Before you exchange contracts, you need to settle four things: whether you own the property as joint tenants or tenants in common, how you'll record any unequal contributions, whether you each have a Will, and how joint mortgage liability actually works. Get independent solicitors involved early, because ownership shares are far harder to unpick after completion than before it.
TL;DR:
- Unmarried buyers should clarify ownership as joint tenants or tenants in common, since it affects inheritance and how their share passes if one dies.
- Recording ownership shares improperly on the Land Registry can default to tenants in common without reflecting actual contributions, risking unintended inheritance outcomes.
- A declaration of trust is essential to legally document financial contributions, ongoing payments, and plans for sale or buyout, protecting each partner’s interest.
- Joint mortgages involve joint-and-several liability, meaning either owner can be responsible for the entire debt, regardless of ownership shares or trust arrangements.
- Unmarried couples must have a Will and properly drafted trust deed before exchange, as intestacy laws do not automatically benefit surviving partners.
Table of Contents
- Buying a house unmarried in the UK: joint tenants vs tenants in common
- How do you protect your share with a declaration of trust?
- What happens with a joint mortgage if one partner stops paying?
- What happens if you split up or one partner dies?
- Your pre-purchase checklist before exchange
- Co-buying as a route onto the ladder
- Why the standard advice undersells the paperwork
- Get started with Cohaus
- Where to check the official guidance
- Sources
- FAQ
Buying a house unmarried in the UK: joint tenants vs tenants in common
The single biggest decision unmarried buyers face is how HM Land Registry records ownership, and it comes down to two options. This choice determines what happens to the property if one of you dies or if the relationship ends, so it deserves more attention than most buyers give it.
Joint tenants own the whole property together, with no fixed shares. If one owner dies, the other automatically inherits the entire property through the right of survivorship, regardless of what a Will says. Tenants in common hold specified shares instead, which can be equal or reflect unequal deposit contributions, and those shares pass under a Will rather than automatically to the surviving co-owner.
Here's the part most buyers miss: the Land Registry only records the legal estate, meaning who legally owns the property. It does not automatically show beneficial interest, meaning who actually benefits financially from it. Two people can be named as legal owners while holding very different beneficial shares underneath, and unless that's documented properly, the split defaults to something you might not expect.
The mechanism matters here. Your conveyancer completes panel 10 of the TR1 transfer form to record your choice. Leave it unclear, and HM Land Registry may enter a Form A restriction by default, which signals tenants in common without necessarily reflecting the shares you intended.
Before you sign anything, check and confirm the following with your conveyancer:
- Which ownership type is stated on the TR1 form, and does it match what you actually agreed?
- If tenants in common, are the exact percentage shares written down anywhere beyond the transfer form?
- Does the title register show a Form A restriction, and if so, why?
- Has your conveyancer explained what happens to your share if you die without a Will?
Our guide on tenants in common vs joint tenancy walks through worked examples if you want to see how the numbers play out in practice.
How do you protect your share with a declaration of trust?
A declaration of trust, sometimes called a deed of trust, is the document that actually protects your money. Where the TR1 form states the headline ownership type, the trust deed spells out the detail: exact percentage shares, how much each person put into the deposit, ongoing mortgage contributions, and what happens if one of you wants to sell and the other doesn't.
A solid deed of trust should cover:
- The deposit split — who paid what, including any gifted money from parents that needs separate acknowledgement.
- Ongoing contributions — how mortgage repayments, renovations, and bills are shared, and what happens if that ratio changes over time.
- Sale triggers — what happens if one owner wants to sell, one dies, or the relationship ends.
- Buyout mechanics — how one partner can buy the other out, and how the property gets valued when that happens.
A cohabitation agreement sits alongside the trust deed rather than replacing it. Where the deed of trust deals with money and the property itself, the cohabitation agreement can cover wider practical matters, such as how you'll split bills, what happens to shared possessions, and how you'll handle a pet or a joint bank account if you separate.
Then there's the Will, and this is where unmarried couples get caught out most often. Unmarried partners have no automatic inheritance rights under English intestacy law, no matter how long you've lived together. If you're tenants in common and you die without a Will, your share doesn't pass to your partner. It goes to your legal next of kin, which could mean your surviving partner ends up co-owning the house with your parents or siblings.
Pro Tip: Draft the deed of trust, cohabitation agreement, and your Wills at the same time as your mortgage application, not after. Solicitors report far fewer disputes when these documents are signed before exchange rather than "sorted out later".
What happens with a joint mortgage if one partner stops paying?
Joint mortgages work differently to how most people assume. Lenders assess both applicants' credit histories, income, and outgoings as a package, and most will not accept separate mortgages for separate ownership shares, even when you own unequal percentages of the property.
The critical term to understand is joint-and-several liability. This means the lender can pursue either borrower for the full mortgage debt, not just their "half". If your partner stops paying, you are on the hook for the entire monthly repayment, not 50% of it, regardless of what your deed of trust says about ownership shares. The trust deed governs the split between you and your partner; it has no bearing on what the lender can demand.
A few practical points worth checking before you apply:
- If one of you is a first-time buyer and the other isn't, you typically lose first-time buyer Stamp Duty relief on the whole purchase, because the relief applies to the transaction, not to an individual buyer.
- Lenders run credit and affordability checks on both applicants, so one poor credit history can affect the mortgage rate or amount available to both of you.
- A joint secured loan works on similar principles if you're considering borrowing against the property later, and the same liability rules apply.
- Unequal deposit or repayment contributions should be recorded in the declaration of trust, not left as an informal understanding.
Our detailed breakdown on unequal mortgage contributions explains how to structure the paperwork so your bigger deposit is protected if things go wrong.
What happens if you split up or one partner dies?
The outcome depends heavily on which ownership type you chose, and this is where the earlier decision really shows its consequences.
Under joint tenancy, survivorship means your partner automatically inherits the whole property if you die, which offers real protection against a partner being left with nothing. But it also means your share doesn't pass through your estate to anyone else, which can be a problem if you have children from a previous relationship or want to leave something to family.
Under tenants in common, your share passes according to your Will. If you have no Will, intestacy rules apply and your unmarried partner inherits nothing automatically, even after decades of living together.
Non-owning partners face a harder road entirely. If you're not named on the title at all, you may still be able to establish a beneficial interest through a constructive trust, resulting trust, or proprietary estoppel, but these claims are genuinely fact-sensitive and rarely straightforward:
- Constructive trust claims rely on evidence of a shared understanding that you'd have an interest, backed by financial contributions.
- Resulting trust claims focus mainly on direct financial contributions to the purchase price.
- Proprietary estoppel applies where you relied, to your detriment, on a promise you'd have an interest in the property.
Where informal claims fail, the Trusts of Land and Appointment of Trustees Act 1996 (TOLATA) gives the courts a route to resolve disputes over who owns what and force a sale if needed. TOLATA cases are expensive and slow, and courts consistently encourage professional mediation before litigation. The Ministry of Justice is currently consulting on reforms to cohabitants' rights, so the legal landscape here may shift, but nothing has changed the current position yet.
Your pre-purchase checklist before exchange
Get these sorted in the weeks before exchange, not after you've moved in.
Budget for more than the deposit. You'll need funds for Stamp Duty Land Tax (unless an exemption applies), conveyancer fees, mortgage arrangement fees, a survey, and buildings insurance from exchange onwards, which is a legal requirement the lender will check.
- Instruct separate, independent solicitors for each of you, not one firm acting for both. This avoids conflicts of interest and ensures each person's contributions are properly documented.
- Speak to a mortgage adviser early about how your individual credit profiles affect the joint application.
- Ask your conveyancer directly: how will ownership be recorded, who's drafting the trust deed, and are there Inheritance Tax implications for unequal shares?
- Arrange life insurance proportionate to your mortgage share, particularly if contributions are unequal.
Around 58% of cohabiting couples in England and Wales still believe in the "common law marriage" myth, wrongly assuming living together for long enough grants them the same rights as marriage. It doesn't, and that misunderstanding is precisely why the checklist above exists.
For a fuller walkthrough of the mortgage steps, see our guide to protecting your share before a joint mortgage.
Co-buying as a route onto the ladder
Buying with a partner isn't the only option if affordability is the real barrier. Co-buying with friends, siblings, or a wider group is an increasingly common route onto the property ladder, and it needs exactly the same legal groundwork as buying as a couple: a clear ownership choice, a proper declaration of trust, and Wills that reflect what you've actually agreed.
Some co-buying platforms exist because pooling deposits and mortgage responsibility shouldn't mean pooling risk unfairly. Such platforms may focus on shared deposit structures, legal protections for co-buyers, and transparent exit terms, so if one person needs to leave the arrangement, there's already a framework for how that works rather than a scramble to work it out under pressure. If you're weighing up a two-person purchase against a larger co-buying group, our guides on buying with friends and buying with siblings cover how those arrangements differ in practice.
Whichever structure you choose, Cohaus points people toward independent legal advice rather than replacing it. Checklists and community support help you ask the right questions; they don't substitute for a solicitor reviewing your specific trust deed.
Why the standard advice undersells the paperwork
Most guidance on buying unmarried treats the legal documents as an afterthought, something to "sort out" once the exciting part, finding the house, is done. That ordering is backwards. The ownership decision you make on the TR1 form is genuinely harder to reverse after completion than before it, and severing a joint tenancy later, or arguing over undocumented contributions years down the line, costs far more in solicitor time and stress than getting it right at the outset.
The conventional advice also treats a Will as optional for younger buyers. It isn't. Intestacy rules don't care how long you've lived together or how committed you are; an unmarried partner without a Will can lose everything to the other person's family. If I had to pick one action for readers to prioritise above all else in this article, it's this: don't let the mortgage application race ahead of the trust deed and the Wills. Treat all three as one package, signed before exchange, not three separate errands with different deadlines.
— Martin
Get started with Cohaus
If pooling resources with a partner, friends, or family feels like the more realistic route to ownership, Cohaus gives you a structured way to do it without inventing the legal groundwork from scratch. Rather than negotiating shared deposits and exit terms informally, you get a platform built around shared deposit management, legal protections for co-buyers, and transparent exit terms agreed upfront.
Start by reading the co-buyer checklist on the Cohaus site, then use the platform to connect with others exploring the same route and, when you're ready, get introduced to a mortgage adviser or solicitor to formalise the details. Independent legal advice still matters here exactly as it does for couples, but you won't be starting that conversation from zero.
Where to check the official guidance
For the legal detail behind everything above, go to the primary sources rather than relying on secondhand summaries.
- Gov for the legal estate and beneficial interest basics.
- HM Land Registry's guide to joint ownership types for how survivorship and shares actually work.
- Shelter England's guidance on cohabiting joint homeowners for occupation rights and beneficial interest claims.
- Which?'s explainer on tenants in common vs joint tenancy for consumer-facing practical steps.
This article is general information, not a substitute for advice from a qualified lawyer. Consult a qualified legal professional about your own circumstances before acting on anything here.
Sources
- What kind of joint ownership do I have? – HM Land Registry
- Gov
- Joint tenants vs tenants in common - Which?
- Housing rights of cohabiting joint homeowners – Shelter England
- A fairer end to relationships consultation – Ministry of Justice
FAQ
What are the new rules for unmarried couples in 2026?
There is no new statutory change yet. The Ministry of Justice is consulting on reforms to cohabitants' rights, but current intestacy and property law still apply as before, so a Will and a declaration of trust remain essential.
What if I'm a first-time buyer but my partner isn't?
You'll typically lose first-time buyer Stamp Duty relief on the entire purchase, since the relief applies to the transaction rather than to one buyer individually, and your mortgage lender will assess you both as a joint application regardless.
What happens to the house when unmarried couples split in the UK?
It depends on ownership type: joint tenants each retain an equal interest and usually need to agree a sale or a buyout, while tenants in common hold their specified shares and can seek a TOLATA order if they can't agree how to proceed.
How can I protect myself when buying a house with a partner in the UK?
Choose your ownership type deliberately, put unequal contributions in a declaration of trust, sign a cohabitation agreement covering practical matters, and make sure you both have an up-to-date Will before you exchange contracts.