The Pflichtteil in Germany: Compulsory Share Rules Explained

German succession law lets a person leave a will that cuts a child out entirely. What a will cannot do is defeat the compulsory share, the Pflichtteil, a minimum financial interest the law reserves for certain close relatives regardless of what the will says.

The point most coverage of this topic gets wrong is what the Pflichtteil actually is. It is not a portion of the estate itself. A person entitled to it does not become a co-owner of the house, a member of the Erbengemeinschaft, or a party with any say over how the estate is run. It is a personal claim for a sum of money against the heir or heirs, and that single distinction shapes everything else on this page: how the claim is calculated, how it is enforced, and what a disinherited relative actually ends up with.

This page covers who can claim a Pflichtteil, how the amount is worked out, the information claim that is usually the practical first step, the narrow grounds on which it can be stripped or waived, a common trap for an heir left a burdened share, the problem it creates for a Berliner Testament, and how it interacts with inheritance tax.

Information last verified on 20 July 2026. This page provides general legal information and does not constitute legal advice in an individual case.

Who can claim a Pflichtteil: § 2303 BGB

§ 2303 BGB grants a compulsory share to three categories of relative when a will cuts them out, or leaves them less than that share: the deceased's descendants (children, and a deceased child's own children in their place), the deceased's spouse or registered life partner, and the deceased's parents, but only where the deceased leaves no descendants at all.

This list is narrower than people often assume. Siblings have no Pflichtteil under German law, whatever the will says and however close the relationship was in life. Neither do grandparents, nieces, nephews, or any more distant relative. A parent's claim in particular only exists if the deceased died without children; a surviving child of the deceased excludes the deceased's own parents from any Pflichtteil claim entirely, in line with the same ranked order that governs intestate succession. See intestate succession for how that ranking works.

A claim also only arises where the will actually leaves the person below their statutory share, whether by disinheriting them outright, leaving them a smaller amount, or, as covered further down, leaving them an inheritance burdened with conditions.

The amount: half of the hypothetical intestate share

The compulsory share is always half of the value the claimant's statutory intestate share would have been, calculated as though the deceased had left no will at all and the ordinary intestacy rules applied instead. That hypothetical share is not what the claimant would actually have received after any lifetime planning; it is the plain intestacy fraction, then simply halved.

This is why the compulsory share looks different for the same family depending on how many relatives survive and which marital property regime applied. The worked example further down shows the full calculation for one common family structure.

A money claim, not a share of the estate

This is the detail most coverage of German inheritance blurs. A Pflichtteil is a Geldanspruch, a claim for a sum of money, owed personally by the heir or heirs once the claimant asserts it. It is not an ownership interest in any specific asset and not a stake in the estate as a whole.

Practically, that has real consequences. The claimant does not join the Erbengemeinschaft that forms among the actual heirs, has no vote on how the estate is administered, and has no automatic right to a share of the house, a car, or any specific item, however much of the estate's value that item represents. An heir can choose to satisfy the claim by transferring an asset instead of cash, but the claimant cannot force that outcome; they are owed money, and the heir decides how to raise it, whether by selling estate assets, using their own funds, or agreeing something else directly with the claimant.

This also means the claim is enforced like an ordinary debt. If the heir does not pay voluntarily, the claimant sues for the sum owed in the ordinary civil courts rather than in the probate proceeding itself.

The first step: the information claim, § 2314 BGB

A disinherited relative usually has no real idea what the estate is worth. § 2314 BGB addresses that directly: where the Pflichtteil claimant is not themselves an heir, they can demand that the heir disclose the full state of the estate, and the heir has to comply.

That right goes beyond a simple list. The claimant can insist on being involved when the inventory of estate assets is drawn up, can require that the assets actually be valued rather than merely listed, and can require that the inventory be prepared by a notary or the responsible authority rather than by the heir alone, which matters where the claimant has reason to distrust the heir's own account. § 2314 BGB puts the cost of all of this on the estate, not on the claimant.

Where there is genuine reason to doubt that the disclosed inventory is complete, the claimant can also require the heir to affirm it in lieu of an oath. In practice, this information claim is understood to reach lifetime gifts relevant to the top up claim described below, since a claimant could otherwise never actually verify whether such a claim exists. For most people asserting a Pflichtteil, sending this request is the real first step, well before any figure can be calculated with confidence.

Worked example: a spouse and two children, one disinherited

Say a married couple never signed a marriage contract, so the default Zugewinngemeinschaft, community of accrued gains, applied throughout the marriage. One spouse dies leaving a will that gives everything to the surviving spouse and one of their two children, cutting the other child out completely. The estate is worth 800,000 euros.

To work out the disinherited child's Pflichtteil, start with what that child's intestate share would have been if there had been no will at all. Under § 1931 BGB the surviving spouse's basic share alongside children is one quarter, and § 1371 BGB adds a further flat quarter because the couple was married under Zugewinngemeinschaft, for a combined one half. The remaining one half is split equally between the two children, so each child's hypothetical intestate share is one quarter of the estate.

The Pflichtteil is half of that hypothetical share. One quarter of 800,000 euros is 200,000 euros, and half of that is 100,000 euros. The disinherited child has a money claim against the heirs, the surviving spouse and the sibling who inherited, for 100,000 euros. They have no claim on any specific asset inside that 800,000 euro estate, only on that sum.

Topping up the claim with lifetime gifts: § 2325 BGB

A will is not the only way a testator can reduce what a compulsory share is worth. Giving assets away before death has the same effect, unless § 2325 BGB steps in. It lets the claimant add the value of gifts the deceased made back into the notional estate used to calculate the Pflichtteil, a claim generally called the Pflichtteilsergänzungsanspruch.

The addback is not all or nothing. It runs on a sliding scale tied to how long before death the gift was made.

One relationship breaks this pattern entirely. Where the gift went to the deceased's own spouse, the ten year clock under § 2325 BGB does not start running until the marriage ends, whether by death or divorce. A gift made decades into a long marriage can therefore still be added back in full if the marriage was still intact when the testator died, however long ago the gift itself was made.

This top up claim runs alongside, and separately from, a different ten year rule used to compute gift tax. See gifts and gift tax for how that separate rule works and why the two should not be confused.

When can the Pflichtteil be stripped: §§ 2333 to 2336 BGB

German law lets a testator remove a compulsory share entirely in a small number of situations set out in § 2333 BGB. The grounds include an attempt on the life of the testator, the testator's spouse, another descendant, or someone similarly close to the testator; a serious intentional criminal offence against one of those people; maliciously breaching a legal maintenance duty owed to the testator; and being sentenced to at least one year's imprisonment without probation for an intentional crime, or committed to psychiatric or addiction treatment for a comparably serious intentional act, where letting that person inherit becomes unreasonable for the testator. Comparable grounds apply, adjusted for the relationship involved, to a parent's or spouse's compulsory share.

§ 2336 BGB then adds two conditions that make this harder to use than the list alone suggests. The ground has to exist at the time the will is made, and the will has to state it. A vague reference to a falling out, or a general statement that a relative was ungrateful, is not enough; the will has to point to one of the specific statutory grounds and the facts behind it. If the disinheritance is ever challenged, the burden of proving the ground falls on whoever relies on it, ordinarily the heir defending against the Pflichtteil claim, not on the claimant.

In practice, this route succeeds far less often than testators assume when they draft a will hoping to cut someone out completely. Most family conflict, disappointment or estrangement, however genuine it feels to the person writing the will, simply does not meet any of these narrow statutory grounds.

The notarised waiver: § 2346 BGB

A relative or spouse can also give up their compulsory share voluntarily, in advance, through a contract with the person whose estate is involved. § 2346 BGB allows a full waiver of statutory inheritance rights, or, under its second paragraph, a narrower waiver limited to the Pflichtteil alone while leaving the person's position as an heir otherwise untouched.

This contract has to be notarised under § 2348 BGB; an informal agreement, however clearly both sides intended it, has no legal effect. Unless the contract says otherwise, a waiver by one person also binds their own descendants under § 2349 BGB, so a child who waives their compulsory share generally waives it on behalf of their own children too, not only for themselves.

This tool is used most often in planning the succession of a family business, where the owner wants one child to take over the company without the others later using a Pflichtteil claim to force a payout the business cannot afford. In exchange for the waiver, the waiving relative is usually given a lump sum, other assets, or a defined role elsewhere in the plan; a waiver given for nothing in return remains legally valid but is rarely accepted without some form of compensation in practice.

The trap for a burdened heir: § 2306 BGB

A will does not have to disinherit someone outright to create a Pflichtteil problem. It can instead name the person as an heir but attach conditions: a Nacherbe, a subsequent heir who takes over later, an executor who controls the estate, an instruction on how it is divided, or a legacy or duty the heir has to fulfil out of what they receive.

§ 2306 BGB gives a person left this kind of burdened inheritance a real choice: keep the inheritance as left, with all its conditions, or disclaim it entirely and claim the unencumbered Pflichtteil instead. This is a genuine election with a real deadline, not something that happens automatically, and the ordinary disclaimer period is six weeks under § 1944 BGB, extended to six months where the heir was abroad when the inheritance opened.

Whether disclaiming is worth it depends entirely on the numbers: whether half the intestate share in cash is worth more than the burdened inheritance actually left, once every condition attached to it is properly accounted for.

The Berliner Testament problem

A Berliner Testament, recognised under § 2269 BGB, is a mutual will in which spouses name each other as sole heir on the first death and name their children, or another third party, to inherit only once the surviving spouse has also died. It is one of the most common will structures among German married couples, and it creates a Pflichtteil problem that regularly catches people by surprise.

Naming the surviving spouse as sole heir cuts the children out of the first estate entirely. That triggers each child's compulsory share claim immediately, against the surviving spouse, at exactly the point the couple usually wants least to disturb the family's finances.

Two drafting responses are common, and it is worth being honest about what each one actually does. A Pflichtteilsstrafklausel, a penalty clause, provides that a child who asserts their Pflichtteil on the first death also forfeits anything beyond that Pflichtteil on the second death, reducing what they eventually inherit if they press the claim early. A Jastrowsche Klausel goes further, typically pairing that penalty with a lump sum left to whichever children do not assert their claim, funded from the estate on the first death, to reward patience. Neither clause removes a child's underlying legal right to demand the Pflichtteil at the first death. Both only change the financial cost of exercising that right, making the claim more expensive to pursue rather than unavailable.

How long the claim lasts

A Pflichtteil claim is a claim like any other and becomes time barred if nobody pursues it. § 195 BGB sets the ordinary limitation period at three years, and § 199 BGB fixes when that period starts: the end of the year in which the claim arose and the claimant learned, or should reasonably have learned, of the death, of the disposition (the will or the gift) that reduced their share, and of the identity of the person who owes it.

Where the claimant genuinely does not find out for a long time, § 199 BGB still imposes an absolute outer limit of thirty years from the event giving rise to the claim, regardless of when actual knowledge arrives. In practice, most claims are pursued well inside the ordinary three year window, but the absolute limit matters for a claimant who only learns of a will, or of a gift relevant to a top up claim, long after the fact.

Pflichtteil and inheritance tax

A Pflichtteil sits inside the German inheritance tax system on both sides of the transaction. For the claimant, receiving a Pflichtteil is itself a taxable acquisition under § 3 ErbStG, taxed once the claim is actually asserted, using the claimant's own relationship to the deceased to set their tax class and allowance under the ordinary rules. See German inheritance tax for those allowances and rates.

For the heir who owes the payment, an asserted Pflichtteil liability is deductible as a debt of the estate under § 10 ErbStG, reducing that heir's own taxable acquisition by the amount actually owed. Getting both sides right, what the claimant now owes tax on and what the heir can now deduct, is one of the more easily overlooked steps once a Pflichtteil claim is settled.

Related reading: writing a will in Germany, intestate succession, gifts and gift tax, and German inheritance tax. For a wider view of the legal system, see German law explained.

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