What Happens to Money You Earn After You Separate? A £86.5 Million Case Explains It
If you are going through a divorce and one of you has started earning bonuses, shares, or other rewards since you separated, you have probably wondered: does my ex get a share of that too?
A recent High Court case, HC v SW [2026] EWFC 237, gives one of the clearest answers we have seen in a while. The numbers are enormous (the case involved £86.5 million), but the principles apply just as much to smaller cases.
The situation
The husband was a senior finance professional. During the marriage he built up various forms of pay linked to performance: Restricted Stock Units (RSUs), a type of deferred share bonus, and "carried interest," a share in the profits of investment funds he worked on. Both of these only actually land in your bank account after a waiting period, sometimes years later.
The couple had separated shortly before. Not long after, the husband negotiated an exit deal with his employer that released a lot of this deferred pay early, worth many millions of pounds. The question for the court: how much of that money is "marital" (to be shared) and how much belongs to him alone because it relates to work he did after the marriage ended?
What the judge decided
The judge, Mr Justice Trowell, did not take an all-or-nothing approach. Instead he looked at:
RSUs: he split each block of shares in proportion to how much of the waiting period fell before separation versus after. If a batch of shares had been building up for two years and separation happened halfway through, half was treated as shared.
Carried interest: he went a step further here. Because the husband's contract gave him a right to an extra year of accelerated vesting if he left his job "without cause," and that right already existed at the date of separation, the judge treated it as something the wife was entitled to share in too, even though it only paid out afterwards.
A significant gift: the wife tried to have this added back into the pot, arguing the husband gave money to someone without her consent. The judge said lack of consent alone does not make a payment reckless, so it stayed out.
Foreign tax: the wife wanted the order structured to help reduce her tax bill abroad. The judge said that is not his job. He will not shape an order around one party's personal tax planning.
Why this matters if you are self-representing
You do not need £86 million for these principles to apply to you. If either of you has:
- deferred bonuses or share schemes
- vesting share options
- carried interest or partnership profit shares
- anything that was "earned" during the marriage but pays out later
then the same reasoning applies. The court will generally look at when the entitlement was earned, not just when it happens to land in an account. Work that built up during the marriage tends to be shared. Work done purely after separation, with no link back to the marriage, tends not to be.
If you are drafting a Form E or preparing for an FDA or FDR and either of you has deferred pay of any kind, this is exactly the kind of issue worth raising early, ideally with clear dates showing when each entitlement was granted and when it vested.
For plain English guidance through financial remedy proceedings, visit divorcenavigator.uk. For the fuller practitioner-level case analysis, see familycourtbridge.org.