An Islamic inheritance calculator applies the fixed shares set out in Quran 4:11, 4:12 and 4:176 to what remains of an estate after funeral costs, debts and any bequest of up to one third have been paid, in that order. A widow takes one eighth if there are children and one quarter if not; a widower takes one quarter or one half; each parent takes one sixth when there are children; sons take twice a daughter's share from what is left. This guide works four typical South African estates through in rand, shows where the Master of the High Court's process meets the Muslim Judicial Council's distribution certificate, and names the cases (awl, radd, excluded heirs) that no calculator should settle without a scholar.
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What comes off the estate before anyone inherits
The order of deductions is fixed and every worked example below follows it. In South Africa a fifth step comes first: the Master of the High Court's deceased estates page states that at death the estate is frozen and nobody may withdraw funds or deal with assets without the Master's permission, and that where the deceased was married in community of property the joint estate is frozen too. In a community of property marriage the surviving spouse already owns half of the joint estate, so only the deceased's half is the estate to be distributed. Establish the matrimonial property regime before you open a calculator.
- Funeral and burial costs, kept to what is customary and reasonable; extravagant expenses are not a charge on the heirs.
- Debts owed by the deceased: the outstanding bond, loans, unpaid mahr owed to the wife, unpaid wages, and, in the view of many scholars, unpaid zakat and other religious obligations.
- Bequests (wasiyyah) up to one third of what remains after debts, to people who are not heirs; a bequest to an heir needs the consent of the other heirs after death.
- Distribution of the residue to the heirs according to their fixed shares and then to the residuary heirs.
South African law only reaches this point if there is a valid will directing Islamic distribution. Without one, the Master's page says the estate is distributed under the Intestate Succession Act 81 of 1987, which does not follow faraid. Our guides to dying without a will as a Muslim in South Africa and to drafting an Islamic will explain how to make the calculation below legally enforceable.
The fixed shares in one table
| Heir | Fixed share | Condition that sets or changes it |
|---|---|---|
| Wife (wives share one portion) | 1/8 | Deceased left a child or son's child; 1/4 if no descendant |
| Husband | 1/4 | Deceased left a child or son's child; 1/2 if no descendant |
| Mother | 1/6 | With a child, or with two or more siblings of the deceased; otherwise 1/3 |
| Father | 1/6 | With a son; with daughters only, 1/6 plus the residue; with no child, the residue |
| One daughter | 1/2 | No son; two or more daughters share 2/3; with a son, daughters take half a son's share of the residue |
| Sons | Residue | Each son takes twice a daughter's share after the fixed shares are paid |
| Full sister | 1/2 | No child, no father, no brother; two or more sisters share 2/3; with a brother, 2:1 of the residue |
| Maternal (uterine) siblings | 1/6 for one, 1/3 shared by two or more | Only when there is no descendant and no father or grandfather; male and female share equally |
Two rules govern the whole table. Fixed shares are paid first, and residuary heirs (sons, father in the absence of sons, brothers) take what is left. A closer relative excludes a more distant one of the same kind: a living son excludes the deceased's brothers and the children of a son who died earlier, which is the single most common source of grief in South African Muslim estates and the reason a bequest for orphaned grandchildren is so often advised. Our estate planning hub covers that bequest.
Example 1: a widow with two sons and a daughter
A man dies married out of community of property, leaving his wife, two sons and a daughter, with a house worth R1,800,000, a car worth R250,000 and savings of R350,000, a gross estate of R2,400,000. The funeral costs R30,000 and the bond balance is R370,000, so the net estate is R2,000,000. He left no bequest. The wife takes one eighth because there are children: R250,000. The residue of R1,750,000 goes to the children in the ratio two to a son and one to a daughter, five parts of R350,000 each. Each son receives R700,000 and the daughter R350,000. The four figures add back to R2,000,000.
Had the couple been married in community of property, the joint estate would first be halved: the widow would own R1,200,000 of the gross outright, the deceased's half would bear its share of the debts, and her one eighth would be calculated on his net half only. The outcome for the widow is very different, which is why the regime matters more than any other single input.
Example 2: a man leaves a wife, both parents and one daughter
Net estate after funeral and debts: R1,800,000, no bequest. The wife takes one eighth, R225,000. The only daughter takes one half, R900,000. The mother takes one sixth because there is a child, R300,000. The father also takes one sixth as a fixed share, R300,000, and because there is no son he is also the residuary heir and collects whatever is left: R1,800,000 less R1,725,000 is R75,000, giving him R375,000 in total. The estate is fully distributed.
What changes with two daughters: the awl case
Replace the one daughter with two and the fixed shares no longer fit. The wife's 1/8 (3/24), the daughters' 2/3 (16/24), the mother's 1/6 (4/24) and the father's 1/6 (4/24) add to 27/24, more than the whole estate. Faraid resolves this by awl: every share is scaled down in proportion, so the denominator becomes 27. The wife takes 3/27 of R1,800,000, R200,000; the two daughters share 16/27, R1,066,666.67 or R533,333.33 each; the mother and father take 4/27 each, R266,666.67. Rounded to the nearest cent the four figures again total R1,800,000. The father receives no residue because there is none. A calculator that simply applies 1/8, 2/3, 1/6 and 1/6 without scaling will show an over-allocation, and that is the first sign the case needs a scholar's confirmation.
Example 3: an unmarried woman with her mother, a brother and a sister
An unmarried woman dies leaving her mother, one full brother and one full sister; her father died earlier and she has no children. Net estate: R900,000. The mother takes one sixth rather than one third because the deceased left two or more siblings, R150,000. The full brother and sister are the residuary heirs and share the remaining R750,000 in the ratio two to one: the brother receives R500,000 and the sister R250,000. Had the father been alive, he would have taken the entire residue of R750,000 and the siblings nothing, because a father excludes siblings.
Example 4: a blended family with a bequest to a stepson
A man dies leaving his second wife, a son and a daughter from his first marriage (which ended in divorce), a daughter born to the second marriage, and a stepson, his wife's son from her earlier marriage, whom he raised. Under faraid the stepson is not an heir and the former wife is not an heir. Knowing this, the man left a bequest of R300,000 to the stepson in his will. Net estate after funeral and debts: R3,200,000. One third of that is R1,066,666.67, so the R300,000 bequest to a non-heir is within the limit and is paid first, leaving R2,900,000 for the heirs.
The wife takes one eighth of R2,900,000, R362,500. The three children share the residue of R2,537,500 in four parts (two for the son, one for each daughter) of R634,375: the son receives R1,268,750 and each daughter R634,375. Note that the two daughters receive identical shares even though they have different mothers, and that without the bequest the stepson would have received nothing at all. For the drafting points that make such a bequest valid, see our article on common Islamic will mistakes in South Africa.
Where the MJC certificate and the Master of the High Court meet
The Master supervises every deceased estate under the Administration of Estates Act 66 of 1965. The Master's page requires the estate to be reported within 14 days of death by anyone holding property or a will of the deceased, at the Master's office for the area where the deceased lived in the 12 months before death. Magistrates' offices act as service points but have limited jurisdiction: estates with wills and estates worth more than R125,000 are transferred to the provincial Master's office, so it is advisable to report those there directly. An online registration system has run at the Johannesburg, Durban, Cape Town, Pretoria and Thohoyandou offices since 10 October 2023, and Legal Aid South Africa can assist where the estate is worth less than R250,000 and there is a minor heir.
The executor appointed by the Master must draw a liquidation and distribution account showing who inherits what. Where the will directs distribution according to Islamic law, the executor obtains a certificate from an ulama body setting out the heirs and their shares; the Muslim Judicial Council lists an Inheritance department offering guidance on Islamic inheritance and faraid alongside its Fatwa and Wills departments. That certificate performs exactly the arithmetic in the examples above on the real family tree, and the executor transcribes it into the account. Our article on the MJC Islamic distribution certificate describes the paperwork and timing, and our guide to winding up a Muslim estate covers the executor's steps.
One asset class sits half outside the calculation. An MJC fatwa dated 18 May 2026 on death benefits and inheritance holds that a death benefit paid from the deceased's own pension fund forms part of the estate, so the laws of succession apply to it, while proceeds of a life insurance or assurance policy depend on the view taken of conventional insurance: following institutions that permit it, named beneficiaries take their stipulated amounts outside the succession rules, and only if no beneficiary was named is the payout distributed by faraid. Retirement fund death benefits are also subject to trustee discretion under section 37C of the Pension Funds Act, which our article on section 37C and Islamic inheritance explains.
What a calculator cannot decide
A good calculator, including the faraid calculator on our tools page, will handle the fixed shares, the residue and the awl scaling shown above. It should stop and tell you to consult a scholar in several situations. Radd arises when the fixed shares add to less than the estate and there is no residuary heir, for example a widow and a daughter with no other relatives; the surplus is returned to the fixed-share heirs, and the schools differ on whether the spouse participates in that return. Distant kindred (dhawul arham) such as maternal aunts or daughters' children inherit only when no fixed-share or residuary heir exists, under rules the schools also apply differently. A grandfather alongside brothers, a missing heir, a child born after death, an heir who caused the death and a non-Muslim relative all change the outcome in ways the arithmetic alone will not show.
The MJC pages we fetched do not set out where Hanafi and Shafi'i practice in South Africa produce different rand outcomes, so we do not list those differences here as fact. What you can rely on is that the calculator should ask for the madhhab, that the ulama body issuing the certificate will apply the family's madhhab, and that the four examples above come out identically under all four schools because they involve only fixed-share and residuary heirs. If your family tree includes any of the situations in the previous paragraph, treat the calculator's figure as a first draft.
Verdict: how to use the numbers
If you are an heir, run the family tree through the calculator before the executor's liquidation and distribution account is advertised for inspection, and compare the two figures line by line; a discrepancy is far easier to raise before the account lies open than after it is confirmed. If you are an executor, obtain the distribution certificate before drafting the account, not after, and confirm the matrimonial property regime and the list of debts in writing. If you are planning your own estate, the arithmetic shows you what your spouse, parents and children will receive, and the gaps (a stepchild, an orphaned grandchild, a non-Muslim relative) show you what the one-third bequest is for.
Turning the result into a document the Master will act on is the step most families leave too late. Specialist drafters such as Tazkiya and Legacy Fiduciary Services prepare madhhab-specific wills and administer estates, and the other calculators on our tools page cover zakat on the estate and the bequest limit. Facts checked against mjc.org.za, justice.gov.za on 21 September 2026.
Frequently asked questions
How is inheritance calculated in Islam?
Funeral costs, debts and bequests of up to one third to non-heirs are deducted first, in that order. The fixed shares in Quran 4:11, 4:12 and 4:176 are then paid: a widow takes 1/8 or 1/4, a widower 1/4 or 1/2, each parent 1/6 when there are children, one daughter 1/2 or several daughters 2/3. Residuary heirs, mainly sons at two parts to a daughter's one, take what remains. Where fixed shares exceed the estate, every share is scaled down proportionally (awl).
What does a wife inherit in Islam?
One eighth of the net estate if her husband left a child or a son's child, and one quarter if he left none; if there is more than one wife they share that single portion equally. The share is calculated after funeral costs, debts (including any unpaid mahr owed to her) and bequests. In a South African marriage in community of property she also owns half the joint estate outright before the inheritance calculation begins.
Is there a Hanafi Islamic inheritance calculator?
Calculators that ask for the madhhab apply the Hanafi rules where they differ from the Shafi'i, Maliki or Hanbali positions, chiefly in cases of radd (return of surplus), distant kindred and a grandfather alongside siblings. The four fixed-share examples in this guide come out identically under all four schools. For a South African estate, the ulama body issuing the distribution certificate applies the family's madhhab, so confirm it before you compare figures.
Do debts get paid before inheritance in Islam?
Yes. After reasonable funeral expenses, all debts of the deceased are paid in full before any bequest or inheritance, including the bond, personal loans and unpaid mahr. Many scholars treat unpaid zakat as a debt to be settled from the estate as well. Only after debts are cleared is the one-third bequest limit measured and the residue divided among the heirs, which is why the net estate, not the gross, is the figure to put into a calculator.
Does the Master of the High Court follow Islamic inheritance?
Only if a valid will directs it. The Master's office supervises administration under the Administration of Estates Act 66 of 1965 and, where there is no valid will, distributes under the Intestate Succession Act 81 of 1987, which does not follow faraid. With an Islamic will, the executor obtains a distribution certificate from an ulama body such as the MJC and reflects those shares in the liquidation and distribution account that the Master approves.
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Can a stepchild inherit under Islamic law?
Not as an heir, because faraid shares pass only through blood and marriage to the deceased, and a stepchild is neither. A stepchild can receive up to one third of the net estate by bequest in the will, or any amount by gift during the testator's lifetime. Example 4 above shows a R300,000 bequest to a stepson from a R3,200,000 estate, paid before the heirs' shares are calculated.
