Not Married? Your Pension Has Two Different Answers

What happens to your pension when you die if you are not married depends almost entirely on one thing: whether it is a pot of money or a promise of an income. Those two kinds of pension answer the question in opposite ways. From a defined contribution pot, the people who run the scheme can usually pay your unmarried partner. From some defined benefit schemes, the rules simply will not let them, no matter how long you were together.

This is the fact that catches cohabiting couples out, because most people think of their pension as one thing. It is not. A workplace pot built up over a career, a personal pension, or a self-invested arrangement is money held for you, and its death benefits are typically paid at the discretion of the trustees or provider, which gives them room to pay a partner. A final salary or career-average scheme pays what its rulebook says, and some rulebooks define a survivor as a spouse or civil partner and stop there.

So the honest answer to whether your girlfriend or partner gets your pension is: it depends which pension. This page splits the answer by scheme type, explains why the two behave so differently, and sets out what an unmarried couple can actually do where the scheme's rules are against them.

The short answer: it turns on the type of scheme

Before anything else, find out what kind of pension the person actually has, because everything follows from it. A defined contribution pension is a pot with a value: you can see a fund figure on the statement. A defined benefit pension is a promised income, usually described as a fraction of salary for each year of service, with no single pot behind it that belongs to the member.

The distinction is not academic. It decides who has the power to pay your partner. With a pot, that power sits with the trustees or provider and is usually discretionary, which is what lets them look at your real life and pay the person you lived with. With a scheme pension, the power sits in the rulebook, and if the rulebook says spouse, the administrator cannot simply decide to be generous.

Unmarried couples are not a rare edge case that schemes can afford to ignore. Cohabiting-couple families have been the fastest-growing family type in the UK for many years, which is precisely why the mismatch between how people live and how older scheme rules are written causes so much hardship.

Source: Office for National Statistics, Families and households in the UK: 2024, published under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

The defined contribution pot: discretion can pay a partner

Start with the more hopeful case. When someone with a defined contribution pension dies, the pot does not automatically pass under the will. It is held under a trust, and the trustees or provider decide who receives it, choosing from a class of potential beneficiaries that normally includes dependants and anyone the member nominated.

That discretion is what makes a partner payable. Trustees can pay a financially interdependent partner, and in practice they routinely do, particularly where the couple shared a home and finances and where the member nominated the partner on the scheme's form. The discretionary structure has a second benefit that has mattered until now: because the trustees choose, the pot has generally sat outside the member's estate for inheritance tax, though that treatment changes for most unused pots from April 2027.

The catch is that discretion cuts both ways. Trustees are not obliged to pay a partner, and if there is no nomination and no clear evidence of the relationship, they have to reconstruct your circumstances from whatever they can find, which is slower and can end somewhere you would not have chosen. The way to tilt this decisively in a partner's favour is the nomination form, covered below. The tax treatment of what they receive, and the choice between a lump sum and a beneficiary income, is set out in a guide to value protection, guarantee periods and joint life options.

The defined benefit scheme: the rules can shut a partner out

Now the harder case. A defined benefit scheme, whether final salary or career average, pays survivor benefits strictly according to its rules. Those rules define who counts as a survivor, and that definition is where an unmarried partner can be excluded completely.

Many schemes define a survivor as a spouse or civil partner. Where that is the rule, the administrator has no discretion to pay a cohabiting partner a survivor's pension, however long the relationship and however dependent the partner was. It is not unkindness on the administrator's part; they are bound by the trust deed. Some schemes have modernised and now pay an eligible cohabiting partner who meets stated conditions, typically a genuine, exclusive relationship with financial dependence or interdependence, and sometimes a nomination on file. But you cannot assume it. You have to read the specific scheme's booklet and, if it is unclear, ask the administrator in writing.

An armed forces pension is a good illustration of how much this varies between schemes and even between versions of the same scheme, which we set out in a guide to what a wife or partner receives from an armed forces pension. The same lesson applies to any scheme pension: the survivor's entitlement is only ever what the rules grant, and a large headline pension can leave an unmarried partner with nothing at all.

The lump sum a scheme pension can still pay

Even where a defined benefit scheme's survivor pension is closed to an unmarried partner, that is often not the whole story, because many of these schemes carry a second, separate death benefit: a lump sum. This is most visible as death-in-service cover for someone who dies while still employed, commonly expressed as a multiple of salary, but a lump sum can also be payable where a member dies within a guarantee period shortly after retiring.

What matters for an unmarried partner is how that lump sum is paid. Unlike the survivor's pension, which is bound by the rulebook's definition of a spouse or civil partner, the lump sum is frequently held under a discretionary trust in exactly the way a defined contribution pot is. That means the trustees can normally pay it to a partner, and the nomination form does the same work here as it does for a pot. So the realistic outcome for a partner of a final salary member can be split in two: no ongoing survivor pension, but a discretionary lump sum they can still receive where they were nominated and the relationship is clearly evidenced.

The practical instruction that follows is simple. Do not read the survivor-pension rule, see the words spouse or civil partner, and conclude a partner gets nothing at all. Ask the administrator specifically about the lump-sum death benefit, whether it is held at the trustees' discretion, and whether a nomination is on file, because the two benefits are decided under different rules and can genuinely land in different places for the same person.

The form that decides more than people think

For a defined contribution pot, the nomination form, sometimes called an expression of wish, is the most powerful tool an unmarried couple has, and it is astonishing how often it is left blank.

The form does not bind the trustees, and that surprises people who assume naming someone guarantees payment. What it does is give the trustees the clearest possible evidence of what you wanted, which in practice they follow unless there is a strong reason not to. Without it, an unmarried partner is relying on the trustees piecing the relationship together from correspondence, bank records and what the family tells them, which takes longer and can genuinely end with the money going elsewhere. Fill the form in, keep it current, and make sure any separate pot, such as an additional voluntary contribution arrangement, has its own nomination too. Where an older scheme requires a specific partner nomination as a condition of a survivor's pension, completing it can be the difference between a partner qualifying and not, which is bound up with the public sector ruling covered next.

The public sector exception

There is one broad category where the picture improved sharply for cohabiting partners, and it is worth knowing whether it applies to you. In 2017 the Supreme Court decided the Brewster case, which concerned a public service scheme that required a cohabiting partner to be nominated on a form when a spouse needed no such step. The court held that requirement to be unlawful discrimination.

As a result, public service schemes across the UK removed the nomination precondition for cohabiting partners, so an eligible partner can qualify on the strength of the relationship itself. That helps if the person worked in, say, local government, the NHS or teaching. It does not help everyone. The ruling turned on human rights arguments that apply to public bodies, and a private sector occupational scheme can still define its survivors as its own rules see fit. So a cohabiting partner of a private DB member may have no entitlement at all, exactly as the rulebook allows. The relationship conditions still have to be met and evidenced in any case, so a completed partner nomination remains worth having even where it is no longer a strict precondition.

What to do if the scheme will not pay a partner

If you read the booklet and the scheme genuinely excludes a cohabiting partner, it is better to know now, while something can be done, than to leave a partner to discover it in the worst week of their life.

The direct legal answers are marriage or a civil partnership, either of which brings the partner inside the definition of a survivor in almost every scheme and inside the inheritance tax spouse exemption as well. Where that is not wanted, the practical answer is to make sure the household income does not disappear on your death by arranging separate cover sized against what the excluded pension would have provided. That is a straightforward thing to price, and you can get life insurance quotes through an FCA-authorised broker who can look at the specific gap your scheme leaves. If you have recently met someone new while already receiving a survivor's pension, a different question arises about whether that pension continues, which we address in a guide to whether moving in with a new partner affects a widow's pension.

Scotland and Northern Ireland

Pension scheme rules and the tax treatment of pensions are largely UK-wide, so the core split between a discretionary pot and a rules-bound scheme pension applies wherever you live, and the Brewster ruling affected public service schemes across the UK.

The surrounding succession law differs, and it can matter for a cohabiting partner who is left out by a scheme. Scotland gives a surviving cohabitant a limited right to apply to the court for provision from the estate within a strict time limit, which is separate from anything the pension does. Northern Ireland has its own intestacy framework, with figures and rules of its own, which we set out in a guide to how Northern Ireland intestacy differs. None of these routes forces a pension scheme to pay a partner; they affect what a partner may claim from the estate alongside the pension. The whole subject sits within our guide to pensions, nominations and death benefits.

Frequently asked questions

Will my partner get my pension if we are not married?

It depends on the scheme. Trustees of a defined contribution pot can normally pay a financially interdependent partner at their discretion, especially where you nominated them. A defined benefit scheme pays only what its rules allow, and some still define a survivor as a spouse or civil partner, which can leave a cohabiting partner with no entitlement at all.

Does naming my partner on the form guarantee they are paid?

It does not bind the trustees, but it matters a great deal. On a discretionary pot the nomination is the clearest evidence of what you wanted, and the trustees will usually follow it. Without one, they have to reconstruct your circumstances from correspondence and family accounts, which takes longer and can end differently from what you intended.

What can we do if the final salary scheme will not pay a partner?

Read the scheme booklet to confirm the definition of a survivor and whether a partner nomination is possible at all. If the rules genuinely exclude cohabitees, the practical options are marriage, a civil partnership, or arranging separate cover so the household income does not vanish entirely on your death.