To wonder why there isn’t public outrage about this?

[Blusterylimp]

If a couple isn’t married but own their property between them, the surviving one will need to pay inheritance tax on their partners half of the house (and other assets) if they die.
Effectively they will lose their home to pay the IHT unless they also have huge savings.
How can that be allowed in this day and age when so many couples cohabit without getting married?

I know, I just ignored that rude post!

I think you could see a solicitor and get your Wills drafted so that you benefit from the NRB and RNRB using a trust in your Wills. At least that would help a bit. It's not the full spousal exemption obviously and it is a complication but it's something.

I still can't get my head around so many women trying to insist marriage is a good deal for other women. The huge amounts of unpaid labour, increased risk of violence and murder, earlier death for married women, increased risk of illness such as heart disease for married women, married women earn 10-20% less... I get it if you don't have a pot and the guy is minted, but if you start out equal or the woman has more money, the only benefit of marriage for women is actually for their kids as you can leave more in IHT.

@Blusterylimp my comprehension skills really aren't lacking, but maybe yours are? We're all listening to your point, it's just very few posters agree with it. Here's why - I'll try going slowly & without being rude:

"I don’t think it should be relevant how privileged or affluent we are."

Obviously you're welcome to think what you like. Sadly (for you) UK tax code is such that if someone has £325 to their name when they die, they can give it to whoever they like & no tax is deducted. Same at £3.25k, same at £32.5k, same at £325k - the latter of which is QUITE a lot of money, by any reckoning. After that tax is due.

"A lot of posters have incorrectly assumed that owning the property as joint tenants protects from IHT at the death of the first person in the couple."

Yeah, they keep getting corrected though don't they, so there is value to your thread!

"There is no reason why that shouldn’t be the case for cohabiting couples who own a property as joint tenants as that would protect their home on the first death."

Actually, this is your fundamental poor assumption. There are MANY, MANY, co-habiting couples in situations completely different from yours, who very much WOULDN'T want the value of their jointly held property to be assumed to go to their partner with an additional nil-rate IHT allowance. Maybe they have children by a different partner? Maybe they want it to go to a charity? Maybe they want it to go to their fancy piece round the corner? The additional nil-rate primary property IHT allowance for spouses/civil partners is wrapped up with the laws of intestacy. So if you die with no valid will, all assets default to the legal partner - or otherwise to children/parents/sibling in that order.

Many, many people CATEGORICALLY do not want a co-habiting partner to be prioritised above blood relatives (usually because of children from earlier partners). Therefore in the UK there is NO presumed time period or circumstances for a co-habiting arrangement to result in transfer of property to the co-habitee upon dying intestate. Therefore there is ALSO no additional nil-rate primary property IHT band available. (We all understand this is the part that makes you sad because it means a bigger tax bill on death).

"They would still pay IHT on any other assets so the differentiation between them and married and civil partners would still exist but their home would be safe until the second death."

Great. Under the IHT @Blusterylimp amendment Act 2025, this would suit your circumstances perfectly. The vast majority of people are comfortable that we don't need to start pulling the tax code apart at the seams to codify why or when a co-habiting partnership becomes serious enough to receive an additional nil-rate IHT allowance.

This is because there is an existing process for this which takes less than 2 hours of anyone's time, and under £200 to do.

Therefore we don't need volumes of new tax code defining when a partnership does or doesn't become worthy of the additional allowance. We have a VERY clear opt-in system, which is no hassle at all and doesn't require months of MPs debating time to adjust. (This is called Civil Partnership.)

"I don’t understand what the objection would be to this."

See above. Also, I'd rather our MPs got on with more pressing stuff. I suspect most taxpayers would.

"I feel like I’m saying the same thing over and over and the replies don’t address my point."

They do address your points, as broken down above. You just don't like the answers. It's different, bad luck.

Oh dear @MeandT you have just proved my point that your comprehension skills are indeed sadly lacking. Go back and try again,

Those downsides (other than the one about women who are higher earners) are associated with women being in couples with men. They're not created by marriage. Unmarried cohabiting women typically do the lion(ess)'s share of the housework, childcare etc too...

Comparing the potential downsides to women of marriage versus remaining single (which is basically what your post is about) is a separate matter.

It's probably because you're not making the right comparison. Married women are worse off than unmarried by various metrics, but the relevant comparison for a woman in a serious relationship is between married and unmarried cohabitation. There's no evidence afaik that unmarried cohabiting women do better than married ones in the areas you mention, and given that the median woman is worse off than the median man, the cohabitants are doing the same shit without the legal protections.

I understand arguments for staying single and not living with a partner on the basis of the stats you mention. But that's not what this thread is about.

"...the really rich plan not to pay it whereas the middle class don’t"

I hear this repeated so often but that really isn't true. The "rich", generally speaking, do end up paying a lot of IHT.

A quick question here, who exactly do you mean by "...the really rich"? (Serious question btw)

Who exactly are the "middle class" anyway?

Well, median income for a full time worker in 2024 was £37,400. (so this really is the "middle" income for a full time worker).

Let's say that this person left an estate worth £550k. HMRC say that, of people leaving this much money, 81% didn't pay any IHT at all and of those 19% that did pay IHT they paid on average 10% of their entire estate.
.

In contrast, from the HMRC data (which covers 2021-22) it shows that the largest estates, with an average net value of £19.5 million paid on average £3.9 million in IHT.

That is 20% of the total value. So, quite a bit less than the roughly 40% you would expect. So it shows that, yes, they are using means to pay less IHT but they're still paying a lot. (You would typically expect an estate worth £19.5 million to pay £7.4 million in IHT, so they're saving about half of it)

Moving down to those with estates between £2 million and £10 million they ended up paying on average 24% of the total value of their estate in IHT.

If you take a person with an estate worth £5 million then you would expect IHT to be typically either £1.6 million or £1.8 million. These people paid on average £1.46 million in IHT. So they were managing to save maybe a couple of hundred thousand.

Then move down to those estates worth £1 to £1.5 million. Here, around 23% of people didn't pay any IHT at all so they obviously managed to do something.

Of those that did pay tax, the average amount of the total was 13% or £155,000.
You would expect an estate worth, say, £1.2 million to pay either £80k or £280k in IHT so it looks like it was a mixture of single people and married people who were paying the IHT.

Then if you go down to estates worth £500-600k then only 19% of estates had to pay IHT at all, which would imply that for a lot of these people they are getting the £1 million allowance.

Of those that did pay IHT they paid on average 10% or £53k in tax

So, yes, this tax is hitting the "middle class" the most - if your definition of that is somebody who leaves an estate worth around £5 million.

Source: HMRC Inheritance Tax liabilities statistics Table 12.1

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/inheritance-tax-liabilities-statistics

Sorry, just to add to my previous post, now with the change in IHT rules around farms and family businesses there are a lot of quite wealthy families (and not so wealthy farmers) who are going to be hit by IHT in the future.

But I do certainly accept that the UK is a good place for the very rich indeed.

For example, if Jeff Bezos (Amazon) or Elon Musk (Tesla, Twitter) lived in the UK and they gifted their entire multi-billion fortune to some random person then there would be no tax to pay at all – on one condition. That they survived for seven years after making the gift.

Of course how wealthy you are is relevant to whether / how much you should be taxed! Are you even living in the same universe as the rest of us?

If you were in a lower value property with the exact same relationship / ownership situation then IHT wouldn’t apply. The relevance of your affluence is that even if IHT means you won’t be able to stay in this house you will certainly not be left unable to house yourself at all. Someone with less won’t have to pay IHT and can stay in their more modest house. So I’m satisfied that the “problem” you’re highlighting is unlikely to leave anyone in severe hardship and the tax law here is appropriately progressive.

There are reasons why cohabiting couples shouldn’t be exempt from IHT laws as very many previous posters have pointed out. They are addressing your points. You’re only repeating yourself because you refuse to acknowledge their very sensible arguments.

The main objections are that 1) the government should avoid having to define what is a relationship, it’s messy and invasive to do this 2) not everyone who lives together wants the arrangement you suggest so why should it be the default 3) no you can’t just assume every shared ownership or cohabitation is a relationship because there are lots of other reasons to jointly own property and it’s not always just two people jointly owning property 4) it’s not leaving you homeless or impoverished so there’s really no reason at all for the gov or anyone to be concerned about this “injustice” or want to prioritise making you even better off - actually there are obvious reasons why encouraging older single people out of large homes and taking some of that unearned value to support working age people and children is a really good thing for society 5) yes it makes a lot of sense for people who have opted in to a broad legal contract to have a particular arrangement here and no it makes no sense to be able to pick and choose the parts of that contract which are financially beneficial to you right now. If you want to be treated as a single unit for financial/ taxation / inheritance purposes, by all means legally declare yourselves a family and take all the consequences that come with that. If not, that’s fine and you will continue to be treated legally as two separate individuals, which is exactly what you are. It’s fair, it’s workable, and you’ve had this same answer in many forms here already.

You and your partner are adults. You have two perfectly reasonable options in front of you. Neither is apparently ideal, in your view, but both are reasonable. Stop whingeing and just decide which one works better for you.

Same goes for friends / siblings / cousins / parent-child duos / whatever who live together.

That's marriage: it carries all kinds of benefits that unmarried couples don't have. If you want the benefits of marriage, get married. YABU.

Paying IHT doesn't always require huge savings, anyway. If you're only just above the threshold for having to pay it, it might not be much at all.

You might not think of yourself as "exceptional", but to have assets of more than £1 million you certainly are in the top 5% or so.

Or perhaps being in the top 5% is just normal for you?

If you haven't "benefited" from house price inflation then you either had a huge deposit to put down on your £1 million house and/or you are earning enough to support a £800k - £900k mortgage at present rates.

Either way, you are incredibly well off and definitely living in a bubble if you don't understand this.

You can't get "the same protection as marriage" with a will. You can't get out of IHT, or have a lot of other rights / benefits that spouses have. Do they understand that?

You are mistaken. That won't work at all. The RNRB only applies when passing a property to a child or grandchild.

Yes correct. You can use your own RNRB as can your partner if you share children on your own half of the house. You can also use a trust for the NRB to benefit a partner. There are just ways of "fixing" the RNRB and removing the discretionary element and passing on the benefit by way of loans for example. Hence why it's good to consult a solicitor (rather than getting advice on mumsnet!)

"Oh dear @MeandT you have just proved my point that your comprehension skills are indeed sadly lacking. Go back and try again," Nope. Your turn now...

Spouse is defined in law. Civil partner is defined in law. Intestacy hierarchy is defined in law. Additional nil rate band for primary property is defined in law. This may legally pass to children, spouses, or civil partners.

People regularly avoid formalising their partnerships in order that their property and additional nil rate band passes to their own children.

You'd like a special rule to pass it to your partner just because. But the thing is, once you're dead, intestacy rules apply to your partner too. So the default situation is the double nil-rate band allowance would pass to the surviving partner's children, and the children of the first to die receive no additional estate benefit and no inheritance from the property. This is the default legal position from what you are proposing.

It sounds like neither of you have children, which would make it more straightforward for you.

But please go ahead and explain to all of us who have missed the point in 35 pages, what wording you would use in law to define a partner who you live with and DO want the advantage of additional nil-rate-band to go to, versus the hundreds of thousands of co-habiting partners with children who categorically do NOT want their additional nil rate band to be removed from their direct descendants as a result of sharing a house with someone else for a few years...

Go:

@Blusterylimp can I ask why you haven’t address or simply gotten an insurance policy to cover this?

there are certain parts of marriage that you an cherry pick but for me you cannot keep finances separate and expect the tax benefits of being married that really is cherry picking the best bits

and trying to create a notion of cohabiting for tax purposes is far to time consuming and costly and certainly not something I wish for my tax to go on - not when there are simple solutions with insurance or getting a civil partnership

Any house worth over £1m in the south east is still a very good home and yes, you are affluent.

Our house, in greater London, is worth substantially less, our combined salaries not much above average (husband is above, mine below), but I consider us pretty affluent due to the choices we have made.

"There are just ways of "fixing" the RNRB ... it's good to consult a solicitor"

I did just that following your comment last night. She explained how it is possible to do that. So yes, I'm sorry, I was wrong.

However, it is a complex way of dealing with things and there will only be some very particular circumstances where this would be of any real benefit compared with just leaving the RNRB to the surviving spouse.

Yes . Marriage much simpler from that perspective.

Precisely!

It's like wanting full time employment benefits from a company when you're self employed.

Got married in a Church with two witnesses and the Vicar. No party, no faff.

There are one too many forced marriages that take place in front of witnesses.

To think filling a marriage form online is a great idea beggars belief.