Unmarried and No Will: Who Gets the House Instead of You

If your partner died without a will and you were never married, the house does not come to you. It goes to his blood relatives, in a fixed order set out in statute, and an unmarried partner does not appear anywhere on that order. Not after two years together, not after thirty. The law calls it intestacy, and it does not know that you existed.

That is the answer, and it is worth reading twice, because almost everybody in this position has been told something different. There is no such thing as a common law wife or a common law husband anywhere in the United Kingdom. Living together, sharing a name, raising children, paying every mortgage instalment from your own wages — none of it creates an inheritance right.

What follows is the specific journey the house takes: who it lands with, in what order, and how you can end up making the monthly mortgage payment on a property legally owned by a brother-in-law you have met twice. It also covers the two things you can actually do about it, both of which run on deadlines that start without anybody telling you.

The short answer: the law has an order and you are not in it

When someone dies in England or Wales without a valid will, their estate is distributed under rules laid down in the Administration of Estates Act 1925. The order is rigid. There is no discretion in it, no room for what everybody knew he wanted, and no category that fits an unmarried partner.

Running down the ladder, the estate passes to:

1. A surviving spouse or civil partner. This includes a spouse he was separated from but never divorced, which catches families out badly.
2. Children, and the children of any child who died before him, sharing equally.
3. Parents.
4. Brothers and sisters of the whole blood, or their children.
5. Half-brothers and half-sisters, or their children.
6. Grandparents.
7. Uncles and aunts of the whole blood, then of the half blood, or their children.
8. The Crown, where nobody in any of those categories exists.

Read that list again and notice what it means in practice. A nephew he had not spoken to in fifteen years is ahead of you. An adult child from a previous relationship is ahead of you. If there is nobody at all, the state is ahead of you. GOV.UK sets out the full intestacy order, and it is worth reading it in the original rather than taking anybody's summary.

Nothing about the length or seriousness of your relationship alters the sequence. The rules operate on legal status, not on love, contribution or need.

First, find out how the house was actually owned

Before you assume the worst, get the facts. Download the official copy of the title register from HM Land Registry — it is available to anyone online for a small charge — and look at whose names appear and whether there is a restriction against the title. There are three possible answers and they produce completely different outcomes.

You owned it together as joint tenants. This is the best outcome and it is not uncommon. Under a joint tenancy the whole property passes automatically to the surviving owner on death, by survivorship, outside the will and outside the estate. Intestacy does not touch it. The house is already yours, and updating the register is a short administrative step. Survivorship is powerful enough that it overrides a will as well, a point we cover in why a will cannot give away a house held as joint tenants.

You owned it together as tenants in common. Both names are on the title, but each of you owned a distinct share. Yours stays yours. His share falls into the estate and passes down the intestacy ladder to his relatives. You end up co-owning your own home with whoever inherits, which is workable if they are reasonable and extremely difficult if they are not. A Form A restriction on the register is the usual sign that this is the arrangement.

The house was in his sole name. The entire property forms part of the estate and passes under the intestacy rules. Your occupation of it is not, on its own, a legal right to remain. This is the hardest version and most of the rest of this page is written for it.

Get the register itself rather than relying on memory or on what a relative tells you. People are routinely mistaken about which form of joint ownership they had, because the difference is invisible in daily life and only appears on the title.

The cruellest part: you may be paying for a house you do not own

Ownership and liability are separate questions, and the combinations are unkind.

If you were a joint borrower on the mortgage, you are jointly and severally liable, which means the lender can look to you for the entire outstanding balance, not half of it. That liability survives the death and is unaffected by who inherits the bricks. It is entirely possible to owe the whole mortgage on a house in which you have no ownership share at all, if the borrowing was joint but the title was in his name.

If the mortgage was in his sole name, you are not a borrower and the lender cannot pursue you. That sounds better and is thinner than it looks, because you also have no contractual standing. The lender does not have to speak to you, does not have to accept your payments, and does not have to keep the arrangement going while anything is argued about. The debt belongs to the estate, and the lender's ultimate remedy is the house you are living in.

Either way, the payments do not stop while this is worked out. Somebody alive has to fund them each month, and if you are the one doing it, keep every record — the mechanics and the reimbursement position are covered in who actually pays the mortgage before probate comes through. Write to the lender in the first fortnight, tell them who you are and that you are living in the property, ask whether they will accept payments during the administration, and get the answer in writing. An occupied, maintained house is usually worth more to a lender than an empty one, and many will agree informally even where they are not obliged to.

One further thing to check before you assume the mortgage is all there is. If he was self-employed or ran a company, the family home may have been offered as security for business borrowing, which changes the picture considerably — see the business loan secured on the family home. Where there is a business as well as a house, two sets of rules collide and the delay gets longer: a partnership agreement and the intestacy rules pull in different directions, as we set out in what happens when a business partner dies without a will, and the question of who ends up in charge of a business after the owner dies intestate can take months to resolve. Until it is, nobody can tell you what the estate is actually worth.

Two separate claims, on two separate timetables

You are not without options. There are two of them, they are legally quite different, and the most common mistake is pursuing only the first.

A family provision claim. Under the Inheritance (Provision for Family and Dependants) Act 1975, you can apply to the court for reasonable financial provision out of the estate if you lived in the same household as his wife or husband for the whole of the two years ending immediately before the death, or if he was maintaining you, wholly or partly, immediately before he died. The court can order a lump sum, periodical payments, or the transfer or settlement of property, which is how such a claim can end with a right to stay in the home.

Understand the standard being applied. A cohabitant is entitled to ask for what is reasonable for their maintenance, not for a share of the estate as of right in the way a spouse can. You are not asking for what a widow would receive. You are asking for enough. And the deadline is unforgiving: an application should normally be made within six months of the date the grant of representation is issued. Because nobody is obliged to tell you when the grant comes through, a solicitor can lodge a standing search at the Probate Registry so that you find out immediately.

A property claim. This one is often worth more, and it is frequently missed. The register records the legal owner. It does not always record who owns the value. If you contributed to the deposit or the purchase price, paid the mortgage for years, funded an extension, or acted on a shared understanding that the house was as much yours as his, you may already hold a beneficial interest through a resulting or constructive trust — or have a claim in proprietary estoppel where you relied on a promise to your detriment.

That is a property right rather than a request for the court's sympathy. It asserts that part of the house was always yours. Proving it is evidential work: bank statements showing transfers, the conveyancing file, receipts for building work, texts and emails about what you both intended. Anything written at the time beats anything remembered afterwards, because the only other person who knew what was agreed cannot confirm it.

Pursue both together. They run on different rules and different timetables, and a solicitor dealing with one should not be allowed to ignore the other.

What to do in the first month

In rough order of urgency.

1. See a solicitor who does contentious probate. Not a general adviser, and not in three months. The deadlines are real and they start running on events you may not be told about.
2. Do not move out. Occupation is not ownership, but leaving weakens your practical position enormously and is very hard to reverse.
3. Get the title register and find out which of the three ownership positions you are in, before anybody tells you what you are entitled to.
4. Gather the paper before it is tidied away. Bank statements, mortgage statements, the conveyancing file, receipts for work on the house, anything showing what each of you put in.
5. Write to the lender and the insurer. Buildings cover is often invalidated or restricted once a property is unoccupied or the policyholder has died, and a family in dispute is exactly the situation in which a house sits empty — see whether the buildings insurance is valid on an empty probate house.
6. Check for cover nobody has mentioned. A mortgage life policy, an employer's death in service scheme, a pension death benefit. Pension and death in service lump sums are usually paid at the trustees' discretion, which means an unmarried partner can receive them even where intestacy gives them nothing — but only if the trustees know you exist. Write to the scheme yourself.
7. Get free help alongside the legal advice. Citizens Advice and MoneyHelper both cover benefits, debt and the practical side of bereavement, and neither sells anything.

If it turns out the house is going to a child of his rather than a sibling, the dynamics are different but the legal position is the same one described in a father dying without a will with the house in his name.

Scotland and Northern Ireland

This is a topic where guidance written for England and Wales is actively misleading elsewhere, because all three jurisdictions answer the cohabitant question differently.

Scotland is the most generous of the three, though not by much. The Family Law (Scotland) Act 2006 created a standalone right for a surviving cohabitant to apply to the court for a discretionary payment out of an intestate estate — a route that does not exist in England and Wales. The award is at the court's discretion and cannot exceed what a spouse would have received. The catch is the deadline, which is measured from the date of death rather than from confirmation and is short enough that people miss it while still arranging the funeral. Take advice in the first weeks. Scotland also uses confirmation rather than probate, and titles there often carry a survivorship destination written into the deed itself.

Northern Ireland runs its own succession legislation, the Administration of Estates Act (Northern Ireland) 1955, and its own family provision rules under the Inheritance (Provision for Family and Dependants) (Northern Ireland) Order 1979. Crucially, that Order was not amended in the way the English Act was, so a surviving cohabitant in Northern Ireland generally has to claim as someone who was being maintained by the deceased rather than simply as a long-standing partner. nidirect sets out the local probate process and mygov.scot the Scottish one.

How couples fix this before it happens

Everything above is the slow, contested, expensive version of a problem that is straightforward to solve in advance. Three documents do nearly all of the work, and none of them requires a court.

A will. It is the only instrument that reliably directs an estate to an unmarried partner. Without one, the intestacy rules decide, and they will not choose you.

The title. If you are both contributing, both names belong on the register. Held as joint tenants, the property passes to the survivor automatically, outside the will and outside probate, which is precisely what a surviving partner needs. Be clear-eyed about the other side of that coin: joint owners who are also joint borrowers each owe the whole mortgage, not half of it, and a survivor who wants to keep the house will still have to satisfy a lender on one income eventually — the problem examined in whether a lender will give a widow a new deal on one income.

Cover written for the debt, and written correctly. A life policy held in trust or arranged on a life-of-another basis pays the named person directly. It does not fall into the estate, it is not distributed by the intestacy rules, and it does not wait for a grant. For an unmarried couple that distinction is the whole game: it converts an inheritance dispute into a payment. There is a tax dimension too, since the exemption that lets a married couple pass an estate to each other free of inheritance tax does not apply to cohabitants, so an unmarried partner can face a bill a spouse would not. If you want to know what covering your actual mortgage balance and term would involve, you can get life insurance quotes and have an FCA-authorised broker look at it. Whether an insurer offers cover, and on what terms, always depends on health and underwriting.

The rest of this topic sits in our guide to mortgages and property when someone dies.

Frequently asked questions

Who inherits the house if my partner died without a will?

The intestacy rules pass the estate to the closest blood relatives in a fixed order: a spouse or civil partner first, then children, then parents, then siblings, and outwards from there. An unmarried partner is not included at any point, regardless of how long you lived together or what you contributed. The exception is a house owned as joint tenants, which passes to the surviving owner automatically and never enters the estate.

Is there such a thing as a common law wife in the UK?

No. Common law marriage has no legal status in England, Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland, and living together for decades gives no automatic inheritance rights. It is one of the most widely believed and most damaging myths in family finance, and people usually discover it is untrue in the week they can least afford to.

Can I do anything if his family inherits the house?

Yes, potentially two things. You can apply under the Inheritance (Provision for Family and Dependants) Act 1975 if you lived together as a couple for the two years ending with the death, or were being maintained by him; applications are normally made within six months of the grant. Separately, if you contributed financially you may already hold a beneficial share in the property. Pursue both, and take advice quickly.