Intestacy rules for unmarried partners: what you need to know

Here is the position in one sentence: under the intestacy rules of England and Wales, an unmarried partner inherits nothing. Not a reduced share, not a life interest, nothing. It makes no difference whether you have lived together for two years or forty, whether you have children together, whether you share a mortgage, or whether everyone you know assumed you were married. The rules, set out in section 46 of the Administration of Estates Act 1925, distribute an estate to a spouse or civil partner and then down a fixed list of blood relatives. A cohabiting partner is not on the list.

That is the direct answer to the question most people arrive here with. The rest of this guide covers the detail that matters around it: the survivorship exception for jointly owned assets, the court claim route under the Inheritance (Provision for Family and Dependants) Act 1975, the inheritance tax penalty that unmarried couples carry, and the one reliable fix, which is a valid will. If you want to start on that fix straight away, our free making a will checklist works out exactly what you need to gather and decide in a few minutes.

Common law marriage does not exist

The phrase "common law wife" or "common law husband" appears constantly in everyday conversation, and it describes something that has no legal existence in England and Wales. There is no length of cohabitation, no number of shared children and no degree of financial entanglement that converts a couple into spouses in the eyes of inheritance law. Research by the National Centre for Social Research has repeatedly found that around half of cohabiting adults believe common law marriage gives them legal rights. It does not, and the moment that misunderstanding does real damage is the moment one partner dies without a will.

This guide covers England and Wales. Scotland has its own, different intestacy system, and it does give a surviving cohabitant a limited right to apply to the court within a strict time limit. If your situation involves a death in Scotland, the rules on this page do not apply.

Who actually inherits when an unmarried person dies without a will

When someone dies intestate (without a valid will), the estate passes down a strict statutory order. The gov.uk intestacy tool walks through it interactively, but for an unmarried person the order works like this:

1. Children inherit the whole estate, shared equally, at 18. This includes children from previous relationships and adopted children, but not stepchildren who were never adopted.
2. If there are no children, parents inherit everything.
3. Then brothers and sisters (or their children, if a sibling died first).
4. Then half-siblings, grandparents, aunts and uncles, and half-aunts and half-uncles, in that order.
5. If no qualifying relative exists at all, the estate passes to the Crown as bona vacantia.

Notice who never appears: the partner. An estranged parent the deceased had not spoken to in twenty years ranks ahead of the partner they shared a bed with for two decades. If you want the full picture of how this order works across every family shape, our guide to who inherits if there is no will covers it, and the married-couple version of the rules, including the £322,000 statutory legacy a spouse receives, is covered in intestacy rules for a spouse and children. The contrast between the two pages is the whole point: marriage or civil partnership switches on an entire set of protections that cohabitation never does.

The children twist that catches blended families

If the deceased had children, those children inherit everything, equally, whoever their other parent is. In a blended family that can mean the estate passes to children from a previous relationship while the current partner, who may have lived in the home for years and raised those children day to day, receives nothing. The surviving partner may find themselves needing the permission of their partner's adult children, or of a court, simply to stay in the house. Our guide for blended families looks at these overlapping problems, including stepchildren's position, in more depth.

The big exception: jointly owned assets and survivorship

The intestacy rules only distribute the estate, and some assets never enter the estate at all. The most important category for cohabiting couples is property held as joint tenants.

In England and Wales, co-owned property is held in one of two ways, and the difference decides everything here:

How the asset is held	What happens on death
Joint tenants (most joint bank accounts, and many homes bought together)	The deceased's share passes automatically to the surviving co-owner by survivorship. It bypasses the intestacy rules and does not need probate.
Tenants in common (each owner holds a defined share, common where deposits were unequal)	The deceased's share falls into their estate and passes under the intestacy rules, to their children, parents or siblings, not to the surviving partner.

So a surviving partner can end up in either of two very different worlds. If the home was held as joint tenants, they keep it. If it was held as tenants in common, they can wake up co-owning their own home with their partner's relatives, who are entitled to their share of its value. You can check which applies: gov.uk explains joint property ownership, and a copy of the title register from HM Land Registry (a few pounds online) will show a "Form A restriction" if the property is held as tenants in common.

Two other asset types commonly pass outside intestacy: life insurance written in trust for a named beneficiary, and pension death benefits paid under a scheme nomination. If the deceased completed an expression of wishes form naming their partner, the scheme trustees can usually pay the partner directly. These nominations are valuable, but they are patches, not a plan: they cover specific assets and depend on paperwork being up to date.

The Inheritance Act 1975: the claim route, factually

Parliament created a safety valve for people the intestacy rules leave stranded. The Inheritance (Provision for Family and Dependants) Act 1975 allows certain categories of people to apply to the court for "reasonable financial provision" from an estate, whether the deceased left a will or died intestate.

Two categories are relevant to unmarried partners:

• Cohabitants (section 1(1)(ba)): a person who, for the whole of the two years immediately before the death, was living in the same household as the deceased, as if they were a spouse or civil partner. The two years must run right up to the death, and the relationship must have been more than flatmates sharing rent.
• Dependants (section 1(1)(e)): a person who, immediately before the death, was being maintained wholly or partly by the deceased. This can catch a partner of less than two years' standing if they were financially dependent.

For both categories the court can only award what it considers reasonable for the applicant's maintenance, a needs-based standard, not the more generous standard available to a surviving spouse. The court weighs factors in section 3 of the Act, including the applicant's financial needs and resources, the size of the estate and the needs of the people who inherited under intestacy.

The deadline matters most. A claim must normally be issued within six months of the grant of probate or letters of administration. The court can permit a late claim under section 4, but permission is discretionary and never guaranteed. That six-month clock, running from the grant rather than the death, is short, and a bereaved partner is usually in no state to watch it. This is a genuine legal remedy, and it succeeds regularly, but it is litigation: uncertain, slow, stressful and expensive, aimed at relatives who may be the partner's own stepchildren. Anyone in this position should speak to a solicitor early. It is a poor substitute for a document that would have cost a tiny fraction of the price.

The inheritance tax problem stacked on top

Intestacy is not the only rule set that ignores unmarried partners. Inheritance tax does too. Assets passing between spouses and civil partners are exempt from inheritance tax entirely, and a surviving spouse inherits their partner's unused allowances, giving a married couple a combined threshold of up to £1,000,000. None of that applies to cohabiting couples. Anything that does reach a surviving unmarried partner, for example a home passing by survivorship, uses the deceased's £325,000 nil-rate band, and the excess is taxed at 40%. Our guide to the inheritance tax threshold for married couples shows the scale of the reliefs that marriage switches on, and the same gap appears again at probate: a spouse often needs no grant at all for jointly held assets, as explained in do you need probate when a spouse dies, while an unmarried partner's position depends entirely on how each asset was owned.

The fix: make a will

Everything above is the consequence of a gap that takes one document to close. A valid will overrides the intestacy rules completely. In a will you can leave your estate, or any share of it, to your partner directly, name a guardian for children, and decide who administers everything. For an unmarried couple a will is not a nice-to-have piece of life admin; it is the only instrument that makes the survivor an heir rather than a potential litigant.

A few practical points for cohabiting couples specifically:

• Each partner needs their own will. Survivorship on the house does not protect the second partner when the first will was never made, and it does nothing for savings, investments or personal possessions held in one name.
• Check how the home is owned at the same time, because a will controls only what falls into the estate. Tenants in common plus a will leaving your share to your partner is a deliberate, working arrangement; tenants in common with no will is the trap described above.
• Refresh pension and life insurance nominations so every route points the same way.
• Marriage revokes a will made beforehand (unless made in contemplation of that marriage), so if you later marry, the will needs revisiting.

Our wills hub explains what makes a will valid and what it should cover, and the free making a will checklist turns the job into a short, concrete list: what to gather, what to decide, and what to ask when you instruct a professional. If your finances are simple, the whole exercise can be finished within weeks.

Speak to a specialist

This guide is general information about the law of England and Wales, not legal advice for your situation. If your partner has died without a will, or you want wills drawn up that protect an unmarried partner properly, a regulated wills and probate specialist can deal with it quickly and inexpensively. We can connect you with a vetted specialist, and our free tools, starting with the making a will checklist, will make that first conversation faster and cheaper.