Updated August 6, 2026. Quick answer: the beneficiary form is the one part of the system that treats an unmarried partner exactly like a spouse — it pays whoever is named on it, and nobody has to approve your choice. It is also the only part, which is why it carries more weight for partners than it does for married couples. What it cannot do is give your partner a spouse’s tax treatment after you die.
The consent rule runs the other way
Federal law makes a married participant ask permission. Under ERISA §205 (29 U.S.C. §1055), a married worker in most employer plans generally cannot name someone other than their spouse without the spouse’s written consent. The statute contemplates participants who have no spouse, and for them no consent requirement applies at all.
So an unmarried participant may name a partner for the whole account, and no one has to sign anything. Read that in both directions, because both are true: you have complete freedom to name your partner, and your partner has no claim whatsoever if you do not. A spouse left off the form has a statute to point at. A partner left off the form has nothing. The same rule that gives you the freedom removes their protection, and the designation form is the entire difference.
This is the practical reason a beneficiary audit matters more here than anywhere else. The forms outrank your will — see which document controls when the two disagree — and an old form naming a parent or an ex is not corrected by anything you write later.
Where your partner is not treated like a spouse
The form pays out. What happens next is where marital status returns.
A surviving spouse can treat an inherited IRA as their own. An unmarried partner cannot, because that option is written for spouses. Instead the partner is a designated beneficiary and, in most cases, must empty the account within ten years. IRC §401(a)(9)(E)(ii) lists the beneficiaries who escape that rule — a surviving spouse, a minor child of the employee, a disabled individual, a chronically ill individual, and an individual not more than 10 years younger than the employee — and §401(a)(9)(H) applies the ten-year rule to everyone else.
That fifth category is the one worth checking. It says nothing about marriage. A partner within ten years of your age is an eligible designated beneficiary and can take distributions over their own life expectancy, exactly as a spouse’s alternative would allow. A partner fifteen years younger cannot. For couples close in age — which describes most older couples — the harshest version of this rule simply does not apply, and a great deal of writing on the subject never mentions it.
Where the ten-year rule does apply, the mechanics are the same ones every non-spouse beneficiary faces: whether annual withdrawals are required inside the ten years, and how the Roth version differs.
Accounts that take a beneficiary, and accounts that do not
Retirement accounts, life insurance, and annuities all pay by designation. Bank and brokerage accounts can be made to, through a payable-on-death or transfer-on-death registration — and a POD registration is the cheapest protection available to an unmarried couple, because it costs nothing and skips probate entirely. Naming several POD beneficiaries also multiplies FDIC coverage, which is a separate benefit worth having.
Real estate does not take a beneficiary form, but many states offer the equivalent: a transfer-on-death deed, which works the same way and is indifferent to whether you are married. Personal property, and anything you forget, passes under your will — and if there is no will, under the intestacy statute, which is where an unmarried partner receives nothing.
Name a contingent beneficiary on every form. If the primary beneficiary dies first and no contingent is named, the account usually falls back to your estate, and an estate as beneficiary is the worst outcome available — it loses the ten-year rule for something shorter.
Sources
ERISA §205 at 29 U.S.C. §1055, and IRC §401(a)(9)(E)(ii) and §401(a)(9)(H), all read at the Legal Information Institute on 2026-08-06.
Honest gap: the rule that a surviving spouse may roll an inherited IRA into their own is long-settled and is not in dispute, but we have not verified a pinpoint statutory citation for it to our own standard, so we do not print one here. The consequence for an unmarried partner — designated-beneficiary treatment under §401(a)(9) — is cited above and is the part that governs.
See methodology and corrections. General information about published statutes, not legal advice. No affiliate links, nothing sold.
If the will is what is missing rather than the designation, the order the law applies is the whole story — what happens when a partner dies without one.
Life insurance adds a requirement the accounts above do not have: insurable interest — the person taking out the policy must have a genuine stake in the insured continuing to live, tested when the policy is issued rather than when it pays.