Picture a Sunday evening in a semi somewhere in the Midlands. Two people in their fifties are arguing about whose turn it is to put the bins out. They’ve shared a mortgage, a dog and a fair bit of grief for 19 years. They’ve never married, because why would you? The romance has settled into logistics, and both of them assume that after nearly two decades the law sees them as man and wife in all but name.
It doesn’t. Not in England, not in Wales, not in Northern Ireland, and only partly in Scotland. Over a long relationship, you start to realise that love isn’t really the bit that needs looking after. The paperwork is.
Is common law marriage a real thing in the UK?
No. It is one of the most stubborn myths in British life. Once you’ve lived together long enough, there is no point at which you become a ‘common law wife’ or husband with rights to the house, the pension or the estate. NatCen’s British Social Attitudes survey has found that close to half of people in England and Wales believe otherwise. That’s a lot of people relying on a legal status that doesn’t exist.
And there are plenty of them. The Office for National Statistics counted 3.5 million cohabiting couple families in the UK in 2024. That’s 17.7% of all families, and the figure keeps rising. Cohabitation used to be what you did before the wedding. Now it’s very often instead of the wedding, and more and more often the second time round, after a divorce that left one or both partners wary of doing it all again.
Scotland is different, but only up to a point. The Family Law (Scotland) Act 2006 lets a cohabitant ask a court for financial provision when a relationship ends, or when a partner dies without a will. The deadlines are tight and the awards are discretionary, so it is a safety net with large holes, not the rights that come with marriage. Reform has been promised for England and Wales for years. Until it actually becomes law, the rules below stand.
What happens if my unmarried partner dies without a will?
This is where the myth does the most damage. Under the intestacy rules in England and Wales, an unmarried partner inherits nothing automatically, however long you’ve been together. The estate goes to children, then parents, then siblings, and so on down the family tree. Your partner of 25 years comes after your estranged brother.
A surviving partner who lived with the deceased for at least two years can make a claim under the Inheritance (Provision for Family and Dependants) Act 1975. That means going to court, at a time when they’re grieving, against the dead partner’s family, with legal costs and an uncertain outcome. That is not a plan. It’s a lottery ticket bought with lawyers’ fees.
Then there’s the tax. Married couples and civil partners can leave everything to each other free of inheritance tax. Cohabiting couples can’t. Each person has the £325,000 nil-rate band, plus up to £175,000 more if a home goes to direct descendants, and both thresholds are frozen until April 2030. Leave a valuable house to a partner you never married and the surviving partner could face a bill that a wedding certificate would have wiped out.
The law doesn’t care how long you’ve loved each other. It cares what you’ve signed.
Do unmarried partners get each other’s pensions?
Sometimes, but rarely by default. The State Pension is personal: an unmarried partner can’t inherit any extra State Pension from you, which a surviving spouse sometimes can under the older rules. Workplace and private pensions vary from scheme to scheme. Many will pay a death benefit or survivor’s pension to a partner, but often only if you’ve filled in an expression of wish (or nomination) form. Some schemes also want proof that you were financially interdependent.
That form takes about ten minutes. Lots of people last filled one in when they joined the company in 1997, and it may still name an ex-wife. If you do one thing after reading this, log in to every pension you hold and check who’s on it.
One improvement is worth knowing about. Since February 2023, cohabiting parents who lose a partner can claim Bereavement Support Payment, which used to be limited to married couples and civil partners. If you don’t have dependent children, it still doesn’t apply to you.
Joint accounts, the house and the dull bits that matter
Start with the home. If you own it together, find out whether you’re joint tenants or tenants in common. As joint tenants, the property passes automatically to the survivor. As tenants in common, each of you owns a share that goes wherever your will says. If one of you put in a bigger deposit, perhaps from a previous divorce settlement, a declaration of trust records who owns what. If the house is in one name only, the other partner may have very few rights to it, whatever they’ve spent on the kitchen.
Joint bank accounts are handy for the bills, but they link your credit files. If your partner’s finances fall apart, lenders can see it on yours. A common set-up for longer-term couples is one joint account for household costs and separate accounts for everything else. It’s less romantic than pooling the lot, and a good deal less fraught.
A cohabitation agreement, drawn up by a solicitor, sets out what happens to money and property if you split up. It sounds unromantic, which is why so few couples bother. In reality it’s the grown-up version of agreeing who gets the record collection before the band breaks up, not after.
Finally, the cheapest fix of all is a will each. Without one, nearly every other protection is a gamble.
Keeping the partnership warm, not just watertight
There’s something here beyond the legal admin. Plenty of long-term couples stop arguing not because everything is resolved but because they’ve stopped talking about the big stuff. Money, ageing and death are exactly the conversations that get put off, and they’re the ones the law forces on you if you’ve avoided them.
Relate, the relationship charity, offers counselling to couples whether they’re married or not, in person or online. Plenty of people go in about money and come out talking about something else entirely. Sitting down together to sort out wills and pensions can actually bring you closer. It means saying out loud what you want for each other, which most of us haven’t done since about 2003.
Passion fades. A partnership can carry on, but only if somebody’s looking after it.
In short
Common law marriage doesn’t exist in UK law. In England, Wales and Northern Ireland, unmarried partners have no automatic right to each other’s estate, and Scotland offers only limited court-based claims. Cohabiting couples also miss out on the inheritance tax exemption between spouses and often on pension benefits unless they’ve named each other. Wills, pension nomination forms, the right type of property ownership and perhaps a cohabitation agreement will cover most of the gap, so the question is whether you’ll sort it before you need it.
Sources
Midcent Society
Andy Irwin writes about the way we live now for men 45 and over: work, relationships, mental health, getting older, and the trends and debates that land on men in the middle of life. With the facts, a dry sense of humour, and no lectures.
One of Midcent's writers. Spotted something? Write to andy@midcent.uk.
