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Survey evidence suggests that domestic violence is widespread. However, no evidence exists to date on the impact of cohabitating with an abuser on women’s labour market outcomes. We match police records on all crime reports in Finland between 2006-2019 to population administrative employment and earnings records. 2.7% of all cohabitation spells that started in this period are associated with at least one report of domestic abuse. However, this rate is close to 5% amongst couples with large gaps in completed education. Using a matched observation control design and a within-individual comparison of outcomes across relationships, we show that women suffer large and significant earnings and employment falls upon cohabitating with an abusive partner. This deterioration of women’s labour market outcomes upon cohabitation is similar for couples in which police reports appear close to cohabitation, those in which reports occur a number of years following cohabitation, and for those in which no report of violence is made to the police but the man is recorded as an abuser in another relationship. We use our findings to motivate a dynamic structural model of household behaviour featuring multiple bargaining types (cooperative and non-cooperative), endogenous violence reporting and break-up.