Home Rights Notice: Protecting Your Right to Stay

Part of: Financial Settlement after Divorce

A home rights notice is an entry at HM Land Registry. It protects a husband’s, wife’s or civil partner’s right to go on living in the family home when the title carries only the other person’s name. Form HR1 creates that entry (Notice of home rights: registration (HR1)). The HR4 form does the opposite and cancels it (Cancel home rights: registration (HR4)). So if you came here afraid of losing your home, HR1 is your form. HR4 is the one to leave alone. Our occupation order specialists assist and advise on both sides of this. This page covers the law of England and Wales only.

Reviewed by: Iblal Iqbal, Partner & Family Law Strategist, Kabir Family Law

What is a home rights notice, and what does it actually do?

It is a short entry on the register of title. It records that a spouse or civil partner who is not on the deeds still holds a legal right to occupy that home. Anyone who later reads the title sees it, which in practice means a buyer, a lender, or their conveyancer.

Underneath the entry sits a charge. Where one spouse or civil partner owns the home and the other does not, the other person’s home rights are “a charge on the estate or interest” (Family Law Act 1996, s.31(2)). On registered land you protect that charge by putting a notice in the register. It can never be an overriding interest that a buyer must discover for themselves (s.31(10)).

Why the entry matters comes down to priority. Someone buys a registered property, or lends money on it, and registers the deal. That registration pushes behind it every earlier interest “whose priority is not protected at the time of registration” (Land Registration Act 2002, s.29(1)). A notice in the register is one of the things that protects priority (s.29(2)). So the entry keeps your right in front of the buyer rather than behind them. GOV.UK words the practical effect carefully, and so do we: registering home rights “can help stop your partner from selling your home”.

Who has matrimonial home rights, and when do they begin?

Three things have to line up. You are married or in a civil partnership. Your husband, wife or civil partner has the right to occupy the home. You do not (s.30(1)). The property must also be, or once have been intended as, your home together. A house that never was falls outside the section altogether (s.30(7)).

The Act then gives you two limbs. Live there, and you have “a right not to be evicted or excluded from the dwelling-house or any part of it” by the owner, except with the permission of the court. Move out, and you keep a right to go back in and occupy, again with the court’s permission (s.30(2)). Both limbs concern occupation. Neither touches ownership.

Three groups of people ask about matrimonial home rights and turn out not to need them. Own the home together, both on the deeds and behind them, and HM Land Registry says plainly that “no protection … is required”. Where your spouse owns the home with somebody else, you cannot apply at all, unless your spouse would take every penny of the sale money. And an unmarried partner has no home rights at all, whatever the length of the relationship. Ownership decides that position instead, which is where our guide to the financial settlement after divorce begins.

The charge itself dates from the latest of three moments. Those are the day your spouse acquired the property, the date of the marriage or civil partnership, and 1 January 1968 (s.31(3)). That date decides where you stand against a mortgage taken out later.

HR1, HR2 or HR4: which home rights form do you need?

All three carry almost the same title on GOV.UK, which is exactly why people download the wrong one. Read the verbs, not the numbers.

A fourth form exists in the same series. HR3 belongs to a lender, which uses it to search the register for home rights before it acts.

How do you register a notice of home rights?

The mechanics are short. The decisions in front of them are not.

1. Establish what kind of title you are dealing with. You need to know whether the home has a registered title in your partner’s name and, if so, its title number. An unregistered title rules HR1 out. There the protection takes the form of a Class F land charge instead.
2. Check who really owns it. Joint ownership, on the deeds and behind them, means nothing needs registering. A property your spouse owns with a third party usually sits out of reach, unless your spouse would take all the sale money.
3. Check for protection on another property. The law allows one home at any one time. Register a second charge and the Chief Land Registrar “shall cancel the registration of the charge first registered” (Family Law Act 1996, Sch 4 para 2). Moving your protection is a deliberate act, never an accident.
4. Complete form HR1 properly. Panels 5, 6 and 7 “must be completed”, they “should not be treated as interchangeable”, and a blank panel 6 means the application “may be delayed”. HM Land Registry tightened that guidance on 14 September 2026, so an older walkthrough online may now mislead you.
5. Expect two letters, not one. HM Land Registry writes to you, and it writes to your spouse or civil partner to say what you have done. Its practice guide goes further: “Notice is always served on the registered proprietor on any application to enter or renew a home right.”

Think about that last step before any of the others. This is not a quiet move. If the other person’s reaction worries you, have that conversation first.

What a home rights notice cannot do for you

This is a narrow protection. Knowing its edges stops people leaning on it for a job it never had.

• It gives you no share of the house. The Act exists, in HM Land Registry’s words, “to protect the right of a spouse or civil partner to occupy the home”. Who keeps the house, and who takes what from it, belongs to the financial settlement rather than the register.
• It does not freeze the property. Your spouse can still put the home on the market. The entry simply makes completion very hard without dealing with you, because a buyer will not take a title with your right ranking ahead of theirs.
• It moves nobody out. If you need the other person out of the house, or you need to get back in against their will, that means a court application. The two routes are not rivals, though. Holding home rights is itself one of the two ways into a section 33 application (s.33(1)(a)(ii)), so what you register can open the door to what you later ask the court for. Our guide to the balance of harm test explains how a judge weighs it.
• It does not beat an earlier mortgage. Priority runs from a fixed date (s.31(3)), so a lender who came first stays first. Where you do hold protection, though, a lender enforcing its security must serve notice on you (s.56), so at least you hear about it.
• You can sign it away. A spouse or civil partner may agree in writing that another charge ranks ahead of theirs (Sch 4 para 6). People sign that wording inside a remortgage pack without recognising it.
• It does not survive the divorce. The right ends when the marriage or civil partnership ends, unless a court has already said otherwise.

What does form HR4 do, and who sends it?

If you arrived here searching for HR4 because you are the one afraid of losing your home, this is not your form. HR4 takes the protection off. HR1 is the one that puts it on. Read this section to understand what the other side may be doing, not as your own next step.

GOV.UK describes HR4 as the form to use “if you want to remove a home rights entry … from a title”, and the current version dates from 30 October 2023. Three people typically send it: the owning spouse, a conveyancer clearing the title for a sale, or the protected spouse who has agreed to give the rights up.

What evidence does HM Land Registry want with an HR4?

HM Land Registry will not take an owner’s word for it. It wants one of five things: a death certificate, an official copy of the final order or nullity order, an official copy of a court order ending the home rights, the civil partnership equivalents, or a release the spouse or civil partner has signed. A final order used to go by the name decree absolute. If your paperwork still uses the older words, our guide to the final order and decree absolute explains the change.

Two things here deserve a slow read. Where the house is under contract, the law treats the rights as “deemed to have been released” the moment the cancellation reaches the buyer on completion or arrives at the registry, whichever happens first (Sch 4 para 5(2)). There is no undo. Second, nobody should apply for a notice without reasonable cause, because the duty to act reasonably “is owed to any person who suffers damage in consequence of its breach” (Land Registration Act 2002, s.77).

Anyone being asked to sign an HR4 is being asked to give something up. What you get in return is a question worth asking before the pen moves, not after.

When do home rights end, and can they be extended?

HM Land Registry lists four endings together. Either spouse or civil partner dies. The marriage or civil partnership ends some other way. A court makes an order. Or the person protected releases the rights in writing.

The second of those catches people constantly. GOV.UK says you “can usually only live in the property until the divorce, annulment or dissolution has been finalised and a court settlement agreed”. Your entry on the register changes nothing about that. It protects a right that has already run out by its own terms.

One route gets round it, and it carries a hard deadline. The court can direct that neither death nor the end of the marriage ends your rights, but only through “an order … made during the marriage [or civil partnership]” (s.33(5)). That is a continuation order. Once the final order goes through, the door shuts. Where such an order sits on the register, HM Land Registry must not cancel the entry until it knows “that the order has ceased to have effect”, and a renewal “does not affect the priority of the original charge”.

That deadline is the strongest reason to take advice early rather than late. Wait until the divorce finalises and you have not lost the argument. You have lost the chance to have it.

Before you apply for a home rights notice: where do you stand?

Pick the side of this you are on, then tick what is already true. The list shows you what the registry and the court will look at, and where your gaps sit. It decides nothing for you, and nothing you tick leaves this page.

Where this goes wrong, and what it costs you

• Sending HR4 when you meant HR1. The two sit next to each other in search results and their titles nearly match. One protects you. The other strips the protection, and on a sale it does so the instant it reaches the registry.
• Waiting until the divorce finishes. A continuation order only works while the marriage or civil partnership still exists. Miss that window and no application to the registry brings the right back.
• Assuming the entry stops a sale. It freezes nothing. It makes completion difficult, which gives you leverage rather than a lock, and leverage is only worth what you do with it.
• Registering against a second property. The law allows one home at a time, and the registry then cancels the earlier entry. A careless application can strip the protection you already had.
• Signing away priority in a remortgage pack. Agreeing in writing that another charge ranks ahead of yours takes one line in a bundle of paperwork. Its effect is permanent.
• Treating the register as the settlement. An entry protects occupation while everything else gets decided. It has no view on who keeps the house, on a Mesher order, or on the tax, which our guide to capital gains tax on divorce covers.
• Applying with no real basis. The duty to act reasonably runs to anyone who suffers loss from a breach of it. A sale that collapses because of an entry nobody should have made is exactly that kind of loss.

How our specialists assist and advise on home rights

Our specialists assist and advise from the first conversation. They explain which of the three forms fits what you actually want to achieve. They set out what registering will and will not stop, and how the timing sits against the stage your divorce or dissolution has reached. Sometimes the real answer is a court application rather than a register entry, and they say so. Our guides to the occupation order and to the financial consent order set out those routes. They also talk through what the other person is likely to do once the letter arrives, because that reaction is part of the decision.

A free initial consultation is a conversation with a specialist, who gives you initial advice on your circumstances. It does not include drafting or reviewing documents. Before the call it helps to know whose name sits on the title, roughly when your spouse bought the property, and how far the divorce or dissolution has moved.

Frequently asked questions

General information about the law in England and Wales, not advice on your circumstances.

Expert Tip

People ask me almost every time whether they can stop their husband or wife selling. Honestly, the register entry buys you a seat at the table rather than a veto. What they miss is the clock. A court can only extend your right while the marriage still exists, so you have to ask before the final order goes through, not when a buyer appears. If the house matters to you, raise it at the start of the financial discussion rather than the end.

Garry Steedman, Family Law Consultant (Divorce, Children & TOLATA)