How to Check If You Are Tenants in Common

You can settle this today, in about ten minutes, for the price of a coffee. If you want to check whether you are joint tenants or tenants in common on the title register, the method is the same for almost everyone in England and Wales: order a copy of your title register from HM Land Registry, read one particular section of it, and look for a single restriction. If that restriction is there, you own the property as tenants in common. If it is not, you are almost certainly joint tenants.

Most couples have no memory of choosing between the two. It was decided quietly at the point of purchase, ticked on a form by a conveyancer, and never mentioned again. Yet it is the fact that decides what happens to a share of the home when one owner dies — whether it passes automatically to the survivor, or goes instead under a will or the intestacy rules to someone else entirely. That is too important to leave as a guess, and you do not have to.

This guide shows you exactly how to find out how you own your house: how to get the document, where on it to look, the precise wording to look for, and how to check the equivalent record in Scotland and Northern Ireland where the system is different. By the end you will know which of the two you are, and what that means for the person you would leave behind.

The short answer: order the register and look for one restriction

Ownership of a home in England and Wales is recorded on a document called the title register, held by HM Land Registry. The register is the authoritative record of who owns the property and on what terms, and it is public — anyone can buy a copy of it, and you certainly can for your own home.

Buried in that document is the answer to your question. Owners who hold as tenants in common have a specific restriction entered against their title; owners who hold as joint tenants normally do not. So the whole task reduces to getting the document and reading one section of it. There is no need to dig out your conveyancing file, ring your solicitor, or rely on what you half-remember from the day you completed. The register settles it.

Step one: get your title register for £3

Use the official gov.uk service, called "Search for land and property information". You search by postcode, pick your property from the list, pay by card, and download the title register as a PDF. It is the genuine official copy, not a third-party summary, and there is no need to use any of the paid-for lookalike sites that charge far more for the same public document.

The fee for a copy of the title register is £3, and a copy of the title plan, if you want it, is another £3. You do not need the title plan to answer the ownership question — the register alone tells you — but people often buy both.

Source: HM Land Registry, Search for land and property information service fees, gov.uk, published under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

The download usually arrives within minutes for a property that is already registered, which is the vast majority of homes bought in recent decades. If the property has never been registered — more common with homes that have not changed hands for a very long time — there may be no digital register to download, and you would need to look instead at the paper title deeds held by you, your lender or your solicitor.

Step two: read the proprietorship register

An official copy of a title register is divided into three parts, and you only need the second one. The property register describes the property and its address. The proprietorship register names the legal owners and records restrictions on what they can do. The charges register lists mortgages and other burdens. The answer to your question lives in the proprietorship register, the middle section.

Read down the proprietorship register and look for an entry headed "RESTRICTION". If the owners hold as tenants in common, there will be one there in a standard form. If there is no restriction of this kind, the owners hold as joint tenants. That really is the whole test, and it is why the document is worth the £3: it turns a vague uncertainty into a black-and-white entry you can see with your own eyes.

Step three: the Form A restriction, and its exact wording

The restriction you are looking for is known as a Form A restriction, and it has standard wording set by the land registration rules. On your register it will read, word for word, like this:

No disposition by a sole proprietor of the registered estate (except a trust corporation) under which capital money arises is to be registered unless authorised by an order of the court.

If you are wondering what a Form A restriction means in plain English, it does one blunt thing: it stops a single surviving owner from selling the property on their own. "A disposition by a sole proprietor under which capital money arises" is legal language for a sale or mortgage by one person acting alone. The restriction says that cannot be registered unless a court allows it or a second person — a second trustee — is appointed to receive the money alongside the survivor.

The reason that protection exists is precisely because, as tenants in common, the deceased owner's share may belong to someone other than the survivor. The restriction is the land registry's way of making sure a survivor cannot quietly sell out from under whoever inherited the other share. Its presence on the register is the reliable marker that you hold as tenants in common.

If the restriction is not there

No Form A restriction usually means you hold as joint tenants — you own the whole property together, with no separate shares, and on the death of one owner the whole passes automatically to the survivor by survivorship. For many couples that is exactly what they want, and finding no restriction is reassuring.

Two cautions, though. First, a joint tenancy can be turned into a tenancy in common at any time by one owner serving a notice of severance, which then adds a Form A restriction — so the register reflects the position as it stands, and a severance you were told about years ago should show up. Second, the absence of a restriction tells you how the property is held, but not what a will says, and the two interact. If you are unsure what the practical consequences are, our companion guide on joint tenants or tenants in common and which one you are sets out what each means when an owner dies, and the same question for unmarried couples covers the version where there is no spouse to fall back on.

Why this one line changes everything on death

It is worth being clear about why you are doing this at all, because the entry on a register can feel abstract until you connect it to a death. The difference is not a technicality. It decides who owns part of your home the day after one of you dies.

As joint tenants, the survivor takes the whole property automatically, outside the will. As tenants in common, the deceased's share goes wherever their will directs, or if there is no will, wherever the intestacy rules send it — which can be their children, their parents or their siblings rather than the person they lived with. That is how a surviving partner can end up co-owning their own home with in-laws, or how a share can pass to children from a first marriage rather than to a current spouse. We have set out that exact outcome in the case where a tenant in common's half went to his children rather than his partner. And because forming a civil partnership or marrying changes the inheritance picture as well, it is worth reading alongside whether a civil partnership gives the same protection as marriage when one partner dies.

Checking it in Scotland and Northern Ireland

The Land Registry service above covers England and Wales only. The other UK nations keep their own registers, and Scotland does not even use the same legal vocabulary.

In Scotland, property is registered with Registers of Scotland, not HM Land Registry. You can search for a property first using their ScotLIS service, then order a copy of the title sheet. Scots law does not talk about joint tenants and tenants in common; instead, co-owners hold the property in shares, and the crucial thing to look for on the title sheet is a survivorship destination — a clause that passes a deceased owner's share directly to the survivor, doing a job broadly similar to a joint tenancy. If there is no survivorship destination, a deceased owner's share passes under their will or under Scottish succession law instead.

In Northern Ireland, land is registered through Land and Property Services rather than HM Land Registry, and the concepts of joint tenancy and tenancy in common do exist there as in England. To check how a Northern Irish property is held, obtain a copy of the folio from the Northern Ireland registers. As always, use the record for the nation the property sits in, not the English service, or you will not find it.

Once you know, what to do next

Finding out is the point of this exercise, but it is only useful if you act on what you find. If you discover you are tenants in common when you assumed the house would simply pass to each other, the fix is usually a will that directs your share to the person you intend, and sometimes a review of whether joint tenancy would suit you better. If you are joint tenants and content with that, you at least now know it rather than assume it.

Either way, ownership decides who gets the share, but not whether the survivor can afford to keep the home. If a mortgage is still running, the person left behind has to carry it, and clearing it usually comes down to whether there is cover in place to do so. If there is not, you can get life insurance quotes and have an FCA-authorised broker size cover against your actual balance. You can also see how this question fits with the other moments that change who depends on you in our guide to life events that change who depends on you.

Frequently asked questions

How do I check whether we are joint tenants or tenants in common?

Order the title register for your property from HM Land Registry, which costs £3 and arrives as a PDF. Read the proprietorship register. A Form A restriction means you hold as tenants in common; no such restriction usually means you are joint tenants. Use the official gov.uk "Search for land and property information" service rather than a paid-for lookalike site, as it is the genuine record for the same small fee.

What does the Form A restriction actually say?

It prevents a disposition by a sole proprietor under which capital money arises from being registered, unless a court order authorises it. In plain terms, a surviving owner cannot sell alone. That entry is the standard marker that the property is held as tenants in common, and it exists to stop a survivor selling out from under whoever inherited the deceased owner's share.

How do I check this in Scotland?

Scottish property is registered with Registers of Scotland rather than HM Land Registry. Order a copy of the title sheet and read the ownership section, which names the owners and shows any survivorship destination passing a share to the survivor. ScotLIS lets you search the property first. Scots law does not use the terms joint tenants and tenants in common, so it is the survivorship destination, not a Form A restriction, that you are looking for.