Most people who build wealth before they marry assume it stays theirs. In England and Wales that assumption has always been shakier than it looks. The law on dividing assets at the end of a marriage is still the Matrimonial Causes Act 1973, interpreted through fifty years of case law, and whether a pre-marital portfolio, an inheritance or a family business is shared or ring-fenced has depended as much on which judge heard the case as on any statutory rule.
That may be about to change. Between June and August 2026 the Ministry of Justice ran a consultation called A fairer end to relationships, the broadest look at financial remedies on divorce in a generation. Responses are now being analysed and no Bill has been published. But the direction of travel is clear enough that anyone with significant assets, or about to marry into them, should understand what is on the table.
What the consultation proposes
The government has adopted what the Law Commission called a "codification-plus" model. The principles judges already apply, sharing and needs chief among them, would be written into statute rather than left to case law.
The headline for wealth holders is a statutory definition of matrimonial and non-matrimonial property. Matrimonial property, broadly what the couple built up together during the marriage, would be shared equally as a starting point. Non-matrimonial property, meaning assets owned before the marriage, inherited or received as gifts, would sit outside the sharing pot. It could still be reached to meet the other spouse’s needs, but only where matrimonial assets fall short.
That distinction is not new. It has been developing in the courts for two decades. What is new is the prospect of it being fixed in legislation, with the definitions drawn from the Supreme Court’s 2025 decision in Standish v Standish.
Why Standish matters
Standish involved roughly £80 million, most of it generated by the husband before the marriage. In 2017 he transferred the bulk of it to his wife as part of a tax-planning exercise, intending it to be settled into trusts for the children. The trusts were never set up, the marriage ended, and the wife argued that the transfer had made the money matrimonial.
The Supreme Court disagreed. The source of an asset, not whose name it sits in, decides whether it is matrimonial. Moving money between spouses for tax reasons does not by itself convert it into shared property. Only where the couple treat an asset as genuinely theirs together over time does it become "matrimonialised".
Codifying that reasoning would give people with pre-marital wealth considerably more certainty than they have today. It also raises practical questions the consultation did not fully answer. Who bears the burden of proving an asset is non-matrimonial? How is the pre-marital element of a business valued when it has grown tenfold during the marriage? Those arguments will not disappear; they will simply move from case law to statutory interpretation.
Nuptial agreements with teeth
The second proposal of direct relevance to anyone with assets is the introduction of qualifying nuptial agreements. Pre-nups are already given significant weight by English courts where they were entered freely, with full disclosure and proper advice, and where enforcing them would not leave one spouse in real need. But the court keeps the final say.
The consultation proposes a category of agreement that would be binding, provided it meets set formal requirements and does not deprive either party of what they need. For couples bringing unequal wealth into a marriage, that would be the most significant shift in decades. Anyone with complex finances facing divorce in England, or marrying with significant assets already in place, has a clear interest in how those formal requirements are eventually drawn.
What to do while the law is in flux
Nothing has changed yet. Anyone divorcing today is dealt with under the existing framework, and any new Act is unlikely to apply retrospectively to cases already under way.
But the reform agenda does affect decisions being made now. A pre-nup signed under the current rules, done properly, is already persuasive; if the reforms pass, an agreement that meets the new formalities could become binding. Keeping pre-marital assets separately held and documented, rather than pooled into joint accounts or used to fund a shared home, preserves the argument that they are non-matrimonial under both current law and the proposed statute. And where wealth has been moved between spouses for tax or estate planning, the paperwork recording why it was moved may turn out to matter a great deal.
The full consultation document is published on GOV.UK. A government response is expected in due course; until then, the uncertainty the reforms are designed to remove is still very much in place.
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