Who Inherits in Belgium: The Order of Heirs, the Spouse’s Share and the Reserve

Belgian succession law is federal. Whether you die in Antwerp, Namur or Brussels, the same rules in Book 4 of the Civil Code decide who inherits, what a surviving spouse or partner receives, and how much of an estate a testator is free to give away. Nothing about that changes at the language border or the regional one.

What does change by region is what the transfer costs. Inheritance tax is a regional competence in Belgium, set separately by Flanders, Wallonia and the Brussels-Capital Region, and it is covered on three other pages rather than this one. This page is about the civil rule: who has a claim on an estate, and how much of it a person can freely direct elsewhere.

Information last verified on 21 July 2026. This page provides general legal information and does not constitute legal advice in an individual case.

The order of heirs

Where there is no will, or a will does not dispose of everything, the Civil Code calls heirs in a fixed sequence of orders. Book 4, article 4.10, sets out four of them, and each order excludes every heir in the orders that follow it entirely: nobody in the second order takes anything while a single heir from the first order survives.

The first order is the deceased's descendants: children, and if a child predeceased the parent, that child's own descendants taking their place by representation. The second order covers the deceased's parents together with brothers and sisters and their descendants (nieces and nephews), who share the estate between them according to rules that depend on how many parents survive. The third order is other ascendants further up the family line, such as grandparents. The fourth order reaches more distant collateral relatives, uncles, aunts and cousins, up to the degree the Code still recognises.

A surviving spouse sits outside this ladder and is considered alongside whichever order actually inherits, which is why the spouse's own position is worth treating separately.

What the surviving spouse receives

Where the deceased leaves descendants, the surviving spouse does not compete with them for outright ownership. Instead the spouse collects the usufruct of the entire estate (article 4.17), while the descendants hold the bare ownership. In practice this means the spouse can use the assets and draw their income for life, and the underlying capital passes to the children only once the spouse's usufruct ends.

A second, narrower right sits inside that broader usufruct and cannot be bargained away by will: the surviving spouse's usufruct over the family home and the furniture in it is specifically protected, and the spouse also holds the right to any lease on the property used as the family's main residence (article 4.20). That usufruct cannot be stripped away by gifts made during life: article 4.147 §2 independently guarantees the surviving spouse at least the usufruct of the family home and its furnishings even where gifts would otherwise eat into it. A spouse can be excluded from the general succession by a will made against them, but this protected minimum, the reserved usufruct discussed below, is harder to remove. Exclusion or forfeiture of a spouse's rights is itself possible only on the single ground set out in article 4.22: full or partial deprivation of parental authority over children born of the marriage with the deceased. Separately, and by a different mechanism, a spouse who is already divorced or legally separated from bed and board does not qualify as an heir-spouse at all under article 4.10.

Where there are no descendants, the surviving spouse's position strengthens further and can extend to full ownership of some or all of the estate depending on which other relatives, if any, survive.

Legal cohabitant versus de facto cohabitant

Belgium recognises two very different kinds of unmarried couple for succession purposes, and the difference matters enormously in practice.

A legal cohabitant (wettelijk samenwonende in Dutch, cohabitant légal in French) has made a formal declaration of legal cohabitation at the town hall. Article 4.23 of the Civil Code gives the surviving legal cohabitant the usufruct of the immovable used as the family's main residence at the time of death, together with its furnishings. That right is real, but it is not a reserved share: unlike a spouse, a legal cohabitant is not a protected heir, and a will can remove this usufruct entirely. Legal cohabitation also carries no claim on the rest of the estate beyond the home and its contents.

A de facto cohabitant (feitelijk samenwonende, cohabitant de fait) has made no such declaration. Under the Civil Code, a de facto partner is not an heir at all. Living together for any number of years, sharing a household and even sharing children creates no succession right by itself. The only way a de facto partner inherits anything is if the deceased left a will, an insurance beneficiary designation or some other instrument naming them directly. Couples who have not registered as legal cohabitants and want the survivor protected need to arrange that deliberately, through a will, a gift, or another instrument; the law will not supply it for them.

The reserve: what a testator cannot give away

Belgian law limits how freely a person can dispose of an estate by will or gift, protecting certain heirs with a reserve (réserve héréditaire, wettelijke reserve): a minimum share the law sets aside for them regardless of what any will says. The reserve was substantially rewritten by the law of 31 July 2017, in force for successions opened from 1 September 2018, and its current form sits in Book 4's chapter on the disposable portion and reduction (articles 4.145 and following).

Before that reform, the children's reserve scaled with their number: one half for a single child, two thirds for two children, three quarters for three or more. Since the reform, the reserve owed to children collectively is a fixed one half of the estate, no matter how many children there are. A testator with one child, four children or ten children can always freely dispose of the other half; the pool that must go to descendants no longer grows past that point. How that protected half then divides between the children themselves still depends on how many there are, but the ceiling on what a testator can give away elsewhere no longer shrinks as a family gets larger.

The same reform removed the reserve entirely for parents. Where a person dies without descendants, parents remain legal heirs under the order of succession described above, but they can no longer insist on a fixed share if a will cuts them out. Instead, a disinherited parent who is genuinely in financial need at the time of the death can claim a maintenance allowance (créance alimentaire, onderhoudsvordering) from the estate, capped at a quarter of the notional estate in full ownership, payable as a lump sum or a periodic allowance. That is a needs-based claim, not an automatic entitlement, and it only arises if the parent can show actual need.

A surviving spouse keeps a reserve of a different shape: article 4.147 fixes it at one half of the estate in usufruct, concretely anchored to at least the usufruct of the family home even where the home's value would otherwise exceed that half. Where a spouse's and children's reserves would otherwise overlap, article 4.146 sets out how the two are reconciled.

Succession agreements are now allowed

For most of the twentieth century, Belgian law treated any binding agreement about a future, still-open succession as void in principle. The 2017 to 2018 reform relaxed that prohibition and introduced succession agreements (erfovereenkomsten, pactes successoraux), now regulated in Book 4.

Two broad kinds exist. A global family pact brings together a parent (or both parents) and all of their children and other presumptive descendants to record, in one binding document, how gifts already made between them will be treated and to confirm that the arrangement is balanced and accepted by everyone at the table. A point-specific pact is narrower: for instance, an heir can agree in advance not to challenge a particular gift even if it would otherwise eat into their reserve, without signing away anything else. Every succession agreement must be executed before a notary, following a mandatory reflection period, and the formalities exist precisely because a family is being asked to agree today about an estate that has not yet opened.

Dying without a will

If there is no valid will, the estate simply passes under the order of heirs described above, with the surviving spouse's usufruct layered on top where descendants or other qualifying relatives exist. Where none of the four orders produces a living relative and there is no surviving spouse or legal cohabitant, the estate is vacant and ultimately passes to the State.

Accepting, renouncing, or accepting under benefit of inventory

Inheriting is not automatic in the sense of being forced on anyone. An heir has a genuine choice, and the choice matters because Belgian estates carry debts as well as assets.

Pure and simple acceptance takes the estate as it stands, assets and debts together, and can expose the heir personally if the debts exceed the assets. Acceptance under benefit of inventory (aanvaarding onder voorrecht van boedelbeschrijving, acceptation sous bénéfice d'inventaire) is a formal, notarised declaration that lets the heir take the estate while capping their exposure to its actual value, after a proper inventory. Renunciation gives up the inheritance altogether; under article 4.44 it must be made by declaration before a notary in an authentic deed, and it is recorded in the central succession register. None of the three is presumed, and each carries its own procedure and deadlines, which is one of the main reasons this is not a step to take without advice suited to the specific estate.

The notary's role

A notary (notaris, notaire) sits at the centre of almost every Belgian succession. Establishing who the heirs are and in what shares, drawing up the deed of acceptance or renunciation, dividing jointly held property between heirs and handling any succession agreement all normally go through a notary, and several of these steps, including renunciation and any succession agreement, must legally be done before one. Where real estate is involved, or the heirs cannot agree on how to divide the estate, the notary's role becomes still more central.

What it actually costs

Everything on this page describes who inherits and how much of an estate is protected. What the state charges for the transfer is a separate question, governed by regional tax law rather than the Civil Code: Flanders, Wallonia and the Brussels-Capital Region each set their own inheritance tax rates, exemptions and family-home treatment, and each is covered on its own page. This page does not state a rate for any of them, because doing so here, outside its regional context, would be misleading rather than simplifying.

The questions gift-giving during life raises, including how a gift made years before death can still be pulled into the taxable estate, are covered separately.

This page describes general civil succession rules under Belgian federal law and does not constitute legal advice for an individual estate. Family situations, prior gifts, marriage contracts and cross-border elements can all change the outcome, and the underlying law changes from time to time. Check the current text on ejustice.just.fgov.be, or consult a notary, before acting on anything here.