Immediate family

The immediate family is a defined group of relations, used in rules or laws to determine which members of a person's family are affected by those rules. It normally includes a person's parents, siblings, spouse, and children.^[1] It can contain others connected by birth, adoption, marriage, civil partnership, or cohabitation, such as grandparents, grandchildren, aunts, uncles, siblings-in-law, half-siblings, cousins, adopted children, step-parents/step-children, and cohabiting partners.^[2] The term close relatives is used similarly.

The concept of "immediate family" acknowledges that a person has or may feel particular responsibilities towards family members, which may make it difficult to act fairly towards non-family (hence the refusal of many companies to employ immediate family members of current employees),^[3] or which call for special allowance to recognise this responsibility (such as compensation on death,^[4] or permission to leave work to attend a funeral).^[5] It is used by travel insurance policies to determine a set of people on the basis of whose health someone might need to cancel a journey or return early.^[6] The concept is used by some countries' inheritance laws.