What Is Community Property?

COMMUNITY PROPERTY is a concept in Texas law that any property that is acquired while a person is married is owned by that person and their spouse equally (50/50). It cuts across all areas of Texas law but is particularly important in family law, real estate law, and estate planning law.

This concept is the basis for determining who owns property and how much their ownership interest is worth. The type of property does not matter. If you and your spouse bought a magazine or a mansion after you were married, you each own 50% of that piece of property.

What does matter are dates. What date were you married? What date were you divorced? What date was the property acquired? What date was the Will signed? What date did you die? These dates determine when and if the property became COMMUNITY PROPERTY.

Determining COMMUNITY PROPERTY can become very complicated. And just to make it more difficult, Texas law also recognizes what is known as SEPARATE PROPERTY. We’ll talk about that in our next post.