The Cohabiting Backdating Window Closed in 2024

If your partner died some years ago and you have only now discovered that the law changed for cohabiting parents, the honest answer is the hard one: for that older death, the backdated claim is almost certainly too late. The Bereavement Benefits (Remedial) Order 2023 opened a limited, one-off window to claim for deaths reaching back to 2018, and that window closed during 2024. It does not reopen, however strong your case and however recently the news reached you.

This is a genuinely cruel piece of timing, because the whole difficulty was always that nobody was told. The families the change was meant to reach were, by definition, ones the old system had ignored — unmarried, so invisible to a benefit that recognised only marriage and civil partnership. There was no register of them and no letter. So the right depended on people happening to hear about it inside a deadline most never knew was running.

There is a better half to the answer, and it matters. The rule change itself is permanent. If your partner died more recently, you may still be able to claim in the ordinary way, on the same footing as a married survivor — but the ordinary deadlines are short and bite fast, so the reading below separates what has closed for good from what is still open to you now.

The short answer: the backdating windows have closed

For a death that fell inside the retrospective period — broadly, deaths from 2018 up to the point the rules changed in early 2023 — the door is shut. There was a fixed stretch of time in which those older deaths could be claimed for, it ran out in 2024, and there is no discretion anywhere in the system to accept a claim now that it has passed. That is true whether you missed the deadline by a week or by a year, and whether or not you had any realistic way of knowing it existed.

It is worth stating this plainly rather than leaving you to hope, because false hope here just delays a hard fact and can cost money in wasted effort. If the answer to your situation is no, it is better to know it is no, and to move straight on to what is actually still available — which, for many people, is more than they expect.

The two dates that mattered

The order came into force in February 2023, and the retrospective right it created ran on the same clock as an ordinary Bereavement Support Payment claim — but measured from that February 2023 start rather than from the death, because the deaths themselves were already years in the past. That is what produced two hard deadlines in 2024.

By 8 February 2024, twelve months on from the start, the one-off lump sum could no longer be awarded on a backdated claim. A claim made after that date could, for a while, still pick up some monthly instalments, but the lump sum — the largest single part of the award — was gone. Then 8 November 2024, twenty-one months on, was the final backstop. After it, nothing at all could be claimed for a death that fell in the retrospective period, not a single month.

The cruelty of the design is that both deadlines ran while most eligible families still had no idea the rules had changed. The clock was counting down from February 2023 for everyone at once, regardless of when — or whether — word ever reached them. Someone who saw a news item in December 2024 was already too late for a death that would plainly have qualified.

Where the right came from

For most of its history, bereavement support in the UK was built entirely around marriage. If you were not married to your partner or in a civil partnership, you got nothing when they died, however long you had been together and however many of their children you were now raising alone. That was challenged by Siobhan McLaughlin, a mother in Northern Ireland whose partner of many years had died, leaving her with four children and no entitlement to the old Widowed Parent's Allowance.

In 2018 the Supreme Court agreed with her, holding that denying support to a surviving cohabiting parent — when the money existed to help the children of the relationship — was incompatible with human rights law. A court cannot rewrite a benefit by itself; it falls to Parliament to act. The eventual response was the Bereavement Benefits (Remedial) Order 2023, which extended both the older Widowed Parent's Allowance and the current Bereavement Support Payment to cohabiting parents with dependent children, and did so retrospectively, reaching back to deaths from 30 August 2018 — the date of that judgment. That retrospection is what created the backdated claims, and it is also what created the deadline, because a backward-looking right had to be given an end date.

What the DWP figures say about who missed out

The Department for Work and Pensions has since published how many people actually claimed, and the number is small. Across the entire retrospective window, 4,830 backdated awards of Bereavement Support Payment and Widowed Parent's Allowance were made to cohabiting families.

Source: Department for Work and Pensions, Uptake of backdated Bereavement Support Payment and Widowed Parent's Allowance under the Bereavement Benefits (Remedial) Order 2023, published 14 July 2025 under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

What the figure cannot tell you directly is how many families could have claimed, because there was never a list of them. But the estimates made when the change was designed put the eligible population far above 4,830, and the gap between those two numbers is the measure of how many grieving households the right never reached. If you are one of them, it may be some small comfort to know you are not an isolated case of bad luck; you are part of a very large group who were owed something and were simply never found.

The rule is permanent — what still works today

The important thing the backdating story hides is that the underlying change did not expire with the windows. Cohabiting parents are now permanently inside the scheme. If your partner died recently, and at the date of death you were entitled to Child Benefit for a child living with you, or you were pregnant, you can claim Bereavement Support Payment in exactly the same way a married survivor would.

The catch is that the ordinary deadlines are unforgiving. Claim within three months of the death and you receive the full run of payments; within twelve months and you still receive the lump sum; and there is a final cut-off after which nothing is payable at all. Those are the same short clocks that caught so many people in the retrospective scheme, now running from the death itself. If there is any chance you are inside them, treat the claim as urgent rather than something to organise once the dust settles. The wider set of rules, and where the deadlines fall, are gathered in our guide to bereavement benefits and state support.

If you have missed out, what is actually left

Being outside the backdating window is not the same as being outside every form of help. Several things are worth checking in their own right, whatever the position on the bereavement benefit.

A workplace pension often carries a death-in-service lump sum and a survivor's pension paid at the scheme's discretion, and schemes frequently pay a nominated cohabiting partner — though such a payment can rebound on a means-tested claim, as we explain where a death in service lump sum lands while you are on Universal Credit. Means-tested support such as Universal Credit or Pension Credit, and help with council tax, may be available depending on your income. And if your household never included dependent children, the exclusion you have run into was written in on purpose rather than by a missed deadline — a different and harder situation we set out in the piece on why cohabiting couples without children were left out, and in the plain statement that there is no Bereavement Support Payment for a childless cohabiting survivor.

The lesson underneath all of this is the one the 4,830 figure makes unavoidable. State provision after a death does not come and find you; it is a set of separate claims, each with a deadline, each of which you have to know about. Protection a household arranges for itself works the other way round — a life policy pays because it was set up to, not because someone spotted a news story in time. Anyone thinking about that gap, married or not, can compare life insurance quotes through an FCA-authorised broker. It is a different kind of security from a benefit most eligible families never managed to claim.

Scotland and Northern Ireland

Bereavement Support Payment is a reserved benefit, so its rules and the extension to cohabiting parents applied across Great Britain in the same way, and the retrospective deadlines were the same wherever people lived. In Northern Ireland — where the McLaughlin case itself began — social security is administered separately by the Department for Communities under mirror legislation, and the same change and the same closed windows applied there, with claims made through that department rather than the DWP.

One thing genuinely differs. Help specifically towards funeral costs is devolved in Scotland, where it is a separate scheme with its own rules rather than the version used elsewhere — we cover that in the note on how Scotland's Funeral Support Payment is not the same scheme. That is worth knowing if funeral costs are the immediate pressure, because it is claimed and calculated differently from the equivalent in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Deaths before August 2018: a separate, permanent exclusion

The backdating window only ever reached back to 30 August 2018, the date of the Supreme Court judgment in the McLaughlin case. If your partner died before that date, no deadline caught you out — you were never inside the retrospective scheme at all, regardless of when you found out about the wider change. That is a harder line to explain to families than a missed deadline, because there is no date you could have acted by; the door to that particular death was never open in the first place.

This distinction matters because the two situations look similar from the outside — an unmarried parent, bereaved years ago, discovering only now that the rules changed — but they lead to different conversations. Someone whose partner died in 2019 can, at least, establish whether the November 2024 deadline caught their claim in time or too late. Someone whose partner died in 2016 has nothing to establish; the 2018 date is a fixed boundary set by the judgment itself, and no later government decision moved it.

Frequently asked questions

Have I missed the deadline for a backdated cohabiting claim?

The Bereavement Benefits (Remedial) Order 2023 opened a limited window for deaths going back to August 2018, and that window closed during 2024. A claim for one of those older deaths can no longer be made, however strong the circumstances or however recently you found out that the law had changed.

Does the change still help cohabiting parents today?

Yes. The rule itself is permanent. A surviving cohabiting partner who was entitled to Child Benefit for a child living with them, or who was pregnant when their partner died, can claim Bereavement Support Payment in the normal way and within the ordinary time limits, which are short and worth acting on quickly.

Is there any way to claim late?

The DWP has no general discretion to accept a claim once a statutory window has closed. If you believe a claim was made in time and wrongly refused, you can ask for a mandatory reconsideration and then appeal to a tribunal, but a genuinely late claim for an older death cannot be revived.

What if my partner and I were not living together at the time of death?

Bereavement Support Payment, whether claimed by a married survivor or a cohabiting parent, generally requires that you were living together as a couple when your partner died, or that you meet one of the narrow exceptions the DWP applies to couples kept apart by illness, work or care needs. A cohabiting parent who had separated before the death, with no dependent child link remaining, is unlikely to qualify under either the ordinary rules or the retrospective scheme, because the entitlement was built around the household the child was actually living in at the time.

Can I ask the DWP to check informally whether an old claim would have qualified?

You can ask, and some bereaved partners have found it useful to get a written answer for their own records even where no payment follows, particularly if a probate or pension dispute later turns on whether a benefit was ever payable. But an informal answer confirming eligibility does not reopen the statutory window, and the DWP has been clear that the November 2024 backstop applies regardless of when a family first made contact.