Cohabiting, With Children From Before

If you are not married, and you have a partner who needs to keep the home alongside children from a previous relationship who are expecting their inheritance, you are holding two promises that a single house cannot keep. Working out how to protect your partner and your children from a previous relationship at the same time is one of the hardest problems in planning what you leave behind — and for unmarried couples it is harder still, because the law hands you none of the shortcuts a married couple gets.

The short version is that you cannot solve it out of the house alone. One asset cannot both shelter your partner for the rest of her life and hand your children a share they can actually receive. Try to do both with the home and you end up either leaving the children nothing certain, or forcing a sale over your partner's head, or trapping her in an arrangement she has to live inside for decades. The way out is to stop treating the house as the thing that has to satisfy everyone, and to create a second pot of money that goes to one side so the home can go to the other.

That second pot is usually life cover written in trust. Done properly, a single policy lets the home pass to your partner while your children receive their inheritance in cash — nobody is asked to give up the house, and nobody is left to fight for what they were promised.

The short answer: you cannot split one house two ways

Every version of this problem comes back to a single asset being asked to do two incompatible jobs. Your partner needs somewhere to live — usually the home you have shared. Your children need the inheritance you intend for them, and for most families the home is where the value sits. The house cannot be both fully hers and fairly theirs at the same time.

You can leave it to her outright, but then your children's inheritance depends on what she chooses to do with it later, which is not an inheritance at all — it is a hope. You can leave it to them, but then either it is sold and your partner has to move, or it is held in a trust that lets her stay while owning nothing, an arrangement that can feel more like a tenancy than a home and that ties everyone together for years. Each route sacrifices one side to serve the other.

The realisation that unlocks it is simple: the deadlock only exists while the house is the only asset in play. Introduce a separate fund — money that goes to the children so the home can go to your partner, or the other way round — and the two promises stop competing. Life cover is the usual way to create that fund, because it produces a known sum at exactly the moment it is needed, without having to come out of the house.

The two-way squeeze, in detail

It is worth being precise about why each of the obvious answers fails, because seeing the failure clearly is what makes the solution obvious.

Leave the house to your partner. She is secure, which is what you wanted. But your children now inherit only whatever else is in the estate, which after a home is often very little, and they have no claim on the house at all. Worse, they are relying on her to pass it to them eventually — through her own will, which she can change, or which a new relationship of hers could rewrite entirely. Your children could end up with nothing, and there is a real risk of them feeling written out, which sours the relationship between the two halves of your family at the worst time.

Leave the house to your children. Now they are provided for, but your partner is exposed. If they want their money, the house has to be sold and she has to move, sometimes quickly. If you try to soften that with a life interest trust — giving her the right to live there for life while the children own the underlying value — you have kept her housed, but she owns nothing, cannot easily move or release money, and remains bound to your children in a shared asset for as long as she lives. Many people find that arrangement workable; many find it a slow source of friction.

Neither outcome is what you actually want, which is both: your partner secure in the home, and your children given what is theirs. The pressures that make this sharper for unmarried and blended families specifically are ones we return to in marrying at 60 with children from before, where the question of whether to marry at all sits on top of everything here.

What happens if you do nothing

Doing nothing is itself a decision, and for an unmarried couple it is a harsh one. If you die without a will, the intestacy rules apply, and those rules do not recognise a cohabiting partner at all. She inherits nothing — not the home, not a share, not a penny — no matter how long you were together. Your estate, including your share of the home, passes to your children.

So the "do nothing" outcome is close to the worst of the options above: your partner is left with no automatic right to the home she lives in, and your children inherit an asset she may be living inside. Her only route would be a claim under the Inheritance (Provision for Family and Dependants) Act 1975, arguing that reasonable provision was not made for her. Such a claim is possible for a cohabitant who meets the conditions, but it means going to court, it costs money, it takes time she does not have while grieving, and its outcome is never guaranteed. Building your plan around your partner having to sue your children is no plan at all.

The wider reality that the law simply does not treat unmarried couples as it treats spouses runs through everything here, and we set out how far that exclusion reaches in cohabiting without children: still no bereavement help and, for couples who are close to marrying, in engaged but not yet married: what the date changes.

The tax that punishes the choice

There is a second penalty stacked on top of the first, and it falls precisely because you are not married. Married couples and civil partners pass everything to each other free of inheritance tax under the spouse exemption. Cohabiting couples get none of it. Anything you leave your partner is treated like a gift to anyone else and counts against your tax-free threshold, so a home left to a partner can generate a tax bill that a home left to a spouse would not.

The extra allowance that applies when a home passes to your children or grandchildren does not rescue the partner route either, because that allowance is only available where the home goes to direct descendants — and a partner is not a descendant. So the unmarried couple is squeezed from both directions: no exemption for leaving the home to the partner, and no additional property allowance unless the home goes to the children instead. HMRC's overview of how inheritance tax works sets out the thresholds and exemptions in full, and it is worth reading before you decide who the home should go to.

This is not a reason to despair, but it is a reason to size any plan against the tax as well as the housing. Cover is frequently arranged not just to fund the children's share but to meet the tax that leaving the home to a partner can trigger, so the survivor is not forced to sell in order to pay a bill to HMRC.

How one policy settles both sides

Here is the resolution the whole article has been building towards. Instead of asking the house to satisfy everyone, you let the house go cleanly to one side and use a life policy to provide for the other.

The common shape is this: the home passes to your partner — either by how you own it or through your will — so she is secure and does not have to move. Separately, a life policy pays a set sum to your children, giving them the inheritance you intended, in cash, at the moment of your death rather than on some distant day when your partner sells or dies. Written in trust for the children, the payout does not fall into your estate, is not held up waiting for probate, and reaches them directly. Neither side is asked to give anything up: your partner keeps the home, your children get their money.

Because what you want here is a fixed, known sum landing for a defined group of people — a set inheritance for the children, or a set amount to cover the tax — the cover that fits is usually level term assurance, where the amount insured stays the same across the whole term rather than falling away like a mortgage-linked policy. A trust is the container that directs the money to the right people, and the policy is what actually fills it; a trust with nothing paying into it does nothing at all, a point we make in a discretionary trust with nothing in it.

Getting the ownership and the paperwork right

The plan only works if three things line up, and any solicitor doing this properly will check all three.

The first is how you own the home. If you own it as joint tenants, your share passes automatically to the co-owner on death, outside your will — which may be exactly what you want if the co-owner is your partner, but is a problem if it accidentally cuts your children out of a share you meant them to have, or if the co-owner is someone else. If you own it as tenants in common, your share passes under your will, giving you control over where it goes. Getting this wrong can quietly undo everything else, and it is the first thing to check. In Wales, an additional wrinkle applies to how contract-holders are added to a home, which we cover in adding a joint contract-holder in Wales before it is too late.

The second is your will. For an unmarried couple it is not optional — it is the only document that leaves your partner anything at all, names who gets what, and stops the intestacy rules from applying. The third is the trust and the nomination on any policy, so the money reaches the children directly and does not get pulled back into the estate or the tax calculation.

Whether cover is available to you, and on what terms, is a matter of underwriting rather than anything that can be promised in advance, and no policy pays out as a certainty. If you want to see level cover priced against the size of your children's intended share and any tax on the home, you can get life insurance quotes and have an FCA-authorised broker size it with you, ideally alongside a solicitor drafting the will and trust. The full set of blended-family and cohabiting decisions runs through our guide to dependants and unusual family shapes.

Scotland and Northern Ireland

The core problem — one house, two sides, no marriage — exists across the UK, but the legal backdrop differs in ways that change the detail.

Scotland is notably different for cohabitants. A surviving cohabitant there can apply to the court for a discretionary award from the deceased's estate under the Family Law (Scotland) Act 2006, a route that does not exist in the same form in England and Wales — but it is a time-limited application with an uncertain outcome, not an automatic entitlement, so it is not a substitute for planning. Scotland's intestacy also gives children fixed legal rights in the moveable estate that cannot simply be excluded. In Northern Ireland the succession rules follow their own statute and, as in England and Wales, do not provide for a cohabiting partner on intestacy. Wherever you are, the safe conclusion is the same: the default rules will not deliver what you want for a partner you are not married to, and only a will, the right ownership and a funded trust will.

Frequently asked questions

Can I leave the house to my partner and still provide for my children?

Not out of the same asset. Leaving it to her outright leaves the children with nothing certain; leaving it to them forces a sale or a trust she has to live inside. A separate fund for the children breaks the deadlock, and life cover in trust is the usual source, because it produces a known sum for the children at the moment of death while the home passes cleanly to your partner.

Is there any inheritance tax relief for unmarried couples?

No. The spouse exemption applies to married couples and civil partners only, so anything you leave a cohabiting partner counts against your nil-rate band. The residence nil-rate band needs the home to pass to direct descendants, which a partner is not. Cover is often sized to meet the tax, so the survivor is not forced to sell the home simply to pay a bill.

What happens if I do nothing?

The intestacy rules apply, and they give your partner nothing. Your children inherit the estate, including your share of the home, and they can require it to be sold. Your partner's only route would be a court claim under the Inheritance (Provision for Family and Dependants) Act 1975, which takes time and money and has no guaranteed outcome.