Do unmarried partners inherit? The common law marriage myth (UK)

4 September 2026 · Inherit Vault

There's no such thing as common law marriage in England and Wales. Live together for thirty years, raise children, split the mortgage, and if your partner dies without a will you inherit nothing automatically. Not a share, not the house, not a penny.

The law never recognised it, and still doesn't

There were 3.5 million cohabiting couple families in the UK in 2024, 17.7% of all families. The law hasn't budged. A cohabiting partner has no automatic status on death here, however long you've been together. Common law wife is a phrase, not a status, and it means nothing at a probate registry.

What the intestacy rules do with your partner

With no will, the estate is carved up by the table in section 46 of the Administration of Estates Act 1925. That table names spouses, civil partners, children, parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts and uncles. Your partner isn't on it. Where there's a spouse and children, the spouse takes the personal possessions, the first £322,000 and half of what's left. An unmarried partner in the same position takes nothing, and it all goes to the children, or further down the family tree. The full running order is in our guide to what happens when someone dies without a will.

The one route back in, and it's a court case

Section 1 of the Inheritance (Provision for Family and Dependants) Act 1975 lets a cohabiting partner ask the court for provision. You qualify if you lived in the same household as the deceased, as if you were a married couple, for the whole two years before the death. Fall short of two years and you can still apply as someone they were maintaining. Either way it's a claim, not an entitlement, and you fund the solicitors yourself.

What a court actually hands over

Don't expect a spouse's share. For a cohabitant the yardstick is maintenance: what you reasonably need to live on. The court weighs that against the size of the estate, your own resources, and what the deceased owed everyone else. A surviving spouse is judged far more generously. Same house, same finances, very different answer, depending on whether anyone signed a register.

Six months, and the clock starts at the grant

Section 4 gives you six months from the date representation is first taken out. That's the grant of probate or letters of administration, not the date of death. Miss it and you need the court's permission to claim at all. Sometimes it's given, often not. If your partner has died and you're not in the will, diarise that date before anything else.

The tax bill nobody sees coming

Transfers between spouses and civil partners are exempt from inheritance tax under section 18 of the Inheritance Tax Act 1984. Cohabiting partners get no exemption. Say your partner leaves you a £500,000 house and nothing else. The estate pays 40% on everything above the £325,000 nil rate band, so roughly £70,000, before you get the keys. Married couples can also pass an unused nil rate band to each other under section 8A. That's how a couple reaches £650,000 between them, and it's spouses and civil partners only. The extra residence allowance is no help either, because it only applies where a home passes to direct descendants.

The deeds may have decided the house already

None of this touches a home held as joint tenants. The deceased's share passes straight to the surviving owner by survivorship, outside the will and outside intestacy. Hold it as tenants in common and that share drops into the estate instead. Joint bank accounts work on the same principle, covered in what happens to a joint bank account when someone dies. Check the Land Registry title before assuming.

Pensions and life cover are the exception

Most workplace pensions pay death benefits at the trustees' discretion, steered by your expression of wish form. That form can name a partner you never married, and it usually works. Some older schemes still want proof of financial dependency, so read yours. Life policies written in trust pay the named beneficiary direct, without waiting for probate. More on that in what happens to your pension when you die.

Scotland gives a bit more, but not much

Section 29 of the Family Law (Scotland) Act 2006 lets a surviving cohabitant apply for a capital sum or a transfer of property. It only bites where the partner died intestate, and the award is entirely discretionary. The application has to be made within six months beginning with the day of death, not the grant. That's tighter than the English deadline.

What actually fixes it

A will. Cohabiting couples are exactly who wills were invented for, and one costs a fraction of a 1975 Act claim. Alongside it: an expression of wish form for every pension, a declaration of trust if you own property in unequal shares, and current beneficiary details on any life policy. Blended families need the same care and usually more, which we go into here.

The sad part is how ordinary the failure is. Nobody sets out to leave their partner with nothing. They just assume the years together count for something, and legally they count for nothing. So write the will, fill in the forms, and keep a record of where everything sits, so whoever's left can find it without guessing.

Leave your family a map, not a mystery.

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