Free tool
Islamic Inheritance Share Calculator
Enter who survives and see how the Qur’anic shares of fara’id divide an estate, with every exclusion explained in plain language. Nothing you type leaves your browser.
Who survives the deceased?
Count only people alive at the moment of death. Leave anything at zero if it does not apply.
Estate
Debts, funeral costs, and bequests
These come off the top before shares are calculated. Bequests to non-heirs are capped at one third of what remains after debts.
The person who passed away
Only a spouse the deceased was still married to at the moment of death inherits. A former spouse takes nothing once the divorce is final, so choose No if the marriage had already ended.
Children and grandchildren
Parents and grandparents
Siblings
The shares
Add at least one surviving relative to see the division.
This calculator runs entirely on your device. Nothing you enter is sent to us, stored, or logged.
What the Qur’an sets out, and what a plan actually has to do
The shares above come from Surah an-Nisa, which fixes the portions of spouses, parents, children, and siblings, together with the rules of exclusion that scholars have worked out over centuries. That is the starting point for a faith-based plan, and for many families it is the whole answer.
It is not the only answer available to you. Any attorney, including this firm, will tailor a plan to what a client actually wants. Some families follow the classical division exactly. Others adhere to it in most respects and depart from it deliberately in one or two, whether to provide for a child with a disability, to recognize a caregiver, or to keep a business intact. Both are legitimate choices to bring to an attorney, and my job is to draft what you decide rather than to decide for you.
Writing an Islamic will is easy. Making it work is the hard part.
Reciting the fractions is straightforward. Building a plan that survives contact with New York law, a probate court, and a grieving family is where the expertise actually matters. A few examples of what has to be drafted around:
- The surviving spouse and the marital home. A widow’s Qur’anic share is one eighth of the estate when there are children. If the family home is most of that estate, that fraction on paper can mean a house owned largely by her children while she is still living in it. A plan has to give her the right to remain there, on terms everyone understands, and it has to say who pays the taxes, the insurance, and the roof. That is drafting, not arithmetic.
- The elective share. New York gives a surviving spouse the right to claim the greater of $50,000 or one third of the net estate, no matter what the will says. One eighth is less than one third. A plan that ignores this can be undone by the very person it was written to honor, or can force a family into exactly the dispute the plan was meant to prevent. There are ways to address this properly, and they need to be in place before death, not after.
- Assets that never read the will. Retirement accounts, life insurance, and jointly titled property pass by beneficiary designation and operation of law. They ignore your will entirely, Islamic or otherwise. Coordinating them is often the difference between a plan that works and a plan that only looks right on paper.
- A child who receives government benefits. An inheritance paid directly to a beneficiary on SSI or Medicaid can end those benefits. The share can be honored and protected at the same time, through the right trust, drafted the right way.
None of that changes the shares. It changes whether the shares are actually delivered.
How this calculator works, and where it stops
It applies the classical Sunni rules of fara’id, including the fixed Qur’anic shares, the rules of exclusion, proportional reduction when the shares exceed the estate (awl), and the proportional return of a surplus to the Qur’anic heirs when no residuary heir survives (radd), from which a spouse does not take. The four Sunni schools agree on the great majority of cases. Where they differ, the calculator says so rather than quietly picking one.
It covers spouses, children, grandchildren through a son, parents, paternal grandfather, grandmothers, and siblings of all three kinds. More distant relatives, the dhawu al-arham, are outside its scope, as are estates involving heirs of a different faith, adopted children, and questions of what property belonged to the deceased in the first place. Those are consultation questions, and the answers matter more than the fractions.
This is an educational tool, not legal advice and not a fatwa. Using it creates no attorney-client relationship. Results depend entirely on the information you enter and on facts a calculator cannot see. For a plan you can rely on, speak with a qualified attorney, and for the religious questions, with a scholar you trust.
Turn the shares into a plan that holds
I prepare estate plans that follow fara’id where families want it followed, and that are drafted to work under New York and Texas law. The first consultation is free.