Can the council force you to sell your house to pay for care fees?

Quick summary: If you go into residential care but a spouse, partner, or certain qualifying relatives continue living in your home, its value is left out of your financial assessment entirely, this is called the mandatory property disregard. The real risk arises later, for a single homeowner going into care alone, or for a surviving partner who later needs care themselves after inheriting the whole home outright.

While your partner remains living in the property, the local authority cannot count it as one of your assets when assessing what you contribute towards care fees. This protection applies regardless of whether you've done any additional planning, it's a baseline right, not something you need to arrange.

Not usually straight away, no. If your assets are otherwise below the threshold and your home is the only thing standing in the way, councils generally offer a Deferred Payment Agreement, a legal charge placed on the property so the council pays your care costs upfront and reclaims them from your estate later, typically when the property is eventually sold, rather than forcing an immediate sale while you're still alive.

It's a genuine option worth knowing about, but it's still your home's value being used to fund care, just deferred rather than immediate. It doesn't change what ultimately passes to your children.

This is exactly the gap a Property Protection Trust is designed to close. Instead of leaving your whole share of the home outright to your surviving partner, your share passes into a trust for your children when you die. Your partner can typically continue living there for the rest of their life, but because they no longer own that share outright, only what they personally own is assessed if they later need care, your protected share isn't included.

This does mean owning your property as "tenants in common" rather than "joint tenants", so each of you has a distinct share to leave via your own Will. Most couples own their home as joint tenants by default, we check this as a matter of course, and can help change it if needed.

One honest caveat: this works best as considered, proactive planning, not a reaction to a care need that's already on the horizon. Local authorities can look back at transfers made specifically to avoid a known or reasonably foreseeable care cost, and treat them as deliberate deprivation of assets, which can mean the property is assessed as though the trust didn't exist. Setting this up well before care becomes a live concern is what makes it genuinely effective.