Naming an Unmarried Partner as Beneficiary on a 401(k), IRA, and Life Insurance

Start here: are you single or still married?

Almost every article on this topic answers the wrong question. They are written about spousal consent, which assumes you are married and trying to leave your spouse out. But the person searching for how to name an unmarried partner is usually single. For that person, the answer is short and pleasant: yes, you can, nobody has to sign off, you just fill out the form.

So the first fork is about your legal status, not your partner's. Two branches, and they behave very differently.

• You are single (never married, divorced, or widowed). You can name your partner as the primary beneficiary on your 401(k), your IRA, and your life insurance with no consent from anyone. Your partner is never a default beneficiary, so the only thing standing between them and the money is a completed, filed form.
• You are still legally married to someone else (separated but not divorced, or married and choosing your partner instead). Now the rules bite. Your 401(k) makes your legal spouse the automatic beneficiary, and community-property states can hand your spouse a claim on IRAs and life insurance funded during the marriage.

The decision table for all three accounts

This is the part no competing page gives you: one view of all three asset types against your three possible situations. "RDP" means a registered domestic partner or civil-union partner in a state that recognizes it (California, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, and a few others).

401(k): the only account with a consent rule

A 401(k) is an ERISA plan, and ERISA is federal law. For a married participant, the plan must pay the full account balance to the surviving spouse at death unless the spouse consents to a different beneficiary. For a typical 401(k) (a defined-contribution plan paid as a lump sum, not a lifetime annuity), that rule lives in 26 U.S.C. 401(a)(11)(B)(iii): the plan is exempt from the annuity-survivor requirements only if the participant's whole vested balance goes to the surviving spouse on death, absent the spouse's consent to someone else. In plans that actually pay benefits as a life annuity (traditional pensions, money-purchase plans, or a 401(k) where you elect an annuity), the same protection takes the form of the qualified joint-and-survivor and preretirement-survivor annuity rules under 29 U.S.C. 1055. Either way, you cannot quietly name someone else while married.

To name your partner instead, your spouse has to consent in writing, and the mechanics are specific. Under 29 U.S.C. 1055(c)(2) the consent must acknowledge the effect of the election and be "witnessed by a plan representative or a notary public." The Treasury regulation, 26 CFR 1.401(a)-20 (Q&A-31), adds that the consent has to state the specific nonspouse beneficiary you are choosing, who then cannot be changed without further spousal consent unless the consent expressly allows it.

If you are single, none of that applies. There is no spouse, so there is no consent step. You log into the plan, name your partner as primary, and you are done. The IRS QPSA page spells out the same logic in plain language: the spouse is the default death beneficiary unless the participant and spouse consent in writing to waive it.

IRA: no federal consent, one state trap

Here is where a lot of writers conflate two different accounts. An IRA is not an ERISA plan. There is no federal spousal-consent requirement on an IRA. You can name your partner directly with the custodian, married or not, and no one has to sign anything.

The one real catch is community property. In the nine community-property states listed in IRS Publication 555 (Arizona, California, Idaho, Louisiana, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, Washington, Wisconsin), money your spouse contributed to an IRA during the marriage is partly owned by you, and vice versa. So if you are married and living in one of those states, your spouse can claim the marital portion of an IRA even if your partner is named on it. This only matters if you are still married. If you are single, there is no spouse to make the claim.

Life insurance: insurable interest and community funds

Life insurance is governed by state law, and as a rule you can name a partner with no trouble. Two real constraints are worth knowing, and both are smaller than people fear.

• Insurable interest at policy issue. When a policy is taken out, the beneficiary generally needs a stake in the insured person staying alive. A financially interdependent partner, shared rent, shared accounts, shared kids, almost always qualifies. State statutes set this, for example Texas Insurance Code Chapter 1103. Note this is tested at issue, not at your death, so once the policy is in force a later breakup does not void it.
• Community-property funds. If you are married and premiums were paid with marital money, your spouse may have a claim to half the death benefit in a community-property state, absent their consent. Read that precisely: the law does not require you to name your spouse. It just gives the spouse a property claim to part of the proceeds.

One more distinction: employer group life insurance can be ERISA-governed, while a policy you buy yourself is individual. Group plans may carry their own beneficiary procedures, so name your partner through the plan's process, not just on a sticky note to HR.

The age-gap test that saves the stretch

This is the single most useful fact on this page, and it appears on almost no consumer article in the search results. When your partner inherits a retirement account, how fast they have to drain it (and pay tax on it) turns on one number: the age gap between the two of you.

Under the SECURE Act, codified at 26 U.S.C. 401(a)(9)(E)(ii)(V) and explained in IRS Publication 590-B, an "eligible designated beneficiary" includes "an individual not described in any of the preceding subclauses who is not more than 10 years younger than the employee." An eligible designated beneficiary can stretch distributions over their own life expectancy. A partner who falls outside that window is a non-eligible designated beneficiary and gets hit with the 10-year rule instead.

And the 10-year rule is not a simple "do nothing for nine years, cash out in year ten." Under the 2024 final regulations, enforced from 2025, it depends on when you die. If you die before your required beginning date (April 1 of the year after you turn 73), your partner takes nothing required in years one through nine and must empty the account by the end of year ten. If you die on or after your required beginning date, your partner must take annual required distributions in years one through nine and empty it by year ten. Most stale pages miss this split entirely.

What your partner loses by not being a spouse

Naming your partner works. But it is worth being clear-eyed that, on retirement accounts and estate tax, a partner is treated less generously than a spouse would be. Three concrete gaps:

• No spousal rollover, ever. Only a surviving spouse can roll an inherited account into their own IRA and keep deferring. Publication 590-B is blunt: if you inherit a traditional IRA "from anyone other than your deceased spouse, you can't treat the inherited IRA as your own," which means no contributions and "you can't roll over any amounts into or out of the inherited IRA." Your partner names a beneficiary on the inherited account and draws it down. That is the ceiling of their options.
• No unlimited marital estate-tax deduction. Assets left to a spouse pass estate-tax-free under the marital deduction. A partner does not get that, so a large estate can owe federal estate tax that a married couple would have deferred. For sizable life insurance, some couples use an irrevocable life insurance trust (ILIT) so the proceeds sit outside the taxable estate. That is a lawyer conversation, not a form.
• The 10-year squeeze unless they pass the age test. Covered above. A more-than-10-years-younger partner loses the lifetime stretch a spouse would have kept.

None of this is a reason not to name your partner. It is a reason to name them directly on each account rather than routing the money through your estate. Naming a person preserves the designated-beneficiary treatment and the possible stretch. Leaving a retirement account to your estate is treated as having no designated beneficiary, which can force a faster payout (the five-year rule if you die before your required beginning date) and strip those options away.

The execution checklist

This is general information, not legal or tax advice, and the state-by-state pieces (community property, RDP recognition, insurable interest) genuinely differ. For a real plan, especially with a big estate or a large age gap, run it past an estate-planning attorney or a tax pro in your state. But the spine holds everywhere: file the form, mind the age gap, and know that the form, not your will, decides who gets the money.