My Partner Died Without a Will and We Were Not Married

That is the answer most people arrive here looking for, and it is worth stating plainly rather than burying it. If you were not married to your partner and there is no will, the Irish intestacy rules pass the estate to a fixed list of relatives. You are not on that list, no matter how many years you were together.

One term recurs throughout this article, so here it is up front. The grant of representation is the court document that gives a named person legal authority to deal with an estate. Where there is no will it is called a Grant of Administration. Almost every deadline on this page is measured from the date that document issues.

There is more to say than that, though, and some of it matters a great deal. You may have a court claim against the estate. Your children almost certainly inherit. Some assets never enter the estate at all. And there is a social welfare pension whose rules changed in your favour in 2025. This article covers each of those in turn.

Why an unmarried partner inherits nothing on intestacy

Intestacy is what happens when someone dies without a valid will. Part VI of the Succession Act 1965 sets out a fixed order of entitlement, and the personal representative — the person legally responsible for administering the estate — has no discretion to depart from it. The order is built on marriage, civil partnership, and the parent-child and wider family relationships the Act recognises, including legal adoption. It has no category for a partner.

One qualification to the second row. Where the survivor is a civil partner rather than a spouse, Section 67A(3) lets a child of the person who died apply to court for more than their one-third. Three conditions apply: the court must think it would be unjust not to order it, the child must not also be the civil partner's child, and the application must be made within six months of representation first being taken out. A spouse's two-thirds is not open to the same challenge.

A will would have changed this completely. Your partner could have left you everything. Two things would still have limited that. The first is the legal right share — the portion of an estate a will cannot take away from a spouse or civil partner — if your partner was still married to or in a civil partnership with someone else. The second is any claim a child of theirs might bring under Section 117 of the Succession Act 1965. The absence of a will is what removes you, not any judgement about your relationship.

Your children inherit — married or not

A child's inheritance rights in Ireland do not depend on whether their parents married. The Status of Children Act 1987 inserted Section 4A into the Succession Act 1965, so that relationships are deduced without regard to the parents' marital status. Your children stand in exactly the same position as children of a marriage.

Where your partner left no surviving spouse or civil partner, the children share the whole estate equally between them. Section 67B(2) adds one refinement: shares are equal only where all the children are in the same degree of relationship. If one of your children died before their parent, that child's own children take their parent's share between them — the estate is divided per stirpes, by branch of the family rather than by head.

Where a spouse from an earlier marriage survives, that spouse takes two-thirds and the children share one-third. Our guide to intestacy and children's rights sets out how those shares work.

The claim that is open to you: qualified cohabitant redress

A qualified cohabitant is an adult who lived with their partner as a couple, in an intimate and committed relationship, for a minimum period immediately before the relationship ended. This is the status that unlocks Part 15 of the Civil Partnership and Certain Rights and Obligations of Cohabitants Act 2010 — the cohabitant redress scheme.

What that scheme allows is an application to court for provision from your partner's estate — a share ordered by a judge, rather than one given to you by a will or by the intestacy rules.

The Act measures the qualifying period to the point the relationship ended, “whether through death or otherwise”. If you were still living together when your partner died, the relationship ended on the date of death and the period runs to that date. You do not have to have been married, engaged, or financially dependent for this test.

If the relationship had already ended before the death, the position is harder but not always hopeless. Section 194 blocks an application where the relationship ended two years or more before the death. That bar does not apply if you were in receipt of regular support from your ex-partner. It also does not apply if you went to court for financial provision within those two years, or to change an order you already had, and either the case was still running or the order had not yet been carried out when they died. Where the relationship ended before death, you must also show you were financially dependent on your partner. You must also not have remarried or entered a new civil partnership.

The six-month deadline runs from the grant, not the death

What a court can and cannot award

The court may make whatever provision it considers appropriate, if it is satisfied that proper provision was not made for you during your partner's lifetime. It weighs the interests of the beneficiaries of the estate alongside yours. There is no automatic entitlement and no fixed fraction.

Two ceilings apply. Your total provision cannot exceed the share you would have received had you and your partner been spouses or civil partners of each other. And an order under Section 194 cannot affect the legal right share of a surviving spouse — the “net estate” the court works from is what remains after any spousal or civil partner rights are met.

Assets that may never enter the estate

Not everything your partner owned passes under the intestacy rules. Where you and your partner held property as joint tenants, that property passes automatically to you as the surviving owner and does not form part of the estate at all. Citizens Information confirms this applies to cohabitants. Capital Acquisitions Tax may still be payable.

How a home is held therefore matters enormously. Joint tenancy carries a right of survivorship; a tenancy in common does not, so your partner's share would fall into the estate and pass to their relatives. If you do not know which applies, the deeds or the Land Registry folio will show it. Our guide to the family home after a death goes through this in more detail.

Some pension and life insurance benefits are also paid outside the estate, depending on the scheme rules and on whether your partner completed a nomination or expression of wish. This varies scheme by scheme, so it is worth writing to each provider rather than assuming. See our guide to pensions and life insurance after a death.

Inheritance tax: your threshold, and your children's

Capital Acquisitions Tax (CAT) is the Irish tax on gifts and inheritances. The tax-free threshold depends on your relationship to the person who died. A cohabiting partner falls into Group C — the same category as a stranger — while a child of the person who died falls into Group A.

The dwelling house exemption can also remove CAT on a home, but its conditions are strict. All of the following have to be met:

• The house was your partner's only or main home at the date of death.
• You lived there as your only or main home for the three years before the inheritance.
• You had no interest in any other house at the date of the inheritance, and you do not acquire an interest in another house from the same person between that date and the valuation date.
• You continue to live there for six years afterwards. Revenue relaxes this last condition if you are 65 or over, if your employment requires you to live elsewhere, or on certified mental or physical infirmity.

A child inheriting from a parent has a Group A threshold of €400,000, which is cumulative across all gifts and inheritances from either parent since 5 December 1991. Many estates fall entirely within it. Our guide to inheritance tax in Ireland sets out the thresholds and the filing obligations.

Who applies for the grant when a child under 18 is the only beneficiary

Where there is no will, someone has to take out a Grant of Administration before any asset can be collected or transferred. The Courts Service sets the priority: spouse or civil partner first, then a child, then the children of a child who had already died, then a parent, then brothers and sisters, and outwards from there. As an unmarried partner you have no place on that list either.

Where the person entitled is your child and they are under 18, the Courts Service is explicit: a guardian must be appointed to extract (take out) the grant on the child's behalf, and a Probate Officer's order is required. Order 79 of the Rules of the Superior Courts allows a grant to be made to the guardian of a child for that child's use, so the grant is taken for the minor's use and benefit.

If the child has no guardian named in a will and none appointed by a court or under the Guardianship of Infants Act 1964, one is assigned by order of the Court or the Probate Officer. That application rests on an affidavit — a sworn written statement — covering the value of the assets, the child's age, who the child lives with, and the proposed guardian's standing and willingness to act.

Are you a guardian of your own child?

A mother is automatically a guardian of her child. An unmarried father is not always. Under Section 2(4A) of the Guardianship of Infants Act 1964, an unmarried father is automatically a guardian where the parents have been cohabitants for at least 12 consecutive months falling after 18 January 2016, including at least three consecutive months after the birth during which both parents lived with the child.

Read that date carefully, because it catches long-established couples. If your 12 months of living together were entirely before 18 January 2016 — a child born years earlier, a household that has not changed since — this route does not apply to you and guardianship has to come from a statutory declaration or a court order instead.

If you are a surviving father who does not meet that test and never made a declaration or obtained an order, this needs to be sorted out before the grant can be applied for. It is a solvable problem, but not one to discover halfway through a probate application.

Will you need a solicitor?

Proving your child's parentage where the father is not on the birth certificate

Where the parents did not marry, the Succession Act contains a presumption that works against the child on a grant application. Section 27A provides that, for the purposes of a grant, the person who died is presumed not to have been survived by any person whose parents did not marry each other — unless the contrary is shown. The relationship has to be positively proved.

The starting document is the long-form birth certificate. The Courts Service title requirements for an intestate estate confirm that where the person who died was single and a child applies, a long-form birth certificate is the additional document required. It is the long form, not the short form, because it records both parents.

If the father's name is on the register of births, Section 46(3) of the Status of Children Act 1987 presumes he is the father unless the contrary is proved on the balance of probabilities. That presumption is usually enough. The difficulty arises only where the father was never registered.

The Bereaved Partner's Pension: a payment that opened to cohabitants in 2025

The Bereaved Partner's (Contributory) Pension sits outside probate entirely, which is why it is easy to miss. Since 21 July 2025, surviving qualified cohabitants have been eligible for it. It is the payment previously known as the Widow's, Widower's and Surviving Civil Partner's Contributory Pension.

For this payment, gov.ie treats you as a qualified cohabitant if you lived together as a couple in an intimate and committed relationship for two years where there are children of the relationship, or five years otherwise. Entitlement then depends on either your PRSI (social insurance) record or your partner's, and you must not be cohabiting with someone else.

Should you get professional help?

Estates like this typically do need professional input, and earlier than feels natural. Three of the things on this page are time-limited or court-supervised: the six-month window for a Section 194 application, a declaration of parentage if one is needed, and the Probate Officer's order appointing a guardian. None of them is quick to arrange from a standing start.

A solicitor experienced in intestate estates can usually tell you at a first meeting whether you are likely to be a qualified cohabitant, what the estate actually consists of once joint assets and pension benefits are stripped out, and whether an application is worth making. A tax advisor can confirm the CAT position for you and for your children, including whether the dwelling house exemption is in reach.

If you would rather understand the shape of the estate before you commit to anything, you can start with our free assessment, or call us on (01) 578 1570 if you would prefer to talk it through with someone first. There is no obligation either way, and we will tell you plainly if you do not need us.