If You Are Not Married and Own a Home Together, the Survivor May Get Nothing

Give it enough years, plenty of couples assume, and the law quietly starts treating you as good as married. Buy a home, raise the kids, build a whole life together, and surely that counts for something. It is one of the beliefs people hold most firmly about inheritance in this country. It is also flat wrong.

England and Wales has no common-law husband or wife. None. Two years together or forty, it makes no difference. A shared house, a shared mortgage, children between you, none of it changes the answer. To the law that decides who inherits, an unmarried partner is a stranger.

Thousands find this out too late, when one partner has just died and the other is still reeling. There is no worse time to discover it.

Die without a valid Will and a fixed set of rules takes over, called the rules of intestacy. They set out who inherits, in a strict order, and your personal circumstances do not come into it.

Here is the order that matters. A married spouse or civil partner comes first. Then children. Then parents. Then brothers and sisters. Then more distant relatives.

Notice who is not on that list. An unmarried partner. The intestacy rules make no provision at all for someone you were not married to and not in a civil partnership with. However long you were together, you do not appear anywhere in the queue.

So if your partner dies without a Will, their estate passes to their blood relatives. Their children, if they have any. If not, their parents. If their parents have died, their brothers and sisters. You, the person who shared their life and their home, receive nothing under those rules.

For most couples the home is the thing that turns this from a technicality into a crisis.

How you own the property changes the picture, and it is worth knowing which applies to you. If you own as joint tenants, the property passes automatically to the survivor on death, outside the Will and outside the intestacy rules. That is the one situation where the survivor is protected without a Will, at least as far as the house goes.

But many couples own as tenants in common, where each holds a defined share, often half each. When one partner dies, their share does not pass automatically to the survivor. It goes into their estate, and under intestacy it passes to their relatives, not to the surviving partner.

Picture a house worth three hundred and fifty thousand pounds owned as tenants in common. One partner dies without a Will. Their half, worth one hundred and seventy-five thousand pounds, passes to their parents or siblings. The surviving partner now owns half a house, and the other half belongs to the deceased’s family, who may want their share and could, in the worst cases, force a sale. The survivor can find themselves at risk of losing the home they lived in for years.

Surely, people say, having children together must protect the one left behind. It does not, or at least not in the direct way you would hope.

Here is what intestacy actually does. If your partner dies without a Will, their share of the estate goes to their children. If those are children you had together, the money goes to them, not to you. If the children are young, their inheritance is held in trust until they come of age, and you as the surviving parent do not simply receive it.

So you can be left in the strange position of owning half a house while your own children own the other half, with none of it structured the way you would have wanted. That is not a good place to be while you are also trying to hold a grieving family together.

There is a second disadvantage that unmarried couples face, and it is about inheritance tax.

Hand everything to each other and a married couple, or civil partners, pay no inheritance tax on it at all. The rule that does this is the spouse exemption, and it means the survivor inherits with no tax bill landing at that point.

Unmarried partners get no such exemption. Anything one partner leaves to the other counts as part of their estate for inheritance tax in the normal way. If the estate is above the tax-free threshold, the survivor could face an inheritance tax bill on money passing between two people who shared their whole lives, a bill a married couple in the identical situation would not pay at all.

None of this is a nudge towards the registry office. It is just an honest fact worth having in front of you, and it gives an unmarried couple all the more reason to plan on purpose instead of trusting that it sorts itself out.

Here is the reassuring part. The fix is simple, and it sits entirely in your hands.

Make Wills. A Will lets you leave your share of the home, and everything else, to your partner. It overrides the intestacy rules completely. The moment you have a valid Will leaving your estate to your partner, the whole nightmare above simply does not happen. Your partner inherits because you said so, not because the law decided for you.

Look into how you own your home. Is it a joint tenancy or a tenancy in common? A joint tenancy hands the house to the survivor already, though the rest of what you own still needs a Will behind it. A tenancy in common leaves your share going to your relatives unless a Will points it at your partner.

Do it as a pair. One Will is not enough here. Whichever of you dies first walks into the intestacy trap, so genuinely protecting each other means both of you writing your wishes down.

None of this requires marriage, a solicitor's office, or anything complicated. For an unmarried couple who own a home together, a pair of straightforward Wills is one of the most important pieces of protection you can put in place, and it is exactly what our guided Will service is built for. If you would like to sort yours out, you can start with a single Will at /will/single or write mirror Wills together as a couple.