You Can Notarize a Will Online. But Is It Valid?

Someone finishes a remote online notarization session for their will. The identity check passed, the notary applied the electronic seal, and the signed PDF landed in their inbox minutes after they logged on. They file it with the other important papers and stop thinking about it.

In much of the country, that document is not a valid will.

This is not a knock on remote online notarization (RON), which did exactly what it was built to do. It is a gap between two bodies of law that most people, and a fair number of professionals, assume are one law. Notarization law governs who may verify a signature and how. Wills law governs what makes a will valid in the first place. RON modernized the first. In most states it never touched the second.

What the notary is actually doing on a will

Start with the part that surprises almost everyone: in nearly every state, a will does not need to be notarized at all.

What the notary signs is usually a separate page called a self-proving affidavit. That affidavit is a convenience, not a validity requirement. It lets the probate court accept the will without hunting down the witnesses years later to testify that they watched the signing. Skip it and the will is still good. The executor just has more work ahead.

So when a notary appears at a will signing, they are notarizing the affidavit. They are not making the will valid. The thing that does that is the witnesses.

The requirement that actually decides validity

Nearly every state requires two witnesses who watch the testator sign and who then sign themselves. The operative word in most statutes is some version of “presence”: presence, conscious presence, or within sight.

Courts spent the better part of a century interpreting those words, and video calls were not on the drafters’ minds. Some legislatures have since answered the question directly, and they have not all answered it the same way. Which answer your state picked is the whole ballgame, and it is not something you can infer from whether the state allows online notarization.

Ohio: The statute writes video out

Ohio allows remote online notarization. Under ORC 147.60 to 147.66, a commissioned online notary may perform notarial acts over live two-way audio and video.

None of that saves a will, because Ohio’s wills statute closes the door in so many words. ORC 2107.03 requires two witnesses in the testator’s “conscious presence,” then defines the phrase as “within the range of any of the testator’s senses, excluding the sense of sight or sound that is sensed by telephonic, electronic, or other distant communication.”

That is not an ambiguity waiting on a court. Ohio wrote electronic presence out of the definition on purpose. An Ohio testator can complete a technically flawless online notarization and still be holding an improperly executed will, because the notary was never the problem.

The same state produces the opposite answer for a different document. An Ohio financial power of attorney under ORC 1337.25 requires notarization and no witnesses at all. That makes it one of the cleanest remote signings available anywhere: one notary, no witness logistics, finished over video. Same signer, same session, two completely different outcomes depending on which document is on the screen.

Florida: Where it works, and what it costs you

Florida went the other way and built the machinery to support it.

Under Fla. Stat. 732.522, a requirement that people sign in one another’s presence can be satisfied by witnesses appearing and signing through audio-video communication technology. But only inside a specific structure: the signers must be supervised by a notary public under s. 117.285, authenticated as part of an online notarization session under s. 117.265, and the witness must hear the signer acknowledge that they signed.

Section 117.285 is where the real guardrails live. A remote witness has to verbally confirm they are physically located in the United States or a US territory at the time of witnessing. The signer answers a set of questions about their physical and mental condition. And one category of person cannot sign this way at all: a “vulnerable adult” as defined in s. 415.102 must have the signature witnessed in person.

Read that list again, because it is the tell. Florida did not simply switch remote wills on. It concluded that the risks specific to remote will signings, undue influence and diminished capacity above all, needed their own safeguards, and wrote them into the statute. Anyone building a remote signing workflow for estate documents should treat that list as a design spec rather than Florida trivia.

California: A law on the books that is not running

California is the one that catches even careful practitioners.

California enacted remote online notarization in SB 696, signed in September 2023. It is real law. But the operative provision does not switch on until the Secretary of State certifies that the technology project needed to implement it is finished, or January 1, 2030, whichever comes first.

So a Californian today is not choosing between signing in person and signing remotely. There is no California RON to use yet, for a will or for anything else. A service advertising “California online notarization” is either using a notary commissioned elsewhere, which raises its own question about which state’s law governs the act, or has misread the statute.

Where the lines fall

Three states, three different answers, and none of them is predictable from the others. Beyond these, a minority of states have adopted some version of the Uniform Electronic Wills Act, including Colorado, North Dakota, Utah and Washington. The rest still require witnesses in physical presence no matter what their notarization law permits.

Yours is the one that matters, and it is the one detail that decides whether the document works. Before you book any signing, look up your state’s will witnessing requirements and confirm whether witnesses have to be in the room.

Mistakes that void a remotely signed will

Assuming the notary’s presence covers the witnesses. It does not. These are separate requirements in separate statutes, and only one of them was reformed.

Reading the RON statute and stopping there. Ohio’s notarization law is permissive. Its wills law is not. The document type decides the answer, not the platform.

Mixing up an electronic will with an electronically notarized paper will. Different statutes, different requirements. Most states that allow the second still prohibit the first.

Using the wrong state’s rules. Where the signer sits, where the notary is commissioned, and where the will is eventually probated can be three different states.

Treating a valid signing as a permanent one. A will valid where signed is generally honored elsewhere, but moving states is still the right moment to have it reviewed.

When you still need to be in the room

If your state requires witnesses in physical presence, no platform can fix that, and no notary can waive it. The workable answer in most of the country is still the old one: two witnesses, one room, wet signatures, and a self-proving affidavit notarized at the same sitting. The notarization is the part that can now happen over video in most states. The witnessing usually cannot.

That is a narrower promise than “sign your estate plan online,” but it is the accurate one, and accuracy is worth a great deal on a document nobody gets to correct after the fact.

About the author

Wills and Trusts Guide publishes plain-English estate planning guides, including will signing and witnessing requirements, probate steps and power of attorney rules state by state. Every statute cited in this article was checked against the state’s official code or legislature site in August 2026.

This article is general information, not legal advice. Requirements vary by state and change over time. Confirm the current rule with your state’s official source or a licensed attorney before signing.