Updated August 6, 2026. Quick answer: we have documented the default inheritance rules for all fifty-one jurisdictions on this site. None of them reach an UNREGISTERED unmarried partner. No intestate share, no elective share, no survivor benefit, no automatic authority of any kind, at any length of relationship. The exception is registration: in the states that still register domestic partnerships or civil unions, the status can carry a spouse’s intestate share — California’s Fam. Code §297.5 is the clearest — and it is the cheapest fix in this whole wing where it is available. Which states register these statuses, and what each confers. Married couples get a plan by operation of law and can improve it with documents. You get nothing by operation of law, so the documents are not the improvement — they are the entire plan.
What “no defaults” actually means
It is worth being concrete, because the phrase sounds like a technicality and is not. If you died tonight without documents, your partner would have: no claim on your estate under the intestacy statute, which distributes to spouses, descendants and blood relatives; no right to override your will if it left them out, which is what a spouse’s elective share does; no Social Security survivor benefit at any age; no authority to make a medical decision; and no automatic right to the home you shared unless the deed already says so.
There is no common-law-marriage safety net either, in most places. A handful of states still recognise one, and where they do it changes the answer to nearly everything on this page — which is why it is worth knowing rather than assuming. Everywhere else, thirty years of shared life is legally the same as thirty days.
The good news is that this is a solvable problem, and unusually, it is solvable by paperwork alone. There is no negotiation, no waiting period, and no state permission involved. The list below is the whole of it.
The five things, in the order they fail
Ordered by what causes the most damage soonest if it is missing.
- A health care directive naming your partner. First because it is the one that bites while you are alive, and because state default lists put an unmarried partner last or nowhere — where partners actually fall on those lists, and the execution rules by state.
- A financial power of attorney. Without one, nobody can pay your mortgage or deal with your bank if you are incapacitated, and the fallback is a court proceeding your partner may not even be able to start.
- Beneficiary designations, reviewed. The cheapest and most powerful item here: the forms pay whoever is named, they outrank your will, and an unmarried participant can name a partner freely because the spousal-consent rule does not apply to you. An old form naming a parent is the most common single failure in this whole area.
- A will. Everything not covered by a designation or a deed passes under it, and without one that property goes to your relatives. It has to be executed correctly to work at all — the requirements by state.
- The deed, and payable-on-death registrations. How the house is titled decides who owns it far more directly than any will does — joint tenancy versus tenancy in common for partners — and a POD registration on a bank account costs nothing and skips probate entirely.
Notice that three of the five are free. The designations, the POD registrations and the deed language cost nothing but attention, and between them they usually move more money than the will does.
Where documents cannot fix it
Two things stay broken however good the paperwork is, and knowing which is which stops you buying the wrong solution.
The federal transfer taxes have no partner version. The unlimited marital deduction at IRC §2056 applies only to property passing “to his surviving spouse”, and portability of the unused exclusion under §2010(c) runs only between spouses — it is not automatic even for them. For most people this is theoretical against a $15,000,000 exclusion for 2026, but it is absolute where it bites.
State inheritance tax can hit your partner at the stranger rate, because these taxes are graded by relationship and you have none. Five states still levy one, and in two of them registering a status fixes it entirely — which states, and what registration does. And retirement accounts pass to a partner as a non-spouse beneficiary, usually on a ten-year clock, with one age-based exception worth checking.
The first document on the list
Everything above depends on a valid will doing the work that marriage would otherwise do by default. It is the one item that has no free substitute and no automatic fallback, and for an unmarried couple it is the difference between a plan and nothing.
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Sources
IRC §§2056 and 2010(c) at the Legal Information Institute, read 2026-08-06; the 2026 basic exclusion amount from Rev. Proc. 2025-32 §4.14. The state-level statements on this page are summaries of the state pages linked above, each of which carries its own citations.
Honest gap: which states still recognise common-law marriage is a question this page raises and does not answer. It changes the outcome of nearly every item above, so treat it as the first thing to establish rather than something to assume either way.
See methodology and corrections. General information about published statutes, not legal advice.
Where the relationship is not recognised the same way everywhere, the plan has to carry more of the weight — what to get in writing, and why the documents do the work.