On 2 July 2025 the Supreme Court gave judgment in Standish v Standish, the most significant decision on the division of money on divorce since Radmacher v Granatino in 2010. It is not a case about a prenup. It is a case about which assets a court shares on divorce and which it leaves with the partner who brought them in, and that is the question every prenup is written to answer. This guide sets out what happened, what the court decided, paragraph by paragraph, and what it means in practice for couples in England & Wales.
The facts
The husband, born in 1953, had made a fortune in banking and retired in 2007. The wife, born in 1967, was Australian. Their relationship began in 2003, they married in December 2005 and had two children, and almost all of the wealth in the case had been built up by the husband before the marriage. In 2017, as he was about to become deemed domiciled in the UK for inheritance tax, he transferred investment funds worth about £77.8 million into the wife's sole name. The purpose was tax planning: as a non-domiciled person she could hold the assets outside the UK inheritance tax net, and the plan was that she would settle them into trusts for the children. She never did. The assets, worth about £80 million by the time of the trial in 2022, stayed in her name, and when the marriage broke down she argued that the transfer had made them shared matrimonial property to be divided equally.
What the courts below decided
The trial judge held that the transfer had "matrimonialised" the assets, although their source still mattered, and awarded the wife £45 million, about a third of the total. The Court of Appeal disagreed. It held that the source of an asset, not whose name it is in, determines whether it is matrimonial, found that three quarters of the transferred funds remained non-matrimonial, and reduced the wife's share to about £25 million, half of the matrimonial property, with her needs to be assessed separately. The wife appealed to the Supreme Court, which dismissed the appeal and upheld the Court of Appeal's reasoning. The judgment was given by Lord Burrows and Lord Stephens, with Lord Reed, Lord Lloyd-Jones and Lady Simler agreeing.
The five points the Supreme Court settled
First, the categories. Non-matrimonial property is typically property brought into the marriage by one party, or acquired by one party through inheritance or gift from outside the marriage; matrimonial property is the wealth the couple built up during the marriage. The distinction turns on the source of the asset, not on title. Putting an asset into a spouse's name does not, by itself, change what it is.
Second, and this is the sentence the courts had previously avoided saying so plainly, the sharing principle applies only to matrimonial property and does not apply to non-matrimonial property at all. Sharing is the starting point that wealth generated by the marriage partnership is divided between the partners; it has no application to what one of them brought in or was given.
Third, the sharing of matrimonial property should normally be on an equal basis, though there can be justified departures.
Fourth, non-matrimonial property can become matrimonial, and the court set the test. What matters is how the parties have been dealing with the asset and whether that shows that, over time, they have been treating the asset as shared between them. The court adopted three examples given by the Court of Appeal in an earlier case: where the matrimonial property built up during the marriage has come to dwarf the original non-matrimonial contribution; where non-matrimonial property has been mixed with matrimonial property in a way that shows the contributor accepted it would be shared; and where non-matrimonial property has been put into the family home, which is treated as the central family asset.
Fifth, transfers made to save tax do not, without further compelling evidence, show that the parties are treating the asset as shared. On the facts, the 2017 transfer was made to save inheritance tax and for the benefit of the children rather than the wife, so there was no matrimonialisation; a benefit to the family, the court said, is not the same thing as a shared benefit between the spouses.
What Standish did not decide
The case was argued on sharing alone. The wife did not claim compensation for a career given up, and her needs were not before the Supreme Court; they were sent back to be assessed. So nothing in the judgment reduces the court's duty under section 25 of the Matrimonial Causes Act 1973 to consider each party's reasonable needs, with first consideration to any child under eighteen, and needs can still be met from non-matrimonial property where the shared assets are not enough. Nor did the case concern a prenup, the Law Commission's proposals for qualifying nuptial agreements, or conduct. It settled the boundary of sharing, and left the rest of the law where it was.
What it changes in practice
For most couples the ruling is a clarification rather than a revolution, but it is a valuable one. A property owned before the wedding, an inheritance received during the marriage, or a gift from parents starts as non-matrimonial and stays that way unless the couple's own conduct shows they treated it as shared. Keeping such an asset in the recipient's name, outside the joint account and away from the family home, preserves its character; paying it into the household finances or the family home is the conduct that changes it. And a transfer between spouses made for tax reasons, which estate planning so often requires, is not by itself evidence of an intention to share, which removes a trap that had caught the Standishes and many couples before them. Our guide to matrimonial and non-matrimonial property works through the categories in more detail, and inheritance and divorce applies them to the commonest case.
What it means for prenups
A prenup after Standish does three jobs, and each is stronger than it was. It records, in its financial disclosure schedule, what each partner brought into the marriage, which is the contemporaneous evidence of source that the whole analysis depends on. It states the couple's intention that those assets remain separate, which is the best evidence a court can be given on the conduct test, because a couple who wrote down that an asset was not shared, and then behaved consistently with that, are the opposite of a couple treating it as shared. And it can say in terms that transfers between the partners made for tax reasons do not change the agreed treatment on divorce, which turns the Supreme Court's tax-planning point into a term the couple chose rather than a finding they have to fight for.
The test for the agreement itself is unchanged. Under Radmacher v Granatino the court gives effect to an agreement freely entered into by each party with a full appreciation of its implications unless in the circumstances prevailing it would not be fair to hold the parties to it, and the safeguards the Law Commission recommended in 2014, financial disclosure of material information, independent legal advice for each party and signing at least 28 days before the wedding, remain the way to satisfy it. What Standish adds is that a prenup which keeps pre-marital and inherited wealth separate is now asking the court to apply its own rule rather than to depart from it. For couples already married whose assets have started to merge, a postnup recording which assets have and have not been treated as shared does the same work with hindsight.
Standish v Standish: FAQs
What did Standish v Standish decide?
That the sharing principle on divorce applies only to matrimonial property, the wealth built up during the marriage, and not to non-matrimonial property such as pre-marital assets, gifts and inheritances, unless the couple have over time been treating those assets as shared. A transfer made to save tax does not by itself show that.
Does Standish make prenups binding?
No. The test for a prenup is still the one in Radmacher v Granatino, and a prenup is still not automatically binding. What Standish does is make the clause at the heart of most prenups, keeping pre-marital assets separate, consistent with the court's own approach.
Does it apply to inheritances?
Yes. Inheritances and gifts are the classic examples of non-matrimonial property. They stay outside sharing unless mixed with the family finances or used for the family home in a way that shows they were treated as shared (see protecting an inheritance with a prenup).
What if we put a property into joint names for tax reasons?
Standish holds that a transfer made to save tax does not, without more, make an asset shared. Record why the transfer was made, and say in your agreement that it does not change the treatment of the asset on divorce.
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