New Hampshire Transfer on Death Deed

New Hampshire has a real transfer on death deed. RSA 563-D, the Uniform Real Property Transfer on Death Act, took effect on July 1, 2024 and lets an owner name who receives a house or a piece of land at death, outside probate. The deed is void unless you record it before you die and within 60 days of signing it.

That second deadline is the New Hampshire difference, and it is the reason a form copied from Maine, Vermont, or an online template can fail. Most transfer on death states ask only that the deed reach the registry before the owner dies. New Hampshire runs a second clock from the day you sign.

People call this document a TOD deed, a beneficiary deed, or a transfer on death deed. All three names point at the same New Hampshire instrument. This guide covers what the deed does, the four requirements that keep it alive, how to record and revoke it, and the notarized affidavit your beneficiaries owe the registry after you die. It is general information, not legal advice. Confirm your own plan with a licensed New Hampshire attorney before you sign or record anything.

This page covers one tool. For the rest of the menu, read how to avoid probate in New Hampshire. If the property still has to move through court, start with the New Hampshire probate guide.

What a New Hampshire Transfer on Death Deed Does

RSA 563-D:5 says an individual may transfer property to one or more beneficiaries effective at the transferor's death by a transfer on death deed. RSA 563-D:2, V limits "property" to an interest in real property located in New Hampshire, so the deed reaches a house, a condominium, or raw land, and it reaches nothing else. A car, a bank account, and a brokerage account each travel by their own route.

The deed is nontestamentary under RSA 563-D:7, so it works on its own terms rather than through your will. RSA 563-D:10 adds that it takes effect without notice to the beneficiary, without delivery, without the beneficiary accepting it, and without money changing hands. Many owners never tell the person they named.

The 60-Day Rule Is the New Hampshire Difference

RSA 563-D:9 opens with the word that matters: a transfer on death deed is void unless it meets all four requirements below. Void, not voidable. A deed that misses one of them transfers nothing, and the property lands in your estate.

1. It meets RSA 477:3. New Hampshire's deed execution statute is short. The deed must be signed by the party granting it, acknowledged by the grantor before a justice, notary public, or commissioner, and it must show the mailing address of the grantee. New Hampshire asks for no witnesses on a deed, only that acknowledgment.
2. It bears the title "Transfer on Death Deed." The words go on the face of the document.
3. It states that the transfer to the designated beneficiary occurs at the transferor's death.
4. It is recorded three ways at once: before the owner's death, within 60 days following the date of execution, and in full in the registry of deeds for the county or counties in which the real estate lies.

Read requirement four as one deadline: record by whichever comes first, the 60th day after you sign or the day you die. The optional statutory form at RSA 563-D:19 prints that warning across the top of the document, and the revocation form at RSA 563-D:20 repeats it.

Note the plural in "county or counties." Land that straddles a county line has to be recorded in each registry it touches, and New Hampshire has ten of them.

You Keep Control While You Are Alive

Recording the deed hands your beneficiary nothing today. RSA 563-D:12 spells out six things the deed does not do during your life. It does not affect your right to transfer or encumber the property. It does not affect the rights of anyone you later sell to, even if that buyer knows about the deed. It does not affect your creditors, present or future. It does not affect your eligibility or your beneficiary's eligibility for any form of public assistance. It creates no legal or equitable interest in the beneficiary. And it does not expose the property to your beneficiary's creditors.

So you can sell the house, refinance it, or change your mind entirely, without a signature or a conversation. If you sell the property outright, RSA 563-D:11, III preserves the effect of that lifetime transfer, and the deed simply has nothing left to pass.

Capacity is measured against the will standard, not the deed standard. RSA 563-D:8 borrows the test in RSA 551:1: a person eighteen or older, of sane mind, may dispose of property by will.

How to Record the Deed

Here is the sequence, start to finish.

1. Pull your recorded deed. Copy the legal description exactly as it reads. The statutory form says a street address by itself is not sufficient.
2. Name your beneficiary and a backup. The form gives you lines for the beneficiary who takes if they survive you, and for an alternate if they do not.
3. Draft the deed. RSA 563-D:19 supplies an optional form. Using it keeps the wording inside the statute, and a New Hampshire attorney can prepare one instead.
4. Sign and get it acknowledged. RSA 477:3 needs your signature and an acknowledgment before a justice, notary public, or commissioner. Put the grantee's mailing address on the document.
5. Record it fast. Take it to the registry of deeds for the county where the land sits. Under RSA 478:17-g, I the recording charge is $10 for the first page plus $4 for each additional page, and RSA 478:17-g, II(a) adds a $25 land and community heritage investment program surcharge on each deed. Copy charges are set and posted by each register of deeds under RSA 478:17-g, III, so they differ from county to county.
6. Tell someone. Keep a copy and tell the person who will settle your estate the county, book, and page.

The transfer carries no real estate transfer tax. RSA 78-B:2, XXV exempts a transfer on death deed under RSA 563-D where no consideration is exchanged, and the statutory form quotes that exemption in its own text.

Diary the 60th day after you sign. A deed that sits in a drawer for two months is dead paper even if you live another twenty years.

Naming Beneficiaries and What Happens at Death

RSA 563-D:13 governs the moment of death, and several of its rules cut against what people expect.

• A beneficiary's interest is contingent on surviving you. If they die first and your deed does not say otherwise, the interest lapses.
• RSA 551:12 does not apply. That is New Hampshire's rule letting the descendants of a devisee who died before the testator take under a will. RSA 563-D:13, I(b) switches it off for transfer on death deeds, so your beneficiary's children do not inherit in their parent's place.
• Two or more beneficiaries take equal, undivided shares with no right of survivorship, unless the deed itself creates a joint tenancy between or among them.
• If you named two or more beneficiaries to take concurrent interests and one share lapses, that share passes to the others in proportion to their remaining interests, unless the deed says otherwise.
• Your beneficiary takes the property subject to every conveyance, encumbrance, assignment, contract, mortgage, lien, and other interest on it at your death. A transfer on death deed does not erase a mortgage.
• The deed transfers without covenant or warranty of title, even if the document claims otherwise.
• If you are a joint owner and someone survives you, the property belongs to the surviving joint owner or owners with right of survivorship. Your transfer on death deed becomes effective only when you are the last surviving joint owner.

Two more rules sit outside the reach of most planning conversations. RSA 563-D:13, V keeps transfer on death deed property out of the probate estate for the purpose of a surviving spouse's elective share under RSA 560:10, and RSA 563-D:13, VI keeps it out of the calculation for a pretermitted heir under RSA 551:10.

Name a backup beneficiary. With the anti-lapse rescue switched off, one death in the wrong order sends the house back into your estate and into New Hampshire intestate succession or your will.

Divorce and the Slayer Rule Cancel a Beneficiary

RSA 563-D:14 deems a designated beneficiary to have predeceased you in two situations. The first is a divorce or annulment of your marriage to that beneficiary, so long as it happened after you signed the deed, and unless the deed provides otherwise. The second is where the beneficiary intentionally and unlawfully caused your death, and then only if principles of equity warrant revocation.

Divorce cancels the designation on its own, but do not rely on that alone. Record a new deed or a revocation so the registry shows what you want.

A beneficiary who prefers not to take can disclaim all or part of the interest under RSA 563-D:15, which routes to New Hampshire's disclaimer chapter, RSA 563-B.

How to Revoke a New Hampshire Transfer on Death Deed

RSA 563-D:11 is strict, and it is strict in an unusual way. Tearing up or crossing out a recorded deed does nothing: RSA 563-D:11, II says that once the deed is recorded, it may not be revoked by a revocatory act on the deed itself.

Revocation takes a recorded instrument that carries the RSA 477:3 deed formalities and is one of three things:

• a later transfer on death deed that revokes the earlier one expressly or by inconsistency,
• an instrument of revocation that expressly revokes it, or
• a deed that expressly revokes it.

Two timing rules ride along. The revoking instrument has to be acknowledged by you after the acknowledgment of the deed being revoked, which stops a backdated document from unwinding a later deed. And it has to be recorded in the same registry by the earlier of 60 days from its execution or your date of death. The optional revocation form is at RSA 563-D:20.

When more than one owner signed the deed, RSA 563-D:11, I(b) splits the outcome. One transferor's revocation does not touch another transferor's interest, and a deed made by joint owners is revoked only when all of the living joint owners revoke it.

An agent under your power of attorney may execute or revoke the deed if the document grants authority to create or change a beneficiary designation, under RSA 563-D:18, II. A guardian or conservator may do neither without an express court order, under RSA 563-D:18, I.

After the Owner Dies: the Notice of Death Affidavit

New Hampshire added a step in 2025 that no other part of the chapter mentions, and every other state's transfer on death deed guide stops before it. RSA 563-D:22, effective August 22, 2025, requires beneficiaries who receive real property under a transfer on death deed to record a notice of death affidavit at the registry of deeds in the county where the property sits, within 60 days after the owner's death.

The affidavit has to be notarized and has to contain:

• the name and address of each beneficiary named in the deed,
• the street address of the property,
• the date of the transfer on death deed,
• the book and page number where the deed was recorded before the owner's death,
• the name of the deceased owner,
• the date and place of death, and
• the name and address where future tax bills should be mailed.

After recording it, the register of deeds returns the original to whoever filed it and sends a copy to the tax assessor of the municipality where the property sits, under RSA 478:14. That is what routes the tax bill to the new owner.

Now the part that stops a panic. RSA 563-D:22 closes with a sentence worth reading twice: the filing of the notice of death affidavit is not a condition of the transfer of title. Title passed at death under the recorded deed. A beneficiary who files on day 90 still owns the property. Record it anyway, because the public record and the tax bill both depend on it, and a buyer or a title examiner will look for it.

What the Deed Does Not Do

A transfer on death deed keeps a parcel out of probate. It is not a shield.

Creditors can still reach the property

RSA 563-D:16, I lets the estate enforce an allowed claim against transfer on death deed property to the extent the probate estate is insufficient to satisfy it. Where more than one property passed by such a deed, RSA 563-D:16, II apportions the liability among them in proportion to their net values at death. One clock limits it: under RSA 563-D:16, III, no proceeding to enforce that liability may begin if no administration was granted on the estate within 2 years of the owner's death. Read that next to how New Hampshire creditor claims work, where the ordinary deadlines run from the original grant of administration rather than from death.

Medicaid and state assistance claims outrank ordinary debts

RSA 554:19, I sets the order an administrator pays claims, and claims for financial or medical assistance provided by the Department of Health and Human Services, together with debts collected under RSA 126-A:34 and charges under RSA 166:19, sit in the fourth class, ahead of the decedent's just debts. So when a shortfall in the probate estate reaches deeded property through RSA 563-D:16, a state assistance claim is near the front of the line. If long-term care benefits paid for the owner's care, talk with a New Hampshire elder law attorney before you rely on the deed.

The contest window stays open longer than a year

RSA 563-D:17, II gives an action contesting the validity of the deed or its revocation the later of two windows: one year after the owner's death, or six months after the appointment of the administrator of the estate, if that appointment happened within one year of the death.

It changes no tax answer for the heir

New Hampshire levies no estate tax and no inheritance tax, so the deed saves nothing on that front because there was nothing to save. What survives is federal: the property was owned at death, so it still receives a stepped-up federal income tax basis, which matters when the beneficiary sells. The recording exemption in RSA 78-B:2, XXV covers the transfer on death deed itself and does not cover a later sale.

TOD Deed vs. Living Trust vs. Joint Tenancy

New Hampshire adds a wrinkle to the middle row. RSA 477:18 presumes a tenancy in common when property goes to two or more people, unless the instrument says the estate is held as joint tenants, or to them and the survivor of them, or uses other words clearly expressing that intention. Survivorship language that is merely implied does not survive that section.

For one house and one beneficiary, the deed usually wins on cost. For several parcels, a blended family, or a plan that has to move many assets at once, compare it against a New Hampshire revocable living trust. And when the beneficiary later wants to cash out, read selling inherited property in New Hampshire.

New Hampshire recognizes no Lady Bird or enhanced life estate deed. RSA 563-D is the mechanism the legislature chose in 2024, and a vendor offering the alternative here is selling a document this state does not use.

Common Mistakes

1. Missing the 60-day window. Signing in March and recording in June voids the deed, no matter how long the owner lives afterward.
2. Leaving the title line off. RSA 563-D:9, II wants the words "Transfer on Death Deed" on the face of the document.
3. Using a street address instead of the legal description. Copy the description from the recorded deed.
4. Naming no backup. With RSA 551:12 switched off, a beneficiary who dies first sends the property back to the estate.
5. Expecting a will to change it. Only a recorded instrument revokes a recorded deed.
6. Backdating a revocation. The revoking instrument has to be acknowledged after the deed it revokes.
7. Skipping the notice of death affidavit. Title still passed, but the record and the tax bill do not catch up until it is filed.
8. Treating the deed as creditor protection. RSA 563-D:16 reaches the property when the estate runs short.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does New Hampshire have a transfer on death deed?

Yes, since July 1, 2024. RSA 563-D is the Uniform Real Property Transfer on Death Act, and RSA 563-D:5 lets an individual transfer real property to one or more beneficiaries effective at the owner's death. Every section of the chapter except one carries the source line 2024, 1:1, eff. July 1, 2024, and RSA 563-D:22 was added by 2025, 114:1, eff. Aug. 22, 2025.

What is the 60-day rule on a New Hampshire transfer on death deed?

RSA 563-D:9, IV voids the deed unless it is recorded before the owner's death and within 60 days following the date it was signed. The statutory form at RSA 563-D:19 carries the same warning on its face: record by the earlier of 60 days from the date of execution or the date of the owner's death, or it will not be effective. Most transfer on death states ask only for recording before death, so a form borrowed from another state misses this.

Can a will override a recorded New Hampshire transfer on death deed?

No. RSA 563-D:7 makes the deed nontestamentary, and RSA 563-D:11 allows revocation only by a recorded instrument that carries the RSA 477:3 deed formalities: a later transfer on death deed, an instrument of revocation, or a deed that expressly revokes it. A will is none of those three, so the recorded deed decides who takes the property.

What happens if my beneficiary dies before me?

Unless your deed says otherwise, that beneficiary's interest lapses, and RSA 563-D:13, I(b) states that RSA 551:12 does not apply to a transfer on death deed. RSA 551:12 is the rule that lets a deceased devisee's descendants take under a will, so a beneficiary's children do not step into their place here. If you named two or more beneficiaries to take concurrent interests, a lapsed share passes to the others in proportion to their interests.

Do beneficiaries have to file anything after the owner dies?

Yes. RSA 563-D:22 requires beneficiaries to record a notarized notice of death affidavit at the registry of deeds within 60 days after the owner's death. It names each beneficiary, the property's street address, the deed's date and its book and page, the decedent's name and the date and place of death, and where future tax bills should go. The statute states plainly that filing it is not a condition of the transfer of title, so a late affidavit does not undo the transfer.

Can creditors reach property that passed by a transfer on death deed?

Yes, when the probate estate falls short. RSA 563-D:16, I lets the estate enforce an allowed claim against transfer on death deed property to the extent the probate estate cannot satisfy it, and RSA 563-D:16, II apportions that liability among several deeded properties by their net values. RSA 563-D:16, III closes the door if no administration was granted within 2 years of the owner's death.

Related Guides

• How to Avoid Probate in New Hampshire
• New Hampshire Revocable Living Trust
• Selling Inherited Property in New Hampshire
• New Hampshire Creditor Claims
• New Hampshire Probate Guide

Sources:

• Title: RSA 563-D:5 Transfer on Death Deed Authorized. Publisher: New Hampshire General Court. Publication Date: 2024, 1:1, eff. July 1, 2024. URL: https://gc.nh.gov/rsa/html/LVI/563-D/563-D-5.htm
• Title: RSA 563-D:8 Capacity of Transferor. Publisher: New Hampshire General Court. Publication Date: 2024, 1:1, eff. July 1, 2024. URL: https://gc.nh.gov/rsa/html/LVI/563-D/563-D-8.htm
• Title: RSA 563-D:9 Requirements. Publisher: New Hampshire General Court. Publication Date: 2024, 1:1, eff. July 1, 2024. URL: https://gc.nh.gov/rsa/html/LVI/563-D/563-D-9.htm
• Title: RSA 563-D:11 Revocation by Instrument Authorized; Revocation by Act not Permitted. Publisher: New Hampshire General Court. Publication Date: 2024, 1:1, eff. July 1, 2024. URL: https://gc.nh.gov/rsa/html/LVI/563-D/563-D-11.htm
• Title: RSA 563-D:12 Effect of Transfer on Death Deed During Transferor's Life. Publisher: New Hampshire General Court. Publication Date: 2024, 1:1, eff. July 1, 2024. URL: https://gc.nh.gov/rsa/html/LVI/563-D/563-D-12.htm
• Title: RSA 563-D:13 Effect of Transfer on Death Deed at Transferor's Death. Publisher: New Hampshire General Court. Publication Date: 2024, 1:1, eff. July 1, 2024. URL: https://gc.nh.gov/rsa/html/LVI/563-D/563-D-13.htm
• Title: RSA 563-D:14 Designated Beneficiary Presumed to Have Predeceased Transferor. Publisher: New Hampshire General Court. Publication Date: 2024, 1:1, eff. July 1, 2024. URL: https://gc.nh.gov/rsa/html/LVI/563-D/563-D-14.htm
• Title: RSA 563-D:16 Liability For Creditor Claims And Statutory Allowances. Publisher: New Hampshire General Court. Publication Date: 2024, 1:1, eff. July 1, 2024. URL: https://gc.nh.gov/rsa/html/LVI/563-D/563-D-16.htm
• Title: RSA 563-D:17 Validity of Transfer On Death Deed. Publisher: New Hampshire General Court. Publication Date: 2024, 1:1, eff. July 1, 2024. URL: https://gc.nh.gov/rsa/html/LVI/563-D/563-D-17.htm
• Title: RSA 563-D:19 Optional Form of Transfer on Death Deed. Publisher: New Hampshire General Court. Publication Date: 2024, 1:1, eff. July 1, 2024. URL: https://gc.nh.gov/rsa/html/LVI/563-D/563-D-19.htm
• Title: RSA 563-D:22 Notice of Death Affidavit. Publisher: New Hampshire General Court. Publication Date: 2025, 114:1, eff. Aug. 22, 2025. URL: https://gc.nh.gov/rsa/html/LVI/563-D/563-D-22.htm
• Title: RSA 477:3 Execution. Publisher: New Hampshire General Court. Publication Date: 1981, 303:1, eff. Aug. 15, 1981. URL: https://gc.nh.gov/rsa/html/XLVIII/477/477-3.htm
• Title: RSA 478:17-g Recording Fees and Surcharge. Publisher: New Hampshire General Court. Publication Date: 2018, 171:7, eff. July 1, 2018. URL: https://gc.nh.gov/rsa/html/XLVIII/478/478-17-g.htm
• Title: RSA 78-B:2 Exceptions. Publisher: New Hampshire General Court. Publication Date: Not listed. URL: https://gc.nh.gov/rsa/html/V/78-B/78-B-2.htm
• Title: RSA 551:1 Testators. Publisher: New Hampshire General Court. Publication Date: 1943, 93:1, eff. March 30, 1943. URL: https://gc.nh.gov/rsa/html/LVI/551/551-1.htm
• Title: RSA 551:12 Heirs of Legatee. Publisher: New Hampshire General Court. Publication Date: Not listed. URL: https://gc.nh.gov/rsa/html/LVI/551/551-12.htm
• Title: RSA 554:19 Priority of Charges. Publisher: New Hampshire General Court. Publication Date: 2013, 144:38, eff. July 1, 2013. URL: https://gc.nh.gov/rsa/html/LVI/554/554-19.htm

It is not legal advice.