Cohabiting partners who split up are to get similar rights to divorcing couples under plans to be outlined next month, The Times has learnt.

Unmarried women and men will be able to make claims against their partners to demand lump-sum payments, a share of property, regular maintenance or a share of the partner’s pension when they separate. They will also be able to claim against their partners for loss of earnings if they gave up a career to look after children.

The reforms are to be published by the Law Commission, the Government’s law reform body.It is expected to drop any proposal for a time stipulation, so that only couples who had lived together for, say, two years, could bring a claim; or any bar on childless couples.

Plans that would have made it harder for the partner who stays at home to lodge a claim have also been dropped. Courts will no longer have to be satisfied that the unmarried couple jointly decided that one of them should give up their career and stay at home and that the decision was not made just by one of them.

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At present, cohabiting partners have no financial rights if their relationship breaks down, regardless of how long they have lived together. If there are children in the relationship, the partner who has residency will get child maintenance but can make no other claims.

The proposed reforms will offer legal remedies to up to two million cohabiting couples.

Ministers have indicated that they favour reform, but there is no definite slot for legislation. However, there is mounting pressure for unmarried couples to have greater legal recognition: in April the House of Lords ruled that if an unmarried couple owned a house in joint names, the assumption should be that they owned it in equal shares.

The Law Commission reforms aim to strike a delicate balance: they seek to give cohabitees who break up protections similar to those for divorcing couples, but to stop short of automatic rights to a financial share. This means that the courts would have the same discretion to award maintenance payments, a lump sum or share of the property – but the right is not automatic.

A cohabitee will still have to show that he or she has suffered or would suffer financially as a result of the split, so claims after short relationships are likely to fail, and those where there are children are most likely to succeed.

The reforms would apply to both opposite and same-sex couples in “an intimate relationship.” But the Law Commission emphasises that the plans are about granting individuals a remedy, not rights, when they split, and says that the measures will not undermine marriage but make the law fairer.

The Commission’s original idea was that people wanting to lodge a claim on the grounds of financial disadvantage must show that the couple had jointly decided that one would stay at home and give up a career. Someone who made an “imprudent, unilateral decision to give up work” should not be able to claim. But experts said that any agreement would be hard to prove and easy to deny.

Courts in New Zealand and Scottish have experience of measuring economic disadvantage arising from childcare, usually based on potential loss of earnings and career prospects.

With more couples choosing to live together and not marry or defer marriage, there is growing pressure for the law to change. Research shows that few people are aware of their lack of rights and many wrongly believe that cohabitation makes them “common law” spouses with rights similar to those of married couples.

Many contribute to mortgage payments on a home in their partner’s name, or reduce their earning capacity by looking after children, but get little or nothing when the relationship ends.

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