Faraid Inheritance Calculator, Explained — How Islamic Shares Are Worked Out

A faraid inheritance calculator applies the fixed shares of Islamic inheritance law — *faraid* (فرائض), also called *mirath* — to an estate and tells you exactly what each heir receives. Faraid is not a custom or a preference; it is a complete distribution system set out directly in the Quran, mostly in Surah An-Nisa (4:11, 4:12 and 4:176), and it leaves far less to individual discretion than most people expect. A calculator simply does the arithmetic reliably, so a grieving family doesn't have to.

The short answer: you enter who survived the deceased — spouse, children, parents, siblings — and the value of the estate. The calculator pays the debts and funeral costs first, applies any valid bequest (wasiyya, capped at one-third), then assigns each heir their Quranic share: a fixed fraction for some, the residue for others. Sons receive twice the share of daughters in the same class. The whole thing is deterministic — for a given set of heirs, the answer is fixed.

That determinism is precisely why the calculator exists. The hard part is never the math; it's knowing who actually inherits, and getting every asset and debt into the light before the division starts.

The order of operations

Before any heir receives anything, faraid requires a strict sequence:

1. Funeral expenses are settled from the estate.
2. Debts are paid. Every debt owed by the deceased comes out before a single heir is paid. In the Islamic tradition this is taken so seriously that the Prophet ﷺ described the believer's soul as suspended by their debt until it is settled.
3. The wasiyya (bequest) is executed — but only up to one-third of what remains, and never to someone who is already an heir. This is the only slice of the estate a person controls freely.
4. Only then does faraid divide the remainder among the heirs.

This order matters practically, not just religiously: a family that doesn't know what the debts *are* cannot finish step 2, and a family that doesn't know what the assets *are* cannot do step 4. Every faraid calculation is only as good as the map it's drawn from.

The fixed shares, in plain numbers

The Quran names six fractions — 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 2/3, 1/3 and 1/6 — and assigns them to specific heirs under specific conditions. The most common ones:

• Husband: 1/2 if his wife left no children; 1/4 if she did.
• Wife: 1/4 if her husband left no children; 1/8 if he did.
• Father: 1/6 when the deceased left children; 1/6 *plus* whatever residue remains when there are none.
• Mother: 1/6 when the deceased left children (or multiple siblings); 1/3 otherwise.
• One daughter alone: 1/2. Two or more daughters with no sons: 2/3 between them. When sons are present, daughters stop being fixed-share heirs and share the residue with their brothers at a 2:1 ratio — a son receives twice a daughter's portion.
• Full sister (no children, no father): 1/2 alone; 2/3 for two or more; residue with a full brother at 2:1.
• Maternal sibling (shared mother only): 1/6 alone; 1/3 shared if two or more.

Heirs who don't have a fixed share in a given scenario — sons, grandsons, brothers, and further male relatives — take the residue (*'asaba*): whatever is left after the fixed shares are paid. If a man leaves only a wife and two sons, the wife takes her 1/8 and the sons split the other 7/8 equally between them.

A small worked example, the classic one: a man dies leaving a wife, a mother, a father, one son and one daughter, and an estate of 240,000 (in any currency) after debts. The wife takes 1/8 (30,000), the mother 1/6 (40,000), the father 1/6 (40,000). The remaining 130,000 goes to the children at 2:1 — the son receives 86,667 and the daughter 43,333.

The two complications calculators exist to handle

**Blocking (*hajb*).** A nearer heir can completely exclude a farther one. A living son blocks the deceased's brothers, sisters and grandchildren from inheriting at all. A father blocks his own father (the grandfather). Most family trees have more potential heirs than actual ones, and working out who is blocked is where mistakes happen.

**Rebalancing (*'awl* and *radd*).** Sometimes the fixed shares add up to *more* than the whole estate — a husband (1/2), two full sisters (2/3) and a mother (1/3) sum to one-and-a-half. In that case every share is reduced proportionally (*'awl*). Sometimes they add up to *less*, leaving an unclaimed residue that goes back to the fixed-share heirs in proportion (*radd*). Both are mechanical once you know the rule — and easy to get wrong on paper.

This is the entire case for a calculator: not that the shares are mysterious, but that applying them to a real family, with blockers and remainders and fractions that must sum to exactly one, is precision work that deserves a tool rather than a guess at the kitchen table.

What faraid is — and is not

Faraid is the default distribution; it applies to at least two-thirds of every estate whether the person wrote anything down or not. It is not optional in the way a Western will is optional. What a Muslim *can* direct personally is the wasiyya — the discretionary third — plus everything that isn't inheritance at all: debts documented, wishes recorded, guardians named, instructions left.

It's also worth saying plainly: the 2:1 ratio between sons and daughters exists within a system where a son's inheritance carries a legal duty to provide for his family, while a daughter's share is entirely her own. Whether one finds that reasoning persuasive is a matter of faith and conscience, not arithmetic — and it doesn't change what the shares *are*. A calculator's job is accuracy, not commentary.

And a boundary worth respecting: real families are messier than worked examples. Adopted children, half-siblings, missing heirs, property held jointly or across borders, different schools of thought on edge cases — for anything consequential, a calculator's output is the starting point for a conversation with a qualified scholar or estate lawyer, not the final word.

Where WiseEnding fits

A faraid calculator divides the estate; it cannot *find* the estate. The most common way Islamic inheritance goes wrong in practice has nothing to do with shares — it's that the family never learns which accounts existed, what was owed, or where the documents were, so the correct fractions get applied to an incomplete number.

WiseEnding is built for that layer. The Family Vault keeps the complete, current map — every asset, every debt, every document, every instruction — encrypted so only you can read it, with the optional Islamic layer tracking Zakat on each asset along the way. When the Legacy Heartbeat confirms you're gone, that map is released to exactly the people you chose, each receiving what they need — so your family sits down with a scholar or a calculator holding *all* the facts, and the division faraid prescribes can actually happen.

The shares were settled fourteen centuries ago. What remains unsettled, in most families, is the far simpler question: what was there, and where is it?

Faraid handles the division with certainty. Your job — while you're here — is to make the estate legible enough to divide.