There is no such thing as a common law marriage.

The law you’re actually under.

There’s a version of this page that says cohabiting couples have no legal protection. It would be more dramatic and it would be wrong, and a family solicitor would stop reading. So, precisely:

Where you are protected. In relation to children and domestic abuse, cohabitants have similar and sometimes identical protection to married couples. Parental responsibility, child arrangements and child maintenance don’t depend on marriage. Neither does protection under the Domestic Abuse Act 2021. You can apply for an occupation order under the Family Law Act 1996 to decide who lives in the home, whoever owns it.[3]

Where you are not. Two things, and they are the two that decide what you walk away with.

If you separate

Married couples can ask a court to divide things fairly. The court can transfer property, share pensions, order maintenance, and weigh what each person contributed — including at home.

There is no equivalent for cohabitants. No statutory scheme. You fall back on the general law of property and trusts, which wasn’t built for this.

In practice that means the Trusts of Land and Appointment of Trustees Act 1996. If you’re both on the title, you start from what the title says. If the home is in one name, the other has to prove a beneficial interest — broadly, a shared intention that ownership would be shared and reliance on it to their detriment, or direct financial contributions to acquiring the property.[3]

Read that last part again. Contributions to the purchase price, the deposit, the mortgage or significant improvements can count.

Work in the home and childcare do not.

Not for acquiring an interest in a property owned by the other person. Someone who cut their hours for six years to look after children may find the law has no way to see it.

Where there are children under 18, Schedule 1 of the Children Act 1989 allows applications for provision for the child. Real, but limited — no ongoing payments to a former partner, no pension sharing, property adjustment that ends when they grow up. The 2022 committee called it out-dated, and said it mostly benefits the children of wealthy parents.[3]

If one of you dies

With a valid will, your partner inherits under its terms.

Without one, the intestacy rules apply — and they don’t include cohabitants. A surviving partner of thirty years inherits nothing automatically. The route is a claim under the Inheritance (Provision for Family and Dependants) Act 1975, open to someone who lived as a couple in the same household for the two years before the death, limited to reasonable provision for maintenance, and requiring a court application during bereavement.[3]

There’s no inheritance tax exemption between cohabitants either. A partner inheriting a share of the family home can face a bill that makes keeping it unaffordable. And survivor pensions often turn on scheme trustees exercising discretion, with the survivor asked to evidence mutual dependency rather than produce a certificate.

So the accurate sentence is narrower than the dramatic one, and worse. Not “no rights.” No automatic rights to each other’s property on separation, and no automatic inheritance on death. Which are the two moments it matters.

3.6 million households, on an assumption.

In 2021 there were around 3.6 million cohabiting couples in the UK, against 1.5 million in 1996. Roughly a fifth of all couples living together. The fastest-growing family type in the country.[2]

They aren’t choosing to go unprotected. Many of them believe they already are.

The 46% above is England and Wales. These figures are UK-wide. They are not combined.

The barrier was never legal.

Three reasons this stays unwritten, all given in evidence to Parliament.[3]

The words are everywhere. Insurers, forms and ordinary speech use “common-law partner” as if it were a status. Every use makes the belief a little more solid.

Optimism, at exactly the wrong moment. The law expects people to be legally rational about the least rational thing they do. So it gets postponed, and postponed, and then it’s ten years later.

The belief defends itself. A cohabitation agreement only works if the people signing it know what their rights are. If you think you’re already covered, there’s no reason to write anything down. A professor of family law told the committee that many people discover their actual position only at separation or bereavement, having lived for years on an assumption that was entirely false.

Four things, none of which need a law to change.

Find out whose name is on what. The title, the tenancy, the accounts, the policies. A surprising number of couples aren’t certain. Everything else follows from this.

Consider a declaration of trust if you own together, or if one of you put money into a home in the other’s name. It records the shares you actually intend, while you both still agree what they are.

Consider a cohabitation agreement. It can set out what happens to property, money and outgoings if you separate. Take independent advice — one solicitor cannot advise you both.

Make a will. Without one, your partner inherits nothing automatically, however long you’ve been together.

And before any of it, the conversation.

The Government told the 2022 committee that without written evidence, cohabitants can face real difficulty proving what was agreed about the family home.[4]

That’s the whole argument, and it isn’t ours. Whatever the law becomes, it will always be easier to prove something you wrote down together than something you each assumed separately.

Written Down and Your Survey — availability below.

Written Down is a separate document, not one of the public field guides linked above.