Proof of living together

This section, shows you what you need to include to proof that you have been living together for at least two years. Now you are not required to do this but like everything I would include a cover letter. It just provides them an overview of your living arrangements, anything for them to be aware (for instance in my case, my partner’s billing address on his bank statements are his childhood home address so it was worth clarifying) as well as the documents you have included for their consideration. I’ve added a sample of mine here:

proof of living together .jpgDocuments needed:

You need to show at least 6 joint correspondences showing the same address to the both of you. If you do not have joint correspondences you need to show one each to make up for the 6, so a total of 12. Basically, any joint correspondence will count as one each. Any individual statement will just count as one. To make this clearer, I’ll give an example:

Say you have four items of correspondence in joint names to the same address (like rent, bills and maybe council tax), that would count as 4 each. You would need a total of 6 EACH to the same address. So you would need to show an additional 2 more items addressed to each partner at the address. In total eight items would need to be submitted. If you have no joint statements at all, you will each need to give 6 individual correspondences, making it a total of 12 items for submission. Makes sense?

Obviously, if you see above, we gave too many, we went beyond 6 each but that was mostly to make that we covered the number of sources they needed – see below

Other things to note for documents:

  • They need to be from at least 3 different sources (so not all can be your bank statements or your rental agreement, you need to show 3 different types)
  • Need to be across the length of time you have been living together (so you can’t show just one year’s worth of documents, you need to have documents that go throughout the span of your living together).
  • They need to be official, recognizable documents. The list that is given is:
    • Letters or other documents from government departments or agencies, for example HM Revenue and Customs, Department for Work and Pensions, DVLA, TV Licensing.
    • Letters or other documents from your GP, a hospital or other local health service about medical treatments, appointments, home visits or other medical matters.
    • Bank statements/letters
    • Building society savings books/letters
    • Council tax bills or statements
    • Electricity and/or gas bills or statements
    • Water rates bills or statements
    • Mortgage statements/agreement
    • Tenancy agreement(s)
    • Telephone bills or statements
  • Another thing that could be useful, and this was highlighted by something I saw online, could be a letter from your landlord (if you are renting) confirming how long you have lived there. This is normally helpful to support your application but it is not really something to rely on completely. You can normally just draft this letter out yourself and send it to your landlord to approve and sign. Normally most of them are quite happy to do so.