Two Years Together: The Court Claim a Cohabitant Must Make

If you lived together for ten years and never married, you are not entitled to his house. That is the answer, and it is worth absorbing before anything else, because almost everyone in this position starts from the opposite assumption. Length of relationship confers nothing in England and Wales. There is no threshold you cross at seven years, or ten, after which the law starts treating you as a spouse.

What ten years can give you is something narrower and much more useful than nothing: the right to ask a court for reasonable financial provision out of his estate. Not a share as of right. A claim. The court decides whether to make an award and how big it should be, and it starts from your needs rather than from any idea of what you had earned by staying.

That claim has two hard edges. You normally have to show you lived together as a couple for the whole of the two years immediately before the death. And you have roughly six months from the date the grant of probate is issued to get an application in. Miss the second one and the strength of the first stops mattering.

The short answer: a claim, not an entitlement

Two things have to be separated in your head, because conflating them is what leads people to do nothing for five months.

An entitlement is something the law hands you. A widow's share on intestacy is an entitlement. A gift in a will is an entitlement. You do not ask for it; you receive it, and the personal representatives have to give it to you.

A claim is something you have to bring, fund and prove, against people who will usually resist it — his children, his siblings, whoever the will or the intestacy rules favoured. It ends in a settlement or a judgment, not in an automatic transfer. Most of these cases settle, which is a mercy, but they settle because a credible claim was made in time.

The distinction matters practically. Nobody will write to you to say your six months has started. No personal representative is obliged to invite you to claim against the estate they are administering. The clock runs whether or not you know it is running.

"Common law wife" gives you nothing

There is no such legal status in England and Wales, and there never has been. The phrase survives because it describes something socially real — a settled, permanent, publicly acknowledged relationship — while pointing at a legal category that does not exist.

The practical consequences are wide, and they arrive together. On intestacy, the rules pass the estate to a spouse or civil partner, then to children, then outwards through blood relatives. A cohabiting partner appears nowhere. If he was still legally married to someone he separated from years ago, that spouse remains his spouse until a decree absolute, and inherits accordingly.

There is no automatic right to remain in the property either. If the house was in his sole name, the personal representatives own it for the beneficiaries and can, in principle, ask you to leave. In practice they usually cannot move quickly while a claim is live, which is another reason to make one promptly.

One genuine improvement is worth knowing about. Bereavement Support Payment was extended to cohabiting partners with dependent children, so a surviving partner who was living with the deceased and had children with them may be able to claim it even though they were not married. It is a state benefit rather than a share of the estate, and there are time limits on claiming the full amount. We cover the position on late claims in making a bereavement claim two years later.

The two-year test you have to pass

The Inheritance (Provision for Family and Dependants) Act 1975 was amended in 1995 to add a category for cohabitants. The wording is precise, and each part of it does work.

You must have been living in the same household as the deceased, as the husband, wife or civil partner of the deceased, during the whole of the period of two years ending immediately before the death.

Read those three requirements as three separate hurdles.

Same household is not the same as same address. Two people in one house living entirely separate lives are not one household; a couple who kept two properties but functioned as a single domestic unit may still be. Courts look at how life was actually organised — meals, finances, holidays, who was named on what, how you were described to other people.

As husband or wife is about the character of the relationship rather than its label. Publicly acknowledged, mutually committed, of the kind marriage describes. Companionship between friends or relatives does not qualify, however affectionate.

The whole of the two years ending immediately before the death is the clause that trips people. A separation inside that window can break it. So can a long final admission to hospital or a hospice, though the courts have taken a sensible view where the couple were plainly still a household and the move was involuntary and driven by illness. If your last two years were complicated, say so to a solicitor immediately rather than assuming it disqualifies you.

If the two-year test genuinely cannot be met, there is a second door. Anyone who was being maintained, wholly or partly, by the deceased immediately before the death can also apply. That route demands evidence of financial dependency — he paid the mortgage, or supported you because you had given up work — but it is not limited by any period of cohabitation.

Six months from the grant, not from the death

This is the sentence to act on today.

An application under the Act must be made within six months of the date on which representation with respect to the estate is first taken out. That means the grant of probate, or letters of administration where there is no will. Not the funeral. Not the date of death. If no grant is ever taken out, the clock has not started — which sounds helpful but usually means the estate is stuck rather than that you are safe.

You will not necessarily be told when a grant issues. A solicitor can lodge a standing search at the Probate Registry, which produces a copy of the grant when it is issued and keeps looking for a set period, renewable. It costs very little and it converts an invisible deadline into a dated letter.

The court can extend the six months, but the discretion is exercised carefully and late applicants lose cases on the point alone. The factors include how promptly you acted once you knew, whether negotiations were on foot, whether the estate has already been distributed, and whether you have a claim worth hearing at all. None of that is worth relying on. Instruct someone in the first weeks.

There is one specific trap in the timing. If the house was held as joint tenants with someone else, the court has a power to treat the deceased's severable share as if it were part of the estate — but that power depends on the application being made inside the ordinary six-month period. An extension will not revive it. Where a joint tenancy is in play, the deadline is effectively absolute.

What the court weighs, and what it can order

For a cohabitant, the standard is reasonable financial provision for maintenance. That is deliberately lower than the standard applied to a surviving spouse, who can ask for what would be reasonable in all the circumstances whether or not it is required for maintenance. The gap between those two standards is, in blunt terms, the price of not marrying.

In deciding what to award, the court looks at your financial resources and needs, now and in the foreseeable future; the resources and needs of the beneficiaries; any obligations the deceased had towards you or them; the size and nature of the estate; any physical or mental disability; and anything else it considers relevant, including conduct. For a cohabitant it also considers your age, how long you lived together, and the contribution you made to the welfare of the family — expressly including looking after the home and caring for the family. Years of unpaid domestic work count here, even though they bought you nothing in the deeds.

What it can order is broad. Periodical payments. A lump sum. The transfer of property to you outright. The settlement of property, which is the mechanism used when a court wants you housed for life without giving you an asset the deceased's children were meant to inherit — you get the right to live there, and the capital passes to them afterwards.

That last one is the realistic outcome in many cohabitant cases involving a family home. It is not what most claimants want. It is often what makes an award possible at all.

What is in the estate, and what may already be yours

Before making any claim, work out what actually forms the estate, because the answer changes everything.

If you owned the house together as joint tenants, his share passed to you automatically on death, outside the will and outside probate. You do not need a claim for the house. You may, though, have inherited a problem: if you were also joint borrowers, you now owe the entire mortgage rather than half of it, and on one income. That is a different article and a more urgent one.

If you owned it as tenants in common, his share passes under his will or the intestacy rules, and you may find yourself co-owning the house with his children. We set out how that plays out in buying together before marriage and where your half goes.

If the house was in his sole name but you contributed to it — deposit money, mortgage payments over years, paying for an extension, or an agreement between you that it was as much yours as his — you may hold a beneficial interest in it already, through a constructive or resulting trust. This is a property claim, not a family provision claim. It is asserted under different legislation, on a different timetable, and it asks a different question: not "should the estate provide for me?" but "how much of this was always mine?" Pursue both together if the facts support it, and gather the paperwork before anyone clears the house out.

Free help exists alongside the legal advice and is worth using early: Citizens Advice covers benefits, debt and housing after a bereavement, and MoneyHelper is government-backed and deals with mortgage difficulty specifically. Neither will sell you anything.

Check what money exists outside the estate too. Pension death benefits and employer death in service lump sums are usually paid at the trustees' discretion, which means a cohabiting partner can receive them even where the intestacy rules give them nothing. Trustees can only consider people they know about, so write to every scheme. Be realistic about the size of it, though — a salary multiple set years ago rarely matches a mortgage taken out at current prices, as we show in four times salary against a real mortgage balance.

Scotland and Northern Ireland are different

The 1975 Act applies where the deceased died domiciled in England and Wales. It does not run in the other two jurisdictions, and the alternatives are not equivalents.

Scotland created a standalone claim for cohabitants where the partner died without a will, with no two-year qualifying period written into it but a far shorter deadline running from the date of death rather than the grant. There is no equivalent claim at all where a Scottish will exists. We set that out in Scotland's six-month cohabitant claim on the home, with the wider succession picture in Scotland: six months to claim, and no guarantee.

Northern Ireland has its own family provision legislation, which was never amended to add the cohabitant category that England and Wales gained in 1995. A surviving partner there generally has to claim as someone who was being maintained by the deceased, which is a harder test.

The version of this that costs nothing to fix

If you are reading this before it happens — a diagnosis, a scare, or simply the realisation that you have never sorted any of it — the fix is unglamorous and takes a few weeks.

Make wills, both of you. A will is the only document that reliably sends an estate to an unmarried partner, and it removes the need for any of the above. Get the deeds right: if you are both contributing, be on the title, and decide deliberately whether you hold as joint tenants or tenants in common. Record a declaration of trust if the contributions are unequal.

Then deal with the debt, because rights do not pay a mortgage. A life policy written for the balance and the term produces money at the moment the money is needed, and held in trust it pays outside the estate and outside probate delays. Match the policy shape to the loan — level cover for an interest-only balance that never falls, as explained in decreasing cover against an interest-only loan. Cover is always subject to health and underwriting, and no insurer commits until an application has been assessed, but you can get life insurance quotes and have an FCA-authorised broker price it against the real numbers.

Two smaller points that surface later. Clearing a mortgage early after a death can trigger a charge unless the lender waives it, which we cover in early repayment charges when the borrower dies. And if the household income came from a company rather than a salary, it stops faster than people expect — see the dividends stop the day the director dies. The rest of this topic sits in our guide to mortgages and property when someone dies.

Frequently asked questions

Am I entitled to the house if we lived together for ten years?

Not automatically. Cohabiting confers no inheritance rights in England and Wales, however long it lasted and whoever paid the mortgage. What it can give you is the right to apply to court for reasonable financial provision from the estate, which is a claim you have to bring and prove rather than an entitlement that arrives on its own.

What do I have to prove to bring a claim?

That you lived in the same household as the deceased, as a husband, wife or civil partner would, for the whole of the two years ending with the death — or, alternatively, that you were being maintained by them. The court then weighs your needs and resources against those of the beneficiaries, along with the size of the estate and what you contributed to the family.

How long do I have to bring the claim?

Six months from the date of the grant of representation, not from the date of death. The court can extend that deadline but does not have to, and late applications are frequently refused. Where a jointly held property is involved the limit is effectively absolute, so a solicitor should be instructed as soon as the position becomes clear.