Sixty-eight percent of people in a serious or engaged relationship have no estate planning documents in place at all, a higher rate than divorced or widowed people, according to Trust & Will’s 2026 Estate Planning Report. Among all adults surveyed, only 26% have a will, 19% have a medical power of attorney, and just 11% have a financial power of attorney. For a married couple, those gaps are inconvenient. For an unmarried couple who has built a life together for years, they can be devastating, because marriage carries automatic legal protections that a decade of commitment simply does not.
The Legal Fiction of “We’re Basically Married”
Plenty of long-term partners describe themselves as functionally married, sharing a home, finances, and sometimes children, without ever making it official on paper. The law does not see it that way. If one partner is hospitalized and unable to speak for themselves, a partner without a healthcare proxy or medical power of attorney generally has no legal standing to make treatment decisions, even after ten years together. Trust & Will’s report is blunt about the exposure this creates, noting that “without a formal healthcare proxy or power of attorney, an unmarried partner has no legal authority to make medical decisions on your behalf in an emergency.” A spouse walks into that hospital room automatically. An unmarried partner may be asked to wait in the hallway while a court decides who speaks for the person they love.
What Happens Without a Will
Inheritance works the same painful way. In most states, if one partner dies without a will, assets pass to legal next of kin, which typically means parents, siblings, or children, not a longtime partner, regardless of how long the couple lived together or how intertwined their finances became. A partner could have co-signed a mortgage, raised children together, and merged every joint account, and still walk away with nothing if the other partner dies intestate and a will was never drafted. Charles Schwab’s own guidance for unmarried couples walks through exactly this gap, recommending a will, updated beneficiary designations, and powers of attorney as the bare minimum for any couple who has decided marriage is not part of their plan.
Why This Keeps Getting Overlooked
The reason so many committed couples skip this isn’t neglect so much as a trick of timing. Estate planning tends to get triggered by a legal milestone, a wedding, the birth of a child, the purchase of a first home with a spouse’s name on the deed. Unmarried couples reach many of those same life stages without the paperwork moment that usually forces the conversation. There is no city hall appointment that reminds you to update a beneficiary form when you’ve simply been together a long time. The result is a couple who feels every bit as bonded as a married one, protected by exactly none of the same legal scaffolding.
Cost is part of it too. A will and a set of powers of attorney can run a few hundred dollars through an attorney, which feels avoidable when everything in the relationship is going fine. That calculation only reveals itself as wrong at the worst possible moment, in an emergency room or a probate court, when the paperwork can no longer be fixed retroactively.
Closing the Gap Doesn’t Require a Wedding
None of this requires getting married if that isn’t where a couple wants to go. A will, a healthcare proxy, a durable power of attorney, and updated beneficiary designations on retirement accounts and life insurance can replicate most of what a marriage certificate provides automatically, and none of it takes more than a few appointments to put in place. What it does require is treating the relationship’s legal footing with the same seriousness the couple already brings to everything else, from splitting rent to planning a future. A decade of devotion means a great deal emotionally. Legally, in the eyes of a hospital or a probate judge, it can mean nothing at all until it’s written down.
The couples who close this gap successfully tend to treat it as a single afternoon’s project rather than an open-ended source of dread. An estate planning attorney can typically draft a basic will, healthcare proxy, and durable power of attorney in one consultation, and many states also allow simple beneficiary updates on retirement accounts and life insurance policies to be completed directly online in a matter of minutes. None of it demands the emotional weight of a wedding to justify doing it. It only demands acknowledging that the relationship is serious enough to deserve the same protection a marriage certificate would have handed over automatically.
