James Riby comments in Today’s Family Lawyer about family, household, and cohabitation trends in the UK

The UK government is facing increasing calls to reform cohabitation laws. Newly published Office for National Statistics (ONS) data on family and household types in the UK sheds light onto the importance of ensuring cohabitees have valid legal rights.

The figures show a continued rise in cohabitation and an increase in lone parents living with adult children. In 2025, there were 29 million households in the UK, with 66.8% made up of one family unit, such as a couple with or without children, or a lone parent with at least one child. Around 8.6 million people, representing 29.5% of households, lived alone—broadly unchanged from a decade earlier. However, nearly half of those living alone were aged 65 or over, up from 46.9% in 2015.

While married families remain the largest household group, their share has declined slightly over the past decade as other family types have increased. Married couples accounted for 66.6% of families in 2015, compared with 65.3% in 2025. Over the same period, cohabiting-couple families rose by 17%, reaching 3.5 million in 2025 and accounting for 17.6% of all families.

James Riby, Partner in our Family team, comments in Today's Family Lawyer:

The Law Commission first made detailed reform proposals nearly 20 years ago, in July 2007. These latest numbers therefore suggest that not only have we left a generation of cohabitees without adequate rights, but the government is fast running out of time to secure the position of the ever growing number of cohabiting families, and those newly formed families still don’t know what if any new system will apply to them.

It is also interesting to contrast these figures with the stated aspirations of Gen Z adults our firm surveyed last year as part of an independent study into wealth and relationship aspirations of GenZ adults (aged 18-27). Perhaps surprisingly, the survey showed that 75% of GenZ adults aspired to marriage, so perhaps we will see an upturn in the curve again in the years ahead.

Early indications of the focus of reforms are that it will aim to bring consistency and fairness across marriage, civil partnerships and cohabitation, addressing the long-standing weaknesses in the rights of cohabitants and, on the other hand, perhaps also bringing more autonomy and certainty to the outcome on divorce.

Read the full article in Today's Family Lawyer here.