Common law marriage in California keeps rearing its head… but it’s not on.

Common law marriage is legal terminology often wrongly adopted by people involved in marriages without formalities to ‘make things easier’. Come the legal crunch – a split, death or financial dispute for instance – and their world comes tumbling down.

Living together does not mean you have a common law marriage. For a start, only a few states in the United States recognize common law marriages, and each of those has its own regulations. They vary widely, but what they have in common is strict requirements that have to be met for common law marriages to be considered valid.

In California it’s simple – there is no such thing as legally recognized [tag]common law marriage in California[/tag].

Laws are constantly changing, but the number of US States that recognize common law marriages is shrinking – 14 that recognized them prior to 1997 no longer do, and Pennsylvania became the 15th in 2005.

Currently, the only states that do recognize common law marriage are Alabama, Colorado, District of Columbia, Iowa, Kansas, Montana, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas, and Utah, plus New Hampshire and Tennessee for inheritance only.

In general, the requirements in those states include cohabitation and an intention to formally marry.

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