If a home is severed into two separate legal units during a marriage, does each unit count as a matrimonial home?

This depends on the facts after the severance, rather than having one automatic answer. Legally severing a property into two separate units or parcels, which itself requires consent under the Planning Act, changes the property's legal description, but the Family Law Act's matrimonial home test still turns on whether each resulting unit is actually ordinarily occupied by the spouses as a family residence, not simply on how the legal boundaries were redrawn.

If the family continues to occupy both resulting units as part of their home, for example in a severed duplex arrangement where both parts are genuinely used by the household, there's a real argument that both could carry matrimonial home protections. If, instead, one unit becomes a separate rental property or is used in a way that doesn't resemble family occupation, that unit may fall outside the matrimonial home definition even though it was once part of the same protected property. Because this kind of severance creates a genuinely fact-specific and less-common situation, without one clean, settled answer, anyone dealing with a matrimonial home that has been or will be severed into separate legal units should get legal advice on how the resulting units are likely to be treated before relying on any assumption.