Get any part of the signing wrong and you have a document that looks fine in a drawer and fails at a bank counter.
Last reviewed: 14 August 2026
For a Pennsylvania power of attorney executed on or after January 1, 2015, the document must be dated and signed by you, acknowledged before a notary public, and witnessed by two individuals who are each 18 or older. Your agent cannot serve as a witness, and the notary cannot be one of the two witnesses (20 Pa.C.S. § 5601). The document must include the statutory notice in capital letters at the beginning, signed by you, and your agent must sign the statutory acknowledgment before acting on your behalf. Pennsylvania powers of attorney are durable by default (20 Pa.C.S. § 5601.1).
There is a common assumption that marriage or parenthood carries legal authority with it. It does not. If you are incapacitated tomorrow and have no valid power of attorney, your spouse cannot simply call your bank and move money. Your adult child cannot refinance your mortgage or manage your retirement account.
What happens instead is guardianship: a court proceeding, filed publicly, in which a judge decides who manages your affairs and supervises them afterward. It costs money, it takes time, and the person appointed may not be the person you would have chosen.
A power of attorney is how you avoid that. It is also, in my experience, the document Pennsylvania families are most likely to have and least likely to have correctly.
Act 95 of 2014 changed how these documents must be signed, effective January 1, 2015. Before that, a Pennsylvania power of attorney generally did not need to be notarized or even witnessed.
The rule that causes the most trouble is this one: your agent cannot be a witness.
That is the normal, sensible choice. But it means your spouse is disqualified from serving as one of your two witnesses, because your spouse is your agent. For decades it was routine practice for spouses to witness each other’s documents so that only one additional witness was needed. That practice does not work for powers of attorney anymore.
The person who notarizes cannot be counted as one of the two witnesses. So a Pennsylvania power of attorney signed the way a lot of documents used to be signed, with a spouse and a notary in the room and nobody else, is a document with a problem.
The rules in effect at signing generally govern its execution, and it is not automatically void. But it may not contain the specific grants of authority Pennsylvania now requires for certain acts, and financial institutions are markedly more reluctant to accept older documents. It is worth a review.
This is the failure people call me about most, and Pennsylvania law is more helpful here than most people know.
Within 7 business days
A person presented with a power of attorney must either accept it, or request a certification, a translation, an affidavit, or an opinion of counsel (20 Pa.C.S. § 5608.1).
Then 5 business days
If they make one of those requests and receive it, they must accept the power of attorney, unless what they received gives a substantial basis for a further request. They also may not require you to produce a different form of power of attorney.
If they refuse anyway
The remedies include civil liability for financial harm caused to the principal by the refusal, and a court order mandating acceptance. Certain exceptions apply, including powers of attorney governed by another state’s law and those prescribed by a government agency for a governmental purpose.
In practice, most refusals resolve once someone points to the statute in writing. That letter is usually a small piece of work and it is often the entire problem.
Every plan I build treats the power of attorney as the load-bearing document rather than an afterthought stapled to a will. That means:
Download the Pennsylvania Power of Attorney Checklist, or bring the document to a consultation and we’ll look at it together.