Live-in agreement — the four tests that decide whether the law protects you at all, and what a document can honestly do

Is it legal? The short answer

Yes. Two adults who choose to live together have committed no offence, and no law requires them to justify the choice to anybody.

That settles the criminal question and leaves the civil one, which is where all the real difficulty sits: what rights, if any, does each partner have against the other, and against third parties like a landlord or a bank? The answer is not the same for every couple, and the rest of this page is about why.

What an agreement is not

Before anything else, it is worth being blunt about what this document does not do, because the internet is full of the opposite claim.

• It does not create a marriage. Marriage comes from a marriage — solemnised under a personal law or under the Special Marriage Act, 1954 — and nothing else.
• It does not give the status of spouse, and therefore does not give the rights that flow from that status, including inheritance as a spouse.
• It does not create protection under the Domestic Violence Act. That protection depends on whether the relationship satisfies the statutory test, which no private document can supply.
• It does not remove protection either. A clause saying a partner gives up her statutory rights is not enforceable.
• It is not a marriage certificate and no institution will treat it as one.

What it is is a contract between two competent adults about a shared household — the money, the property, the arrangements and the exit. That is a genuinely useful thing, and it is what a good agreement should be built around.

Section 2(f) and the phrase that matters

The whole of the protective law turns on five words in one definition.

Parliament did not define the phrase “relationship in the nature of marriage”, and for some years it was treated as covering any couple living together. The Supreme Court closed that reading. Some live-in relationships come within it and attract every protection the Act gives. Others do not come within it at all, and the Act simply does not apply to them.

So the first question in any dispute is never “what does the agreement say”. It is “is this a relationship in the nature of marriage”.

The four requirements

Take those four apart, because each one disqualifies real couples.

• Holding out to society. A relationship kept entirely private — from families, neighbours, colleagues — struggles on this requirement, however long and however committed it was.
• Legal age to marry. Straightforward, and rarely the problem.
• Otherwise qualified to marry, including being unmarried. This is the one that ends most claims, and it has its own section below.
• A significant period. There is no fixed number of years. It is assessed on the facts, and short or intermittent cohabitation does not qualify.

The eight indicators a court weighs

Three years later the Supreme Court returned to the subject and gave a working list of what to look at.

Two things follow, and they are the practical heart of this page.

First, the court is looking at how you actually lived, not at how you described it. Joint accounts, a shared tenancy, the way the household ran, whether you attended family functions together, whether people treated you as a couple — all of it is evidence.

Second, intention is one of the listed indicators. That is where a written agreement becomes genuinely relevant. A dated document in which both of you set out what you understood the relationship to be is direct evidence of intention, and it is far better evidence than either of you recalling it differently in a courtroom five years later.

Order a live-in agreement — free, pay after work

If one of you is already married

This is the most common factual situation we are asked about and the one with the least comfortable answer.

The Velusamy requirements include being otherwise qualified to enter into a legal marriage, including being unmarried. A person whose earlier marriage subsists is not so qualified. In Indra Sarma the Court considered a long relationship where the woman knew the man was married, and held that such a relationship does not ordinarily come within Section 2(f) — with the consequence that the protections of the Act were not available to her.

The Court was alive to the hardship of that outcome and said so; it observed that the legislature might consider the position of women in such relationships. But the law as it stands is the law as it stands, and anybody relying on a contrary impression picked up online is relying on something that is not true.

The presumption that cuts both ways

There is a long-standing rule that surprises couples on both sides of this subject.

Notice what that means for a couple who deliberately chose not to marry. Years of cohabitation, in which you referred to each other as husband and wife, were received as a married couple by both families, and were treated as married by neighbours and institutions, can produce exactly the presumption you did not intend.

This is the strongest practical argument for writing things down. If your intention is that this is not a marriage, say so, date it, and then behave consistently with it. If your intention is the opposite, the right answer is to marry rather than to rely on a presumption that somebody may later try to displace.

What protection actually looks like

Where the relationship does fall within Section 2(f), the Domestic Violence Act gives real remedies, and they are worth knowing about rather than discovering in a crisis.

The pattern is unmistakable: every one of them depends on the same threshold question. That is why this page spends so much of its length on Section 2(f) rather than on clause drafting.

Children

Whatever the position between the adults, the child is not the one who should carry the consequence, and Indian law has moved steadily in that direction.

• Maintenance is not conditional on the parents’ marriage. A father’s obligation to maintain his child does not depend on whether he married the mother.
• Legitimacy. Courts have treated children born of a long-term cohabitation, where the couple lived as husband and wife, as legitimate, and the statutory provision protecting children of void and voidable marriages works in the same direction.
• Property. The child’s position in the parents’ property is protected, though the precise extent depends on the nature of the property and the facts, and it is an area where the case law has developed considerably.
• Records. Register the birth properly and promptly, with both parents named where that is correct. Our birth certificate guide deals with registration, including delayed registration.

If there is a child, this stops being a documentation question and becomes one for an advocate on your specific facts. We will say so rather than draft around it.

Property and money — the real reason to write it down

Set aside the constitutional questions, and what actually destroys these relationships when they end is entirely mundane: who paid the deposit, whose name is on the lease, who bought the fridge, what happens to the joint account, and whether money one partner put into the other’s flat was a gift or a contribution.

None of that is answered by the law of relationships. It is answered by ordinary property and contract principles, and those work far better when there is a record.

Is the agreement enforceable?

The financial and property terms, ordinarily yes. It is a contract between competent adults for a lawful purpose, and there is no rule that makes agreements between cohabiting partners unenforceable.

The limit is Section 23 of the Contract Act, which makes the consideration or object of an agreement unlawful where it is forbidden by law, would defeat the provisions of any law, is fraudulent, or is regarded by a court as immoral or opposed to public policy. The practical effect is about how the document is framed. An agreement that reads as though cohabitation or a sexual relationship is the consideration is a document in trouble. An agreement that reads as two people organising a household — rent, ownership, expenses, exit — is a document that works.

That is a drafting distinction, not a cosmetic one, and it is one of the main reasons to have this drawn properly rather than downloaded.

Clauses that will not hold

Couples routinely ask for these, and we will tell you before we draft rather than after you rely on them.

• “She waives all rights under the Domestic Violence Act.” Statutory protection cannot be contracted away.
• “Neither party will claim maintenance for any child.” A child’s right is the child’s, not the parents’ to bargain with.
• “This relationship shall be deemed a marriage.” Deeming does not create status.
• “This relationship shall never be treated as a marriage in any proceeding.” You can record intention; you cannot bind a court on a question of fact.
• A penalty for leaving. Unenforceable and, in a personal relationship, unwise to write down at all.
• Anything conditioning money on sexual conduct. This is exactly what Section 23 is aimed at, and it can poison the whole agreement.
• “We are not bound by any law.” A sentence that impresses nobody and tells a court what the parties were trying to do.

What a properly drafted agreement contains

• The parties, fully identified, with a statement that both are adults and competent.
• A declaration of marital status — whether each is unmarried, divorced or widowed. This one line matters more than any other in the document, for the reasons set out above.
• The intention — what the two of you understand this relationship to be, whether you intend to marry, and whether you hold yourselves out as spouses.
• The residence — whose home it is, whose name the lease or title is in, and on what basis the other lives there.
• An opening schedule of what each person brings in, dated.
• The running arrangement — rent, bills, groceries, household help, and who pays what.
• Joint purchases and joint accounts, and how each is treated.
• Loans between you, recorded as loans rather than left ambiguous.
• Confidentiality and personal data, if either of you cares about it — photographs, messages, and what happens to them afterwards.
• The exit terms.
• Governing law and how a dispute is to be handled.
• Review — a date on which you will both look at it again, because circumstances change and a stale schedule is half the problem.

The exit clause — write it while you are happy

This is the clause nobody wants to discuss and the only one that ever gets used.

What it should answer: how much notice either person gives; who leaves the home and by when; what happens to the security deposit and to any advance rent; how the joint account is closed and the balance divided; how jointly bought possessions are divided, with a mechanism rather than a wish; what happens to money one partner put into the other’s property; and what each person may say publicly afterwards, if that matters to either of you.

The mechanism part is worth insisting on. “Shared items to be divided fairly” means nothing at the moment it is needed. “Either party may buy out the other’s share at the price in the schedule, failing which the item is sold and the proceeds divided in the stated ratio” is a clause that actually resolves something.

Stamping, notarisation and registration

A live-in agreement is an agreement and is chargeable with stamp duty. An instrument that is not duly stamped cannot be admitted in evidence or acted upon — which is a total defeat for a document whose entire purpose is to settle an argument one day. The duty on an ordinary agreement is small; our e-stamp paper guide explains how it works and what the penalty is for getting it wrong.

Notarisation is what most couples do and it is inexpensive. We handle it through our notary attestation service, usually in the same visit.

Registration is not required, and an ordinary live-in agreement is not registrable — unless it creates an interest in immovable property, in which case the position changes and you should tell us, because then registration genuinely has to be considered.

Do you have to register the relationship?

In Delhi, no. There is no requirement to register a live-in relationship, and nobody can demand that you do.

The position is not uniform across the country. Uttarakhand has enacted a Uniform Civil Code which, among other things, requires live-in relationships in that State to be registered and provides consequences for failing to do so. That is State-specific law and it does not apply in Delhi. If you live in, or are moving to, a State that has enacted such a requirement, check the current position there rather than assuming the Delhi position travels with you.

We mention it because couples who read a headline about registration frequently assume it applies everywhere. It does not.

Where the document is actually useful

Leaving the courtroom aside entirely, there are ordinary situations where a signed, stamped document naming both of you does real work.

• Renting. Landlords and societies ask who will live in the flat. A document is a better answer than an argument, and it lets both names go on the agreement properly. Our rent agreement guide covers the tenancy side.
• Hospitals. Who may be informed, who may consent, who may be present. Worth thinking about before it is urgent.
• Banks and joint accounts. A written basis for how the account is operated.
• Insurance and nominations. A nomination is not inheritance, as our indemnity bond guide explains — if you intend a partner to receive something, the instrument for that is a will.
• Families. Sometimes the most useful function of the document is simply that two people have thought it through and written it down.

Live-in or marriage — an honest comparison

We register marriages for a living, so we will say this carefully: this is your decision, not ours, and we are not going to tell you what to do with your life. What we can do is set out what each one gives you, without the sales pitch.

If the answer for you is marriage, our court marriage guide sets out the actual process, and the Special Marriage Act guide covers the inter-faith route including the notice period. If it is a live-in with a document, this page is that.

Where these go wrong

• Assuming every live-in relationship is protected. Four requirements decide it, and plenty of couples do not satisfy them.
• Not dealing with an existing marriage. The commonest reason a claim fails, and no document repairs it.
• Downloading a template. The financial clauses are the whole value, and templates have none that fit your facts.
• Waiver clauses. They do not work, and they make the rest of the document look worse.
• Framing the document around the relationship rather than the household. Section 23 is aimed at exactly that.
• Writing it and then living differently. Courts look at conduct; a document contradicted by the facts helps nobody.
• No opening schedule. Two years later, nobody agrees on who brought what.
• No exit clause. The only clause that ever gets used.
• Leaving it unstamped. An agreement that cannot be produced in evidence is not an agreement worth having.
• Forgetting the will. A partner inherits nothing automatically. Nothing.

Time and cost

The drafting takes 1 – 2 days. What takes longer, and matters more, is the conversation beforehand: what the two of you actually want this document to do, what the financial position really is, and whether either of you is expecting the document to achieve something it cannot.

We draft for both partners together, and we will tell you when a clause one of you wants is one the other should think about. Nothing is payable in advance — placing the order is free and payment comes after the work is done.