Unmarried and Living Together: What California Law Does Not Give Your Partner

Couples who live together for years without marrying tend to assume that time counts for something. It does not. California's intestate succession statutes list children, parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. They do not contain the word partner.

That single omission drives almost every problem unmarried couples run into. The person who shares your home and half your expenses has no automatic right to inherit from you, no authority to make your medical decisions, and no standing to manage your affairs if you cannot manage them yourself. None of that changes after five years together, or after thirty-five.

The fix is not complicated, but it is entirely document-driven. Married couples receive a set of default protections whether or not they ever meet with an attorney. Unmarried couples receive none of them, which means every protection you want has to be created on purpose. Here is what California law actually does when there is no plan, and what has to be in place to change the outcome.

What Happens If You Die Without Documents

When someone dies without a will or trust, California Probate Code sections 6400 through 6402 decide who inherits. The statute works down a fixed list of relatives, and a surviving partner appears nowhere on it.

The estate passes first to the decedent's children, then to parents, then to siblings, then outward to grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. If no relative can be located anywhere along that chain, the property escheats to the State of California. A partner of thirty years still takes nothing.

The practical result is what catches people off guard. A brother in another state can inherit a house your partner paid half the mortgage on and has lived in for two decades, and he can list it for sale. Nothing about that outcome is a malfunction. It is precisely what the statute directs when no document says otherwise.

Only two relationships change this analysis: marriage and registered domestic partnership. Both are recognized throughout the Probate Code. Cohabitation, however long, is not.

California Does Not Recognize Common-Law Marriage

This is the most persistent misunderstanding in this area, and it costs surviving partners more than any other. Under California Family Code section 300, a marriage requires a license and solemnization. No length of cohabitation substitutes for either one.

Sharing a surname, raising children together, combining finances, or introducing each other as spouses does not create a marriage here. California stopped recognizing common-law marriages formed within its borders in 1895.

One narrow exception is worth knowing. If a couple established a valid common-law marriage while living in a state that still permits them, California will generally recognize that marriage. The relationship has to have been validly formed under the other state's law first; moving to California does not create one.

There is also a contract remedy that gets mistaken for inheritance rights. Marvin v. Marvin (1976) 18 Cal.3d 660 allows unmarried partners to enforce express or implied agreements about property and support, and a surviving partner can sometimes bring a Marvin claim against a deceased partner's estate. But that is litigation, not inheritance. The survivor has to prove the agreement existed, usually against the relatives who lose if the claim succeeds, and often years after the only other witness to it has died. A signed document costs a small fraction of what that fight costs.

Registered Domestic Partnership Is Now Open to Every Couple

Most couples assume registered domestic partnership is limited to same-sex couples or to seniors over 62. That stopped being true on January 1, 2020, when Senate Bill 30 removed the age and sex restrictions. Any two adults 18 or older may now register with the California Secretary of State.

Under Family Code section 297.5, registered domestic partners hold the same rights and obligations as spouses under California law. That includes intestate succession, community property, authority to make health care decisions, and the property tax treatment discussed in the next section.

It is not equivalent to marriage in every respect, and the differences matter. Registration is a state-law status, and federal law does not uniformly follow it—joint federal income tax filing and the spousal IRA rollover remain tied to marriage, and federal benefit questions require their own analysis. Registration also creates real obligations, including mutual financial responsibility and a court dissolution process that closely resembles a divorce.

For some couples this is the cleanest solution available. For others it is the wrong fit entirely. What matters is that the choice gets made deliberately, because most couples who come to us had no idea the option was open to them.

The Shared Home Comes Down to How Title Reads

For most unmarried couples the house is the largest asset and the one most likely to go wrong. What controls it is not the mortgage, not who made the payments, and not whose name is on the utility bills. It is how title reads on the deed.

Two unmarried buyers who take title together are, by default, tenants in common. Each owns a separate fractional share, and on death that share passes through the decedent's will or by intestate succession—not to the co-owner. This is the arrangement that produces the out-of-state sibling who suddenly owns half a house.

Joint tenancy with right of survivorship, created under Civil Code section 683, does the opposite. The survivor takes the entire property automatically, outside probate. It is simple, it is common, and it carries tradeoffs couples rarely hear about before signing:

• Survivorship overrides your estate plan. A joint tenancy deed beats whatever your will or trust says about that property. Couples who later sign a trust and never correct the deed end up with two documents pointing in opposite directions.
• Either owner can sever it alone. One joint tenant can convert the arrangement into a tenancy in common by recording a deed, without the other's knowledge or consent.
• The property is exposed to both owners' creditors. A judgment, tax lien, or lawsuit against one partner can attach to real property held in joint tenancy.
• Adding a partner to title is a taxable gift. Where one partner already owned the home, putting the other on the deed transfers value. The 2026 annual gift tax exclusion is $19,000 per recipient; anything above it is reportable and reduces the lifetime exemption.
• Only half the property receives a stepped-up basis. Under Internal Revenue Code section 1014 the deceased owner's share is revalued at date-of-death fair market value, while the survivor's own half keeps its original basis. Married couples holding community property step up both halves. Unmarried co-owners cannot.

A revocable trust generally accomplishes the same goal—the survivor keeps the home without probate—while preserving control over what happens after the second death, which joint tenancy does not address at all.

The Property Tax Consequence Most Couples Never See Coming

California assesses property under Proposition 13 at its value when it last changed hands. That is why a Truckee or Tahoe City home bought in the 1990s can carry a tax bill a fraction of what the recent buyer next door pays. A change in ownership resets that assessment to current market value.

Transfers between spouses are excluded from reassessment under Revenue and Taxation Code section 63. Transfers between registered domestic partners are excluded under section 62(p). There is no equivalent exclusion for unmarried partners. A transfer of an interest between partners during life, or a partner's death, is a change in ownership like any other—and at current valuations, reassessment can raise the annual tax by thousands of dollars for as long as the survivor owns the home.

One narrow provision can prevent that result. Revenue and Taxation Code section 62.3, which applies to deaths occurring on or after January 1, 2013, excludes the transfer of a deceased cotenant's interest to the surviving cotenant—but only if every condition is met:

• The two cotenants together own 100 percent of the property, as joint tenants or tenants in common, with no other owner on title.
• Both were owners of record for the full one-year period immediately preceding the death.
• The property was the principal residence of both, and both resided there continuously for that same one-year period.
• The survivor obtains 100 percent of the property as a result of the death, whether by will, trust, intestate succession, or right of survivorship.
• The survivor files an affidavit of cotenant residency, signed under penalty of perjury, confirming the residency requirement.

Every one of those conditions is a genuine trap. Adding a partner to title ten months before an unexpected death fails the one-year test. A third name on the deed—a parent who helped with the down payment, for instance—defeats the exclusion entirely. Because the requirements are measured backward from the date of death, none of them can be repaired afterward. This is one of the few corners of estate planning where acting a year early is the whole difference between qualifying and not.

Medical and Financial Authority While You Are Both Alive

Inheritance is what couples ask about. Incapacity is what arrives first and does the most immediate damage.

Without signed documents, an unmarried partner has no legal authority in a hospital. Staff turn to blood relatives, and a partner may not even be told a diagnosis, because federal privacy rules do not recognize the relationship. Three documents change that, and none of them are expensive:

• An Advance Health Care Directive under California's Health Care Decisions Law, Probate Code section 4600 and following, naming your partner as your agent. Probate Code section 4671 supplies a statutory form.
• A HIPAA authorization under 45 C.F.R. section 164.508, permitting providers to share medical information with your partner. Without it, an agent can be left unable to obtain the records needed to make the very decisions the directive authorizes.
• A durable power of attorney under the Power of Attorney Law, Probate Code section 4000 and following, allowing your partner to handle accounts, mortgage payments, insurance, and property matters if you cannot.

Where none of these exist, the remaining option is a conservatorship petition under Probate Code section 1800 and following—a public court proceeding that takes months, costs many times what the documents would have, and can be opposed by a relative who disagrees with the partner's role. Name alternates on all three. An agent who is unavailable, or who is injured in the same accident, is the same as no agent at all.

Beneficiary Designations Pass Outside Your Estate Plan

Life insurance, retirement accounts, annuities, payable-on-death bank accounts, and transfer-on-death investment accounts pass by contract to whoever is named on the form. A will does not control them. Neither does a trust. For unmarried couples this is both the easiest thing to get right and the easiest to leave stale, and an old form naming a former partner or a parent will be honored exactly as written.

Two federal rules apply differently to unmarried partners and are worth understanding before naming one on a retirement account:

• Inherited retirement accounts. A surviving spouse may roll an inherited IRA into their own. An unmarried partner cannot, and is generally subject to the SECURE Act ten-year rule requiring the account to be emptied within ten years of death. One exception is often missed: a beneficiary who is not more than ten years younger than the account owner qualifies as an eligible designated beneficiary and may still take distributions over life expectancy. A good number of long-term partners fall inside that window.
• Estate tax. The unlimited marital deduction under Internal Revenue Code section 2056, and the portability of a deceased spouse's unused exemption under section 2010(c), are available only to spouses. At the 2026 federal exemption of $15 million per person this affects relatively few estates—but where it does apply, what is lost is an entire second exemption, and life insurance held in an irrevocable trust is often the practical answer.

What Probate Costs the Survivor

When assets pass by will, or with no document at all, the estate goes through probate, and the survivor absorbs the cost of it.

California sets compensation by formula. Probate Code sections 10800 and 10810 award the personal representative and the attorney each the same percentage: 4 percent of the first $100,000, 3 percent of the next $100,000, 2 percent of the next $800,000, and 1 percent of the next $9 million. The detail that surprises people is that those percentages apply to the gross value of the estate, not to equity. A Tahoe-area home worth $1.2 million carrying an $800,000 mortgage is a $1.2 million estate for fee purposes—roughly $25,000 to the attorney and the same again to the personal representative.

California does offer simplified procedures, and both were expanded recently. For deaths on or after April 1, 2025, a small estate affidavit under Probate Code section 13100 covers personal property up to $208,850, and a streamlined petition under section 13151 covers a decedent's primary residence valued up to $750,000. Across much of Nevada and Placer County, residential values sit well above that second figure, which is why a trust remains the practical way for most couples here to keep the home out of probate altogether.

When to Get Legal Help

Unmarried couples do not need a more complicated estate plan than married couples. They need a more complete one, because none of the default rules run in their favor and nothing at all happens automatically.

It is worth getting advice when you own a home together or are about to buy one, when one partner has children from a prior relationship and the other does not, when either of you holds a retirement account or life insurance with a beneficiary form you have not reviewed in years, when you are weighing registered domestic partnership against staying unregistered, or when the arrangement between you has always been an understanding rather than a document.

Andrews Law Firm works with unmarried couples throughout Truckee, Tahoe City, and the Sierra Nevada region on wills, trusts, property agreements, and the incapacity documents that give a partner legal standing. If you have built a life together without the paperwork to match it, contact us to schedule a consultation.