Updated August 6, 2026. Quick answer: in most states you inherit nothing — not a reduced share, not a share behind the children. The exception matters and we state it up front: if you are a REGISTERED domestic partner or civil union partner, several states give you the share a spouse takes. California’s Fam. Code §297.5 is the clearest, and Hawaii’s reciprocal beneficiaries and other civil-union states have their own versions — which states register these statuses and what each confers. Unregistered, the sentence below is the rule. Intestacy statutes distribute to a surviving spouse, then to descendants, then to parents, then to siblings and more distant blood relatives. An unmarried partner appears nowhere in that order, and there is no version of it in which length of relationship is a factor.
Who does inherit
The estate goes to relatives in a statutory order, and if none can be found it escheats to the state. Even the state ranks ahead of you. The mechanics of that order, and the way it varies, are on the intestacy page; the point here is only that no branch of it reaches a partner.
You are also unlikely to be the person administering the estate. Priority to serve as administrator generally follows the same relationship ladder, so the person deciding what happens to your shared home is typically the relative who inherits it — often someone with no reason to accommodate you and, occasionally, a reason not to.
The house, which is usually the whole problem
Everything turns on the deed, and the deed was settled long before anyone died.
If you owned it as joint tenants with right of survivorship, it is already yours. Survivorship operates outside the estate and intestacy never touches it. This is the single most valuable protection an unmarried couple can have, and it is one line of a document.
If you owned it as tenants in common, their share has just passed to their relatives, and you are now co-owner with them. They can ask a court to partition it, which in practice means a forced sale. If the house was in their name alone, you have no ownership interest at all — whatever you contributed to the mortgage — and you may be there as an occupant with no right to stay. How the titling decision works, before it has to be made in a hurry.
What still comes to you, and why
Not everything passes through the estate, and the exceptions are where surviving partners usually find whatever they do receive. They all have one thing in common: a form was filled in.
- Life insurance, retirement accounts and annuities pay the named beneficiary directly. Intestacy is irrelevant to them — and a partner can be named without anyone ’s consent.
- Payable-on-death and transfer-on-death registrations on bank and brokerage accounts pass outside the estate the same way.
- Property held in joint tenancy, as above, including jointly titled vehicles and joint accounts.
- A transfer-on-death deed, where the state allows one and it was recorded in time — how they work.
What does not survive: your right to make decisions in the days before death, which needed a directive, and any Social Security survivor benefit — which is generally unavailable to an unmarried partner, though a registered status can open a route in some states.
If this has already happened
Three things are worth doing quickly, and none of them is a lawsuit.
Find the beneficiary designations before anything else — on the retirement accounts, the life insurance, the bank accounts. They pay regardless of the will and regardless of the family, and they are frequently the only thing that does. Pull the recorded deed from the county recorder rather than relying on memory of what was signed at closing; the words on it decide the house. And establish whether your state recognised a common-law marriage and whether you met its requirements, because if you did, none of this page applies to you — you are a surviving spouse, with an intestate share, an elective share and a Social Security survivor benefit.
That last one is genuinely worth checking rather than dismissing. It is the only route by which an unmarried-seeming couple turns out to have been married all along.
The document that prevents all of this
Nothing on this page happens if there is a valid will. It is the single point of failure described above, and it is the one that can be closed this week rather than argued about later.
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Sources
This page summarises the state-by-state material on intestacy and the deed and beneficiary pages linked above, each of which carries its own statutory citations. The Social Security position is cited on its own page from 20 C.F.R. §404.330 and related regulations. Read 2026-08-06.
Honest gap: intestacy orders differ between states in their details, and this page states only the part that is common to all of them — that no branch reaches an unmarried partner. For the specific order where you live, start from the intestacy page above.
See methodology and corrections. General information about published statutes, not legal advice.