Switzerland's 2023 Inheritance Reform: What Changed Under the ZGB

A great deal of German language content online still describes Swiss inheritance law as it stood before 1 January 2023, which makes this one of the easiest places to get Swiss law wrong by trusting a source that used to be correct. Switzerland's civil code, the Zivilgesetzbuch or ZGB, went through its biggest inheritance change in more than a century on that date. The reform narrowed who is legally entitled to a fixed share of an estate and widened how much a person can direct by will.

This page walks through exactly what changed, article by article, and where the commonly repeated shorthand about the new numbers is only half right. It is part of our wider Swiss inheritance law coverage, itself part of the broader guide to Swiss law.

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

The reform in one date: 1 January 2023

The reform is formally the Bundesgesetz vom 18. Dezember 2020 (Erbrecht), and it entered into force on 1 January 2023. It rewrote Art. 470 and Art. 471 ZGB, added an entirely new Art. 472 ZGB, and adjusted the disposable quota language in Art. 473 ZGB. Nothing about how a will must be written changed. Only how much of an estate a person is free to direct by will changed.

Art. 470 ZGB: parents dropped from the Pflichtteil entirely

Before the reform, Art. 470 ZGB named three groups of protected heirs: descendants, parents, and a spouse or registered partner. Since 1 January 2023, the article names only descendants and a spouse or registered partner. The word Eltern, parents, was simply deleted from the list.

The practical effect is direct. A person with no children who wants to leave their estate to a partner, a sibling, a friend, or a charity no longer has to reserve anything for their own parents. Before 2023, parents held a guaranteed claim on that estate even against the deceased's express wishes, and today they hold none at all.

Art. 471 ZGB: one flat fraction replaces three

The old Art. 471 ZGB set three separate fractions depending on who the heir was. A descendant's compulsory share was three quarters of what that heir would have received under the intestate rules. A parent's share was one half, and a spouse or registered partner's share was also one half.

The current Art. 471 ZGB replaces all three with a single flat rule: the Pflichtteil is one half of whatever the heir's intestate share would have been, whoever the heir is. For a child, that means the compulsory share fell from three quarters of their intestate share to one half of it. For a spouse or registered partner, the fraction was already one half, so nothing changed for that group specifically.

Art. 472 ZGB: a pending divorce can erase the spouse's compulsory share

Art. 472 ZGB is new law, not a change to an existing article. It addresses a specific and narrow situation: a spouse dies while a divorce case involving them is still pending.

Two triggers apply, and either one alone is enough. The first is a divorce filed, or converted, under the joint request procedure. The second is that the spouses have already lived apart for at least two years by the time of death, mirroring the separation period Swiss law otherwise requires before either spouse can seek a unilateral divorce.

If either trigger is met, the surviving spouse's compulsory share disappears entirely, and the estate is divided as though the deceased had never married. The same rule applies, with the necessary adjustments, to the dissolution of a registered partnership.

The disposable quota: it depends which family shape you are in

This is the number most secondary sources get wrong. The shorthand often repeated online is that the freely disposable quota rose from one quarter to one half across the board. That shorthand is only correct for one specific family shape, and Switzerland's most common family shape is a different one.

Art. 473 ZGB itself governs a specific estate planning arrangement: a testator survived by a spouse or registered partner and common descendants can, by will, give that spouse lifetime usufruct over the descendants' entire share, replacing the spouse's ordinary statutory inheritance right alongside those descendants. In that specific arrangement, the freely disposable quota next to the usufruct rose from one quarter before the reform to one half after it, under Art. 473 ZGB.

A second, purely arithmetic reading of the descendants alone scenario lands on the same numbers by coincidence. Where a person has descendants and no spouse or registered partner at all, the compulsory share for descendants fell from three quarters to one half under Art. 471 ZGB, so the disposable quota rose from one quarter to one half there too.

The most common Swiss family shape, a spouse and descendants sharing an estate under the ordinary default with no Art. 473 arrangement, produces a third number entirely. Before the reform, combined compulsory shares in that configuration worked out to five eighths of the estate, leaving three eighths freely disposable, not one quarter. After the reform, combined compulsory shares fell to one half, so the disposable quota there is also one half, the same end point as the other two scenarios but a different starting point.

The spouse or registered partner's own fraction is the one that never moves: one half of their intestate share, before and after the reform. That is easy to misread as meaning nothing changed for couples, and for childless couples the opposite is true.

Where a childless person leaves a spouse and at least one parent alive, Art. 462 Ziff. 2 ZGB gives the spouse three quarters and the parental line one quarter. Before 2023 the spouse's protected share was three eighths and the parents held a further eighth, so half the estate was locked up.

Since Art. 470 dropped parents from protection altogether, only the spouse's three eighths remains protected. The disposable quota for that family shape rose from one half to five eighths, which is a larger jump than the headline reform figure and is the change most often missed.

A worked example

Take a married couple with two children, dividing under the ordinary intestate rule with no special arrangement. Under Art. 462 ZGB the surviving spouse takes one half of the estate when sharing with descendants, and Art. 457 ZGB gives the two children the other half, divided equally between them.

Before 2023, the spouse's compulsory share was one half of that one half, or one quarter of the whole estate. Each child's compulsory share was three quarters of their own one quarter share, which is three sixteenths of the whole estate per child, or three eighths of the whole estate for both children combined. Adding the spouse's one quarter to the children's three eighths gives a combined reserved share of five eighths of the estate, leaving three eighths free to direct by will.

From 2023, the spouse's compulsory share is unchanged at one quarter of the whole estate. Each child's compulsory share is now one half of their own one quarter share, one eighth of the whole estate per child, or one quarter combined for both children. The combined reserved share falls to one half of the estate, so the freely disposable portion doubles to one half, exactly the shift the reform was built to produce for this ordinary family shape.

Translated into money, an estate worth CHF 800,000 illustrates the shift plainly. Before 2023, five eighths, CHF 500,000, was reserved between the spouse and the two children combined, leaving CHF 300,000 free to direct elsewhere. From 2023, only one half, CHF 400,000, is reserved, so the freely disposable portion rises to CHF 400,000, an extra CHF 100,000 the person can now direct anywhere they choose.

What this means for a will written before 2023

A will drafted before 1 January 2023 is not automatically void because the law around it changed. Swiss law does not require an existing will to be reissued or reconfirmed when the ZGB itself is amended, and nothing in the 2023 reform states otherwise.

What can change is how far that will actually reaches. A clause written to leave everything the law allows to be freely directed assumed the old, smaller disposable quota. Under the current law, that same clause may now cover a materially larger share of the estate than the person who wrote it intended, simply because the ceiling around it moved higher.

Anyone who wrote a will specifically to work around the pre-2023 Pflichtteil figures, rather than in general terms, has more reason to have it reviewed. A will that named a fixed fraction tied to the old rule, rather than referring to whatever the disposable portion is at the time of death, is the kind of clause most likely to now say something different from what was meant.

What it does not mean

The reform does not let a person disinherit a spouse or a descendant outright while they are otherwise entitled to protection. It only shrank the size of that protection and removed one class of protected heir, parents, altogether.

It also does not touch how a will must be written, witnessed, or revoked. Those formal rules sit in separate articles of the ZGB and were untouched by this reform. See our page on writing a will in Switzerland for those requirements.

Nor did the reform touch cantonal inheritance tax. Whether an heir pays tax on what they receive, and how much, depends entirely on the canton where the deceased was domiciled, a separate question covered on our inheritance tax by canton page.