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, spouses, siblings, children. It can contain others connected by birth, adoption, marriage, civil partnership, or cohabitation, such as grandparents, great-grandparents, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, aunts, uncles, siblings-in-law, half-siblings, cousin, adopted children and step-parents/step-children, and cohabiting partners.

The term close relative 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), or which call for special allowance to recognise this responsibility (such as compensation on death, or permission to leave work to attend a funeral). 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. The concept is used by some countries' inheritance laws.

The exact meaning of "immediate family" varies, and will sometimes be defined in legislation or rules for a particular purpose. This can change over time: in 2005 the Scottish Government proposed to change the definition for purposes of compensation payments after deaths. The definition was to be expanded from "a remaining spouse, sexual cohabitant, parent, step-parent or step-child, parent-in-law or child-in-law or any person who was accepted by the deceased as a child of his/her family" to include "any person who had accepted the deceased as a child of the family, the brother or sister of the deceased, any person brought up in the same household as a child and who was him/herself accepted as a child of the family, the same sex partner of the deceased, or any person who was the grandparent or grandchild of the deceased". In California, for purposes of subdivision of Labor Code Section 2066, "immediate family member" means spouse, domestic partner, cohabitant, child, stepchild, grandchild, parent, stepparent, mother-in-law, father-in-law, son-in-law, daughter-in-law, grandparent, great grandparent, brother, sister, half-brother, half-sister, stepsibling, brother-in-law, sister-in-law, aunt, uncle, niece, nephew, or first cousin (that is, a child of an aunt or uncle).

The Missouri Code of State Regulations,19 CSR 15-7.021 (18) (H) states that "an immediate family member is defined as a parent; sibling; child by blood, adoption, or marriage; spouse; grandparent or grandchild."

The Australian Fair Work Act 2009, Section 12, defines immediate family as "a spouse, de facto partner, child, parent, grandparent, grandchild or sibling of the employee; or a child, parent, grandparent or sibling of a spouse or de facto partner of the employee.", and "the definition of the term ‘de facto partner’ includes a former de facto partner."

...
Wikipedia