What happens to your partner

Written by Greg Berryman. Sources last checked 7 August 2026.

Most of this site is about what happens to you. This page is about what happens to the person you live with.

Thai law does not ask who is in the bed. It asks one question: is the marriage registered. If the answer is no, then however long you have been together, whatever you own together, whatever you both intended, your partner is a stranger to every process that follows.

What does your partner inherit?

Nothing.

Thai law does not recognise cohabitation or common-law marriage. An estate passes to statutory heirs in a fixed order: descendants, parents, full siblings, half siblings, grandparents, then uncles and aunts. A registered spouse sits alongside whichever class qualifies. An unregistered partner appears nowhere on that list.

A will changes this, and it is the main reason to make one. See what a Thai will does and does not cover.

Can your partner collect your body?

Probably not, without written authority from someone else.

Before a hospital releases a body, it needs a letter from your embassy. Each embassy issues that letter only to a person it recognises as next of kin, or to someone holding that person's written authorisation. Under the UK definition, next of kin means a spouse, a child over 20, or a parent. Your partner of fifteen years is none of those. A brother you have not spoken to in a decade is.

The routes for each nationality are on the embassy letter that releases the body.

Will your partner get the death certificate?

Only if your partner is the one who registers the death.

The district office issues one original, to whoever reports it. That may be a hospital administrator, a funeral director, or a relative who arrived first. Every bank, insurer, land office and foreign probate registry will then ask to see a document your partner does not hold and cannot easily replace. See the Thai death certificate.

What if you do not die, but lose capacity?

Worse, because nothing ends.

Your bank account freezes and nobody can operate it. Rent, utilities, insurance and care costs keep falling due. Your partner pays them out of their own money while applying to a court to be appointed your guardian, which takes two petitions, two hearings and at least three months, and which the court may decide in favour of a relative living abroad instead.

A guardian, once appointed, can also decide who is allowed contact with you. See guardianship and curatorship in Thailand.

Does it matter which of you is Thai?

Not to the law. It changes which problems land where.

If your partner is Thai and you are not, your partner is the only person in the room who can speak to the amphur, the police and the hospital, and simultaneously the person no embassy will deal with. The capability and the standing sit in the same person and point in opposite directions.

If you are Thai and your partner is not, your partner has neither. No language, no standing, and a family who may not want them present at all.

If neither of you is Thai, neither of you can navigate the system, and one event can remove the only person who understood the arrangements.

Same-sex couples have been able to register a marriage in Thailand since 23 January 2025. That changes the answer to every question on this page for couples who register, and changes nothing for couples who do not. Note that most guidance published before that date is now wrong.

What actually fixes this?

In order of how much they achieve.

• Marriage. It resolves more of this, more cheaply, than any set of documents. Available to same-sex couples since January 2025. If it is available to you and acceptable to you, nothing else on this list comes close.
• A professionally drafted Thai will. Inexpensive, and the only thing that puts your partner in the inheritance at all.
• Written authority, prepared now. The US Embassy states it can produce a letter of instruction on receipt of written guidance in the form of a legal will or a signed statement. The Dutch government advises unmarried people who want their remains released to their partner to have a Thai law firm draw up a will or statement to that effect.
• Deciding who registers your death, and telling them. Costs nothing. Determines who holds the only original certificate.
• An inventory of what exists and where it is. No legal force. Removes weeks of guessing.
• Telling your partner all of this. The cheapest and least used intervention on the list. A partner who expects a three-month court process behaves very differently from one who discovers it at a hospital desk.

What cannot be fixed

No document you write gives an unmarried partner a legal right that Thai law withholds. Anyone selling you one is selling false comfort, in the one situation where false comfort does the most damage.

What you can do is make sure your partner is not finding all of this out on the worst day of their life.