Would Getting Married Change What My Partner Inherits?

Getting married, or forming a civil partnership, changes some of what your partner would receive from your pensions if you died — and leaves a surprising amount of it exactly as it was. If you are wondering whether getting married would mean your partner gets your pension, the honest answer is that it depends entirely on which pension you mean. For one kind it makes a real, concrete difference. For another it barely moves the needle. For the State Pension and for inheritance tax it changes specific, nameable things and nothing else.

The reason there is no simple yes is that "your pension" is not one thing. It is usually several arrangements stacked on top of each other, each with its own rulebook: a final salary scheme, a pot of money you have built up, the State Pension, and the tax treatment of whatever is left. Marriage does change pension death benefits, but only in the places where the scheme rules or the tax rules make marital status the deciding factor. Everywhere else, a certificate does nothing at all.

This page goes through them one at a time, so you can see what marrying actually buys — and, just as usefully, what it does not — before you decide anything on the strength of it.

The short answer: a certificate changes the rules, not every pension

Think of your death benefits as being decided by two different kinds of question. Some are decided by entitlement — a rule that says a particular person must be paid. Others are decided by discretion — someone weighing up your circumstances and choosing who to pay. Marriage matters enormously to the first kind and much less to the second.

A final salary pension survivor's benefit is usually an entitlement question: the scheme rules name a spouse or civil partner and pay them. A modern pension pot is usually a discretion question: the trustees look at your life and decide. So the same act — signing a marriage register — transforms your partner's position under one pension and leaves it broadly unchanged under another. The rest of this page separates them out so you can see which of yours is which.

Defined benefit schemes: where marriage does the most work

If you are in, or have preserved benefits in, a final salary or career-average scheme — the NHS, the civil service, a local government fund, teaching, the armed forces, or an older private employer's scheme — a survivor's pension for a spouse or civil partner is normally written into the rules as a right. You do not have to nominate them for it. You do not have to persuade a trustee. If you are married when you die, they receive the proportion of your pension the scheme sets down, for the rest of their life.

An unmarried partner is in a different position entirely. Some schemes now pay a cohabiting partner, but usually only if the relationship meets a list of conditions — living together, financial interdependence, sometimes a minimum period, and often a nomination on file naming them. Others pay unmarried partners nothing at all, however long you were together. That gap is the single biggest thing a certificate closes, and it is worth understanding your specific scheme's position on it, which we set out in whether you are entitled to his pension if you never married.

The exact fraction a survivor receives differs from scheme to scheme, and even within one employer it can differ by which section you joined. The NHS is the clearest example, paying survivors differently across its 1995, 2008 and 2015 arrangements, as we explain in how the NHS pension sections change what your family gets. Marriage secures the entitlement; it does not standardise the amount.

A defined contribution pot: discretion either way

A pension pot — a personal pension, a SIPP, or any of the workplace schemes you have been auto-enrolled into — works on discretion. The trustees or the provider decide who receives the money, and they can pay it to almost anyone: a spouse, a partner, a child, a friend, your estate. Because they already hold that discretion, marrying you does not hand your partner an automatic right to the pot. What it does is make their claim far harder to overlook.

The document that actually steers the decision is your nomination or expression of wish form. Trustees are not legally bound by it, but they follow it in the great majority of cases, and it is the clearest evidence of what you wanted. This is why a couple who marry and change nothing else can still create a mess: the form on file may name a parent, an ex-partner, or nobody. If you have several old workplace pots, each with its own provider and its own blank form, marrying does not touch any of them — a problem we deal with in what happens to old workplace pensions when nobody was ever nominated.

So on a pot, the honest ranking is this: a current nomination form does most of the work, and marriage reinforces it. A married partner named on an up-to-date form is in the strongest position of all. A married partner named nowhere is relying entirely on the trustees noticing them.

Inheritance tax and the spouse exemption

This is the area where marriage does something a nomination form cannot. Transfers between spouses and civil partners are exempt from inheritance tax. An unmarried partner has no equivalent exemption, no matter how long you lived together or how dependent on you they were. Cohabitation, in the eyes of inheritance tax, does not exist.

Until now that has mattered mainly for the house and savings, because most pension pots have sat outside the estate for inheritance tax. That is changing. From 6 April 2027 unused pension funds are being brought into the estate for inheritance tax purposes, and the government has confirmed that the spouse and civil partner exemption will be preserved when they are. In plain terms: a pot passing to a husband, wife or civil partner remains exempt, while the same pot passing to an unmarried partner could be taxed.

Source: HM Treasury and HMRC, Inheritance Tax on unused pension funds and death benefits from 6 April 2027, policy paper and impact note.

That single difference is what leads some couples to ask whether they should marry for the tax rules alone. It is a genuine consideration, but it is not the whole picture, and it sits alongside income tax rules that turn on your age rather than your marital status. Whether a pot is taxed as income when your beneficiary draws it depends on whether you die before or after 75, and on the benefit being paid within two years of the scheme being told — rules you can read in HMRC's guidance on tax when you inherit a pension. Marriage changes the inheritance tax exemption; it does not change those income tax rules.

The State Pension: what a certificate does and does not buy

The State Pension is where expectations are most often wrong. Marriage does not give your partner a State Pension of their own — that is built only on their own National Insurance record. What marriage can do is affect what a survivor inherits from your record, and here the rules depend heavily on when each of you reached State Pension age.

If both of you reached State Pension age before 6 April 2016, under the old system a widow or widower can often have their basic pension brought up using the late spouse's record, and may inherit a portion of any additional State Pension. Under the new State Pension, for those reaching pension age from April 2016, inheritance is much more limited and generally confined to a protected payment built up under the old rules. A cohabiting partner inherits nothing from your State Pension at all — that route is closed to the unmarried entirely.

The picture is different again for one specific group: women who paid the reduced-rate "married women's stamp" and built little pension of their own, then were widowed. If that is your situation, or your mother's, the detail matters a great deal and we have set it out separately in the married women's stamp and what widowhood does to a small State Pension. For everyone else, the takeaway is simple: marrying secures an inheritance route that cohabiting closes off, but it does not create a pension where the underlying record is empty.

What marriage does not change

It is worth being blunt about the limits, because a certificate is not a tidy-up. Three things in particular carry on exactly as before.

First, it does not rewrite your paperwork. An old nomination form naming an ex-partner, a parent or nobody stays exactly as it was on your wedding day. If you want a new spouse to be the clear beneficiary of your pots, you have to say so on each provider's form — there is a short list of forms newly married people should change, which we go through in the nomination forms to update after marriage.

Second, some schemes actively reduce a survivor's pension where the marriage was recent. A scheme may cut the survivor's entitlement if you married after retirement, or within a set period before death, on the basis that the pension was not costed for a spouse acquired late. It is a scheme rule rather than a general law, so it varies, but it means marrying shortly before an expected death does not always deliver the full survivor's pension people assume.

Third, marriage does nothing to protect an unmarried partner in the window before the wedding, and it does nothing about debts. If your relationship is unmarried and one of you is carrying debt, the position on death is its own subject, covered in whether you are liable when an unmarried partner dies in debt.

If, having itemised all this, you decide the honest answer for your household is a certificate plus cover rather than a certificate alone, you can get life insurance quotes and have an FCA-authorised broker price cover against the specific gaps you have found — the survivor's pension a scheme will not pay, or the pot an unmarried partner could be taxed on.

Scotland and Northern Ireland

The pension rules above are largely UK-wide. Occupational and personal pension death benefits, the tax treatment, and the State Pension inheritance rules apply the same way in Scotland, Wales, England and Northern Ireland, because they are set nationally rather than by the devolved administrations.

Where the ground shifts is if a pot ends up in your estate — for example, paid to your estate rather than to a person — and you have not left a will. Intestacy is different in Scotland, where a surviving spouse or civil partner has prior rights that take precedence, and different again in Northern Ireland. A cohabiting partner is not an intestacy heir in any part of the UK. So the further a pension travels away from a named beneficiary and towards the estate, the more the local rules of your part of the UK start to decide the outcome. You can see how the whole cluster fits together in our guide to pensions, nominations and death benefits.

Frequently asked questions

Does getting married mean my partner automatically gets my pension?

It changes the position in defined benefit schemes, where a spouse or civil partner usually qualifies for a survivor's pension as of right rather than at anyone's discretion. On a defined contribution pot the trustees already have discretion whoever you are, so marriage strengthens your partner's claim rather than creating it. A current nomination form still does most of the work on a pot, and marrying does not replace it.

Does marriage affect inheritance tax on a pension?

Yes. Transfers between spouses and civil partners are exempt from inheritance tax, and that exemption is being preserved when unused pension funds come into the estate on 6 April 2027. An unmarried partner has no equivalent exemption, however long the relationship has lasted or however dependent they were. This is the one area where a certificate does something a nomination form cannot.

What does getting married not change?

It does not rewrite an old nomination form, which still needs replacing on each provider's paperwork. It does not give a spouse a State Pension of their own, and what can be inherited depends on both National Insurance records and the dates each of you reached pension age. Some scheme rules also reduce a survivor's pension where the marriage was recent, so marrying shortly before an expected death does not always deliver the full amount.