By Jason Kohlmeyer, Family Law Attorney
If done properly, prenuptial agreements are valid and enforceable in Minnesota, but the rules changed substantially on August 1, 2024. Minnesota calls these contracts antenuptial agreements, and they are governed by Minnesota Statutes section 519.11. To hold up in a divorce, an agreement signed on or after August 1, 2024 must be both procedurally and substantively fair.
This means that means full and fair financial disclosure, a meaningful opportunity for each person to consult their own lawyer, a written agreement signed in front of two witnesses and acknowledged before a notary, signing that is voluntary and free of duress, and signing at least seven days before the wedding. A Minnesota prenup can decide how marital and nonmarital property is divided and can address spousal maintenance, but it cannot waive child support.
I have practiced family law in Minnesota for 26 years, much of it in high-conflict divorces and cases involving farms and closely held businesses. Prenuptial agreements are one of the few places in family law where a few hours of careful work before the wedding can save a client years of litigation later. They are also one of the easiest documents to get wrong. Below is what the law actually requires now, what it costs, and where I see these agreements fall apart in practice.
A prenuptial agreement, which Minnesota law calls an antenuptial agreement, is a contract two people sign before they marry that sets out what happens to their property, and potentially their spousal maintenance obligations, if the marriage ends in divorce or one spouse dies. People also call these prenups or premarital agreements. They are all the same thing.
The agreement lets a couple decide their own rules instead of relying on Minnesota’s default statutes. Without an agreement, a court divides marital property under the equitable division rules and decides spousal maintenance under the maintenance statute. With a valid agreement, the couple can change those outcomes in advance, while they still trust each other and are working toward the same goal. That is the whole point. You are far more likely to reach a fair, sensible deal before the wedding than in the middle of a contested divorce.
This is the part most online articles, including the older posts on my own site, have not caught up with. Effective August 1, 2024, the Legislature rewrote section 519.11 and repealed most of the old subdivisions. If you are reading older guidance, including anything written before late 2024, assume the procedural details are out of date.
The current statute does several things the old one did not. The law replaced the old language about “a man and woman” with “two individuals,” so the statute is now written in gender-neutral terms. It expressly splits the analysis into procedural fairness under subdivision 1b and substantive fairness under subdivision 1c, and an agreement has to satisfy both. A hard requirement was added that the agreement be signed in front of two witnesses and acknowledged before a notary. And it created a seven-day rule, which I will come back to, that ties directly to whether your agreement is presumed valid.
The statute also confirms something that used to live mostly in case law. An antenuptial agreement may provide for spousal maintenance, and the marriage itself counts as adequate consideration for the agreement. You do not have to give your future spouse money or property to make the contract binding. Agreeing to marry is enough.
Under the current statute, a Minnesota court asks two separate questions. Was the agreement procedurally fair, meaning was the process of creating and signing it fair? And was it substantively fair, meaning are the actual terms fair enough to enforce? An agreement has to clear both bars.
Procedural fairness is about how the agreement came together. The statute lists five requirements. There must be full and fair disclosure of each person’s current income and property. Each party must have had a meaningful opportunity to consult independent legal counsel of their own choosing. The agreement must be in writing, signed in front of two witnesses, and acknowledged before a notary or other officer authorized to administer an oath. It must be entered into voluntarily and free of duress. And it must be signed no less than seven days before the marriage.
Full and fair disclosure has a specific meaning now. The statute says each party has to give a reasonably accurate description of all material facts about their income, plus good faith estimates of the value of their property, and explain the basis for those numbers. You also cannot ask your future spouse to waive the disclosure requirement. I tell clients to over-disclose. Attach the account statements, the business valuation, the appraisal. Hiding a number to make the agreement look more palatable is the single fastest way to lose the whole document later.
I want to correct a point that appears in a lot of older Minnesota prenup articles, including some of my own. The statute does not strictly require that both people actually hire lawyers. It requires that each person had a meaningful opportunity to consult independent counsel. There is a real difference. That said, in my experience, an agreement where both spouses were genuinely represented is dramatically harder to attack, so I still recommend separate lawyers in almost every case. The opportunity has to be meaningful, not a formality you spring on someone the night before the rehearsal dinner.
Substantive fairness is about the terms themselves. A court looks at whether all or part of the agreement is so unfair as to be unconscionable, either because of how it read when it was signed, or because of drastically changed circumstances that nobody foresaw, so that enforcing it would no longer match what the parties reasonably expected when they signed.
Here is the nuance that matters. The statute says an agreement does not have to approximate what a court would have ordered. A prenup can deviate from the statutory property division or the maintenance guidelines, and that deviation by itself does not make it unconscionable. People are allowed to make deals a judge would not have imposed. The unconscionability bar is high, but it is real, and the “drastically changed circumstances” language gives a court a way to refuse to enforce an agreement that became grossly lopsided over a long marriage.
Yes. A valid agreement is almost always enforced, but the courts will throw one out when the process was unfair or the result is unconscionable. The Minnesota Supreme Court made this concrete in Kremer v. Kremer, 912 N.W.2d 617 (Minn. 2018). In that case, a husband had an agreement drawn up in the days before a destination wedding and presented it to his bride-to-be about two days before the ceremony, with the wedding hanging in the balance. The Court refused to enforce it, pointing to the lack of a real opportunity to consult counsel and the duress created by the timing.
Kremer was decided under the old statute, but it drove much of the 2024 rewrite, and the lesson survives. Timing and pressure are where these agreements die. That is exactly why the current statute now bakes in a seven-day rule. An agreement signed at least seven days before the wedding is presumed enforceable, and the spouse attacking it carries the burden of proof. An agreement signed inside that seven-day window loses the presumption, and the spouse trying to enforce it has to prove it should stand. In practice, do not wait. The agreement signed two months out, after both people had their own lawyer review it, is the one that holds. The agreement signed in the hotel lobby is the one I get hired to challenge.
The other classic ways an agreement falls apart are incomplete financial disclosure, fraud, signing under duress or undue influence, lack of capacity, or skipping the formalities. A power of attorney cannot stand in for a party’s signature on these agreements. And if even one provision is unenforceable, a court can sever it and enforce the rest, but only if the agreement clearly says severability is allowed, so that clause is worth getting right.
Yes. The current statute expressly allows an antenuptial agreement to provide for spousal maintenance, which is the legal term in Minnesota for what most people call alimony. A couple can set an amount, tie the amount to the length of the marriage, build in a structure that increases support the longer they are married, or waive maintenance entirely. A court will enforce a waiver as long as it was knowing and voluntary and the agreement is otherwise fair, both when signed and at the time of enforcement.
This matters more than it used to, because Minnesota also overhauled its spousal maintenance statute on August 1, 2024. Under Minnesota Statutes section 518.552, maintenance is now described as transitional or indefinite rather than temporary or permanent, and the law created rebuttable presumptions tied to the length of the marriage. As a general matter, marriages under five years are presumed to carry no maintenance, marriages of five to twenty years are presumed to carry transitional maintenance for up to half the length of the marriage, and marriages of twenty years or more are presumed to carry indefinite maintenance. Those are the default rules a prenup is opting out of, so it is worth understanding what you are changing before you sign away rights under it.
One thing a prenup cannot do is waive child support. Child support belongs to the child, not to the parents, and Minnesota policy is that both parents support their children. A clause that purports to waive or cap child support will not be enforced, no matter how carefully it is drafted. I see people try to slip this in, and it never works.
Prenups are not just for the wealthy. The agreement is about clarity and protection, and plenty of ordinary couples benefit. I think hard about recommending one when a client has children from a prior relationship and wants to protect an inheritance for them, when one person is bringing significant nonmarital assets into the marriage, or when one spouse is likely to inherit money or land during the marriage.
They also matter a great deal when there is a business in the picture. If one spouse owns or runs a company, has an ownership stake in a family business, or plans to start one, a prenup can prevent a fight over business valuation and an ugly choice between buying a former spouse out or running a company alongside someone you just divorced. The same logic applies to a professional license or practice that one spouse expects to build during the marriage, to a couple entering the marriage with very different debt loads, and to a couple with a large gap in income or earning power. In each of those situations, deciding the rules in advance is far cheaper and calmer than litigating them later.
Most Minnesota attorneys, including me, charge by the hour for prenuptial agreements, so the cost depends almost entirely on how complicated your situation is and how much negotiating is involved. A straightforward agreement between two people who already agree on the terms, with simple finances, sits at the low end. An agreement involving a family business, farmland, a professional practice, or terms the two sides still have to hammer out will run higher, because it takes more drafting, more disclosure, and more back and forth between the lawyers.
Compare that against the alternative. If your agreement is unenforceable, or you never had one, the protections you thought you had simply evaporate. Assets you meant to keep separate can end up on the table, you can owe maintenance you expected to avoid, and you can spend many multiples of the cost of a prenup litigating a divorce that the agreement was supposed to streamline. Looked at that way, a well-drafted prenup is usually one of the better values in family law. The point of paying a lawyer to draft it correctly is to make sure it survives the one moment it exists for, which is the day someone tries to set it aside.
While it’s hard to give an estimate on the cost, most prenups cost between $1,500 and $3,000. With the rare exception, of course, if it’s extremely complex
If you are already married, you are not out of options. The same 2024 statute authorizes postnuptial agreements, which are contracts spouses sign after the wedding. A postnup has to meet the same procedural and substantive fairness requirements as a prenup, with two important differences. The seven-day rule does not apply, for obvious reasons. But unlike a prenup, a postnup is only valid if each spouse is actually represented by separate legal counsel at the time of signing. Representation is mandatory for a postnup, not just an opportunity.
Minnesota also treats postnups with extra caution right after signing. If either spouse files for separation or divorce within two years of signing the postnup, the agreement is presumed unenforceable unless the spouse trying to enforce it can show it is fair and equitable. That is a deliberate guard against someone pressuring a spouse to sign a postnup on the way out the door.
In my Mankato practice, a large share of the prenuptial agreements I draft are built around family farmland and agricultural businesses across the southern Minnesota counties in the Fifth Judicial District, places like Blue Earth, Nicollet, Le Sueur, Brown, and Watonwan. Farmland is where the new substantive fairness rule gets interesting.
A parcel that a spouse brings into the marriage as nonmarital property can appreciate enormously over a long marriage, and a farm operation often pulls in marital labor and income year after year. That is precisely the kind of “drastically changed circumstances” a court can weigh under subdivision 1c when deciding whether an agreement is still fair to enforce decades later. If you farm here, the agreement has to be drafted to account for how the land and the operation will change over time, not just what they are worth on the day you sign.
A prenuptial agreement in Minnesota is a powerful tool, and after the August 2024 changes, it is also a more demanding document to get right. The agreements that hold up are the ones built on honest disclosure, real legal advice on both sides, proper signing formalities, and enough lead time before the wedding that no one can claim they were cornered. If you are getting married and think a prenup might fit your situation, or you signed one years ago and want to know whether it still works under the new law.
About the author: Jason Kohlmeyer is a Minnesota family law attorney with over 25 years years of experience and a partner at Kohlmeyer Hagen Law Office in Mankato and Rochester. He has practiced family law exclusively since 2010 and has handled hundreds of custody cases across southern Minnesota. He is the author of The Divorce Survival Guide: Getting Divorced in Minnesota and has spoken on family law topics for the American Bar Association, Minn. State Bar associations and American Trial Lawyers Association. He is a member of the Minnesota State Bar Association and has been recognized by Super Lawyers and Best Lawyers of America for many years.
