Wills for Couples Who Live Together

It is a widely held but entirely mistaken belief that living together for a certain number of years creates something equivalent to marriage in the eyes of the law. It does not. However long you have lived together, whatever you call each other, and even if you have children together, an unmarried partner has no automatic right to inherit anything from you if you die without a will.

This matters because many cohabiting couples only discover this after it is too late to do anything about it. If you want your partner to be provided for in the way a spouse would be, the only reliable route is to make a will that says so explicitly.

Under the intestacy rules, the estate of someone who dies without a valid will passes according to a fixed list: spouse or civil partner, then children, then parents, then siblings, and so on down a strict order of relatives. An unmarried partner does not feature anywhere on that list, no matter the length or seriousness of the relationship.

In practice, this can mean a surviving partner has no automatic right to the home they shared, to savings, or to any other asset held solely in their late partner's name, with the estate instead passing to parents, siblings or other relatives who may have had far less connection to the deceased's daily life.

If you own your home together as joint tenants, it passes automatically to the surviving owner by survivorship when one of you dies, regardless of what either person's will says. This is often the outcome cohabiting couples want, but it is worth double-checking this is genuinely how your property is held, since it is not automatic and some couples hold their property as tenants in common instead.

If you own as tenants in common, each of you holds a defined share, which does not pass automatically to the other and instead forms part of your estate, distributed under your will or, if you have none, the intestacy rules, which would not benefit an unmarried partner at all. Couples sometimes deliberately choose tenants in common, for example where they contributed unequally to the property, alongside a will and a declaration of trust that together set out clearly what should happen.

A will lets you leave specific gifts, a share, or your entire estate to your partner, exactly as a married couple would for each other, and lets you appoint your partner as an executor, a role they would have no automatic right to under intestacy. Many cohabiting couples choose mirror wills, where each partner makes a matching will leaving broadly the same provisions to the other, often at the same time and for a similar overall cost.

If you have children together, a will also lets you set out clearly who should be their guardian and at what age they should inherit any money, rather than leaving these decisions to statutory defaults. If either of you has children from a previous relationship, it is worth thinking carefully about how to balance provision between your partner and those children.

A cohabiting partner who lived with the deceased for at least two years before death, or who was financially dependent on them, may in principle be able to bring a claim under the Inheritance (Provision for Family and Dependants) Act 1975 if left without reasonable financial provision. This route exists, but it requires court proceedings, involves cost and delay, and offers no certainty of outcome.

It should never be treated as a fallback for not making a will. Making mirror or individual wills that clearly provide for each other removes this uncertainty entirely and lets you decide, in advance and on your own terms, exactly what you want to happen.