Others will have made a conscious choice not to get married at all. Some will not yet be ready for that next step. Some cohabiting couples will be saving to marry. That’s a massive benefit and it is not available to unmarried couples. What’s more, within a marriage the surviving spouse can also inherit their partner’s inheritance tax allowance, meaning they can leave £650,000-worth of cash and potentially £350,000-worth of property to their heirs tax-free. A married partner can leave everything to their surviving spouse with no tax to pay, whereas unmarried couples would benefit from the normal allowances, but after that they are likely to pay 40 per cent tax. Perhaps the biggest break for married couples comes from inheritance tax. They benefit from defined benefit pension death benefits, meaning they typically gain 50 per cent of a deceased spouse’s pension. On top of that, married couples can inherit their spouse’s ISA investments, without losing the tax-break on their cash. They can reduce their capital gains tax liability on assets held jointly by combining their gains allowance. Married couples can also share assets between them and take advantage of both personal tax allowances, personal savings allowances and dividend allowances. That means a potential saving of up to £230 a year. It allows a partner who doesn’t use their full personal tax-free allowance to transfer a chunk of it to their taxpaying partner – up to £1,150 in the current tax year. ![]() The most obvious benefit is the marriage allowance, a small but constant perk specifically designed to reward marriage over cohabitation. In fact, over a 50-year marriage, even after the cost of the wedding, in today’s money, the couple could be £190,964 better off.” Sarah Coles, personal finance analyst at the investment firm, explains: “The numerous tax benefits available to married couples means that even in cold financial terms, it may pay to tie the knot. Research from Hargreaves Lansdown shows that getting married, and staying married, can provide a pretty substantial bonus. It’s not just if a partner dies that cohabiting couples face a financial penalty. The ability to register a civil partnership would give the authorities no excuse not to recognise this large and growing group.” “It cannot be right that they pay the same tax and national insurance contributions into the system as their married counterparts but are entitled to get less out of it. Helen Morrissey, personal finance specialist at pensions and investment company Royal London, says: “With each passing year more and more people are choosing to live together as a couple without marrying, yet we still have a tax and benefit system which barely recognises their existence. Some commentators have suggested that if unmarried opposite-sex couples were allowed to enter civil partnerships rather than marriages then it might encourage them to do so, meaning they would gain the extra protections and rights. “Children themselves have no influence over whether their parents are married or not, so it seems harsh to deprive some of financial support following a parent’s death based on their parents’ marital status.”
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