A client's father in Surat passed away in early 2023 with what looked, on paper, like clean estate planning. A registered will, drafted by a lawyer, naming his son as sole beneficiary of “all movable and immovable assets.” The mutual fund folios transmitted in five weeks. The flat's title transferred at the sub-registrar's office in six. Everyone involved — the son included — assumed the locker at the bank would follow the same path, since the original property documents and roughly ₹9L of gold jewellery were sitting inside it.
It didn't. The bank sealed the locker the day it was notified of the death, as banks are required to, and refused to release it against the will alone. What it wanted was a fresh set of paperwork — a legal heir certificate, a notarised indemnity bond, and a joint inventory of the locker's contents opened in the presence of a bank officer and a witness. That process took eight months, not because any single step was hard, but because nobody had budgeted time or attention for a process the will was supposed to have already solved.
A locker isn't an asset your will can hand over
Here's the distinction that trips people up: a will disposes of things you own. A bank locker isn't a thing you own — it's a rental contract between you and the bank, governed by the locker agreement you signed, not by succession law. Your will can absolutely say who inherits whatever is inside the locker. It cannot instruct the bank to simply hand the box over, because the bank was never a party to your will and the locker itself was never yours to bequeath.
Most locker agreements do have a nomination field, separate from any nomination you've filed on your accounts or mutual funds. It's the single most skipped field on the form — bank staff rarely walk customers through it, and customers rarely ask. In the Surat case, the locker had been opened in 2011. There was no nominee on file at all. Without one, the bank defaults to its slowest, most conservative release process: legal heirship proof plus a joint inventory, every time, no exceptions.
What a nominated locker actually saves you
With a valid locker nominee, the bank can release the contents against a death certificate and the nominee's ID — typically inside a few weeks, sometimes days. Without one, you're into the same legal-heir machinery as an unnominated bank account, except slower, because the bank also insists on physically inventorying the contents with a witness present before release — a step that doesn't apply to a plain savings account or FD. If the locker holds original property documents, as it often does, that delay can stall a property sale or a loan against the same documents for as long as the locker stays sealed.
Note also that a locker nominee, like a mutual fund or bank account nominee, is a custodian, not an owner — the same principle as any other financial nomination. The nominee collects the contents and is legally expected to hand them to the actual heirs under the will or succession law. Nominating the right person still matters enormously for speed; it just doesn't replace the will as the document that decides who keeps what.
The audit we now run for every estate plan
Since that case, every estate planning review we do at PlusFinance includes a specific line item: list every bank locker, check whether it has a live nominee on file, and confirm the nominee matches who the will actually wants to receive the contents. It takes five minutes at a bank branch. Most clients have never been asked the question before, and most locker forms — filled in years or decades ago — have nothing entered in that field at all. It's the cheapest fix in the entire estate planning checklist, and one of the ones we find missing most often.
The Surat family got everything in the end — the gold, the documents, all of it. What the missing nomination cost them was eight months of a sealed locker sitting in a bank vault, holding the paperwork they needed to do anything else with the property it belonged to.
This is a general account of a real, anonymised case for educational purposes. Locker release procedures vary by bank; confirm your bank's specific process and nomination form directly with your branch.