Beneficiary (trust)

In trust law, a beneficiary or cestui que use, a.k.a. cestui que trust, is the person or persons who are entitled to the benefit of any trust arrangement. A beneficiary will normally be a natural person, but it is perfectly possible to have a company as the beneficiary of a trust, and this often happens in sophisticated commercial transaction structures. With the exception of charitable trusts, and some specific anomalous non-charitable purpose trusts, all trusts are required to have ascertainable beneficiaries.

Generally speaking, there are no strictures as to who may be a beneficiary of a trust; a beneficiary can be a minor, or under a mental disability (in fact many trusts are created specifically for persons with those legal disadvantages). It is also possible to have trusts for unborn children, although the trusts must vest within the applicable perpetuity period.

There are various ways in which beneficiaries of trusts can be categorised, depending upon the nature and need of the categorisation.

From the perspective of the trustees' duties, it is most common to differentiate between:

Where a trust gives rise to sequential interests, from a tax perspective (and also from the point of view of trustee's duties), it is often necessary to differentiate beneficiaries sequentially, between:

For the purposes of various exercise of beneficiaries' rights, it is often necessary to distinguish between:

The nature of a beneficiary's interest in the trust fund varies according to the type of trust.

In the case of a fixed trust, the beneficiary's interest is proprietary; they are the owners of an equitable interest in the property held under the trust.

The position is slightly different in the case of a discretionary trust; in such cases the beneficiaries are dependent upon the exercise by the trustees of their powers under the trust instrument in their favour.

Similarly, where a trust gives rise to successive interest, the title of a remainderman is a prospective, or contingent, interest; although unlike a discretionary beneficiary, this is still a species of property that can be dealt with, much in the same way as a contingent or prospective debt.

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