Inheritance Law by Country: Wills & Succession 2026

Inheritance law looks like a single subject from the outside, but every country actually answers several separate questions differently: who is legally entitled to a share of an estate, what a valid will has to look like, how an estate is administered after death, whether lifetime gifts get pulled back into the calculation, and how much tax the transfer triggers. A will that works exactly as written in one country can be partially overridden in another, simply because the underlying legal tradition treats a decedent's freedom to choose their heirs as a limited right rather than an absolute one.

The pages linked below cover succession and wills law for specific countries in detail. This hub explains the patterns that run across all of them, so a will, an inheritance, or an estate plan that touches more than one jurisdiction can be understood in context. For comparison, US inheritance law sits firmly in the testamentary-freedom tradition described below, though state-level rules on spousal shares, probate, and will formalities still vary widely within the country itself.

Forced Heirship vs. Testamentary Freedom

The biggest fault line in global succession law is whether a person can leave their property to whomever they choose. Civil-law systems, which trace back to Roman and Napoleonic legal codes, commonly impose forced heirship: a defined share of the estate is reserved by law for close relatives, typically children and sometimes a surviving spouse, and a will cannot defeat that reserved share. The rest of the estate, often called the disposable portion, can be left freely. In many forced-heirship systems the reserved share is calculated as a fraction of the whole estate that shrinks as the number of protected heirs grows, and it is usually treated as a right the heir already has at the moment of death rather than a gift the will can decide to give or withhold.

Common-law systems generally start from the opposite premise: testamentary freedom. A valid will can, in principle, leave an entire estate to one person, to a charity, or to no relatives at all. In practice this freedom is not unlimited. Most common-law countries allow a spouse, child, or other dependant who was left without reasonable provision to bring a claim against the estate after death, and a court can order a payment out of the estate to that person even though the will said otherwise. This safety valve, often called family provision or dependants' relief, is discretionary and fact-specific: a court weighs the dependant's need, their relationship to the deceased, and the size of the estate, rather than applying a fixed fraction the way a forced-heirship rule does.

Neither approach is simply "more generous" than the other. Forced heirship guarantees a share without requiring litigation, but it can also override a decedent's considered wish to disinherit an estranged child or to favor a caregiver who is not a blood relative. Family-provision claims preserve testamentary freedom as the default, but they require a dependant to go to court, prove need, and accept a judge's discretion rather than a guaranteed fraction. A number of legal systems sit between the two poles, granting a spouse or child a right to claim a share only in narrower circumstances, such as when they were financially dependent on the deceased or when the will leaves them nothing at all.

Intestacy: Dying Without a Will

Every jurisdiction has a default distribution scheme, known as intestacy or intestate succession, that applies when a person dies without a valid will, or when a will does not dispose of the whole estate. These schemes rank potential heirs in classes, typically starting with a spouse and children, then extending to parents, siblings, and more distant relatives if none of the closer categories survive. The size of each relative's share, and whether a surviving spouse must divide the estate with children or take priority over them, differs by country and sometimes by region within a country. Some systems give a surviving spouse the entire estate if there are no children; others split the estate between spouse and children even when the marriage was long and the estate modest, which can surprise people who assume a spouse automatically inherits everything.

Unmarried partners are treated very differently across jurisdictions under intestacy: some extend full spousal-equivalent status to a long-term cohabiting or registered partner, while others give a partner no automatic intestate share at all, regardless of how long the relationship lasted. This is one of the starkest points of divergence in comparative succession law and a common source of unpleasant surprises for cross-border couples who assumed their home country's rule would travel with them.

Intestacy is also the default that applies to any part of an estate a will fails to address, which is one reason estate planners in multiple jurisdictions treat a will as covering the whole estate rather than specific assets only, and why a will drafted for one country's intestacy backdrop can leave unexpected gaps if the person later moves abroad.

Probate and Estate Administration

After a death, an estate typically has to be formally administered before assets can be distributed: debts and taxes are identified and paid, the will (if any) is validated, and an executor or administrator is given legal authority to act. Three broad models handle this. Court-supervised probate, common in many common-law countries, involves a court formally proving the will, appointing the executor, and often overseeing at least the opening steps of administration. Notarial systems, common in much of civil-law Europe and Latin America, route most estates through a notary who verifies heirship, drafts the deed of succession, and registers the transfer, with a court becoming involved only if the succession is contested. Hybrid systems route straightforward, uncontested estates through a simplified administrative or notarial process while reserving full court proceedings for disputes, insolvent estates, or cases lacking a clear will.

The underlying steps are similar everywhere: establish who has legal authority to act on the estate, identify the assets and debts, settle any tax due, and transfer what remains to the heirs. The vocabulary, the paperwork, the timeline, and the cost vary considerably by country. An estate with assets in more than one jurisdiction may need a separate administration process in each one, since a grant of authority issued in one country is not automatically recognized in another, and moveable assets like bank accounts are sometimes treated differently from real property for this purpose.

Inheritance Tax, Estate Tax, and Succession Tax

Who is legally entitled to inherit and how much tax applies to that inheritance are two different rules, decided by two different bodies of law, and they do not always align. Some countries tax the estate itself as a single unit before distribution, calculating the tax on the total value left behind regardless of who receives it. Others tax each heir individually on what they personally receive, often at a rate that depends on how closely related the heir is to the person who died, with closer relatives typically facing lower rates or higher exemptions than distant relatives or unrelated beneficiaries. A number of countries impose little or no tax on inheritances at all, particularly between spouses or to direct descendants, treating a family transfer very differently from a transfer to an unrelated party.

Because this is a separate axis from the forced-heirship question, a country with strong forced-heirship protections is not necessarily a high-tax jurisdiction for inheritances, and a testamentary-freedom country is not necessarily a low-tax one. The two rules can also work at cross-purposes for a cross-border family: a jurisdiction might guarantee a child a share of the estate while a different jurisdiction taxes that same child heavily for receiving it, or vice versa. Cross-border estates can face tax exposure in more than one country at once if the deceased, the heirs, and the assets are not all in the same place, which is a common reason to seek country-specific tax advice before assuming a domestic estate plan will work internationally, and some countries address the risk of double taxation through bilateral estate and gift tax treaties.

Lifetime Gifts, Clawback, and Collation

A forced-heirship right would be easy to defeat if a person could simply give away most of their property before death and leave a nearly empty estate behind. Many civil-law systems close this gap with clawback (sometimes called reduction) and collation rules, which treat certain lifetime gifts as advances against a beneficiary's eventual share and pull their value back into the calculation used to determine whether the reserved portion has been respected. Collation typically applies among co-heirs, such as siblings, to keep large gifts to one child from silently reducing what the others are owed; clawback more broadly can let a protected heir challenge a gift made to anyone, including a third party, if it encroached on the reserved share. Some of these systems apply a look-back period measured from the date of death, while others reach back to any gift made during the deceased's lifetime regardless of when it occurred, which is an important distinction for anyone relying on lifetime gifting as part of an estate plan.

Common-law systems generally do not have an equivalent collation doctrine built into intestacy or forced heirship, since there is usually no reserved share for clawback to protect. Lifetime gifts in those systems are more often relevant to tax law, where a look-back period can pull a gift made shortly before death back into the taxable estate, than to a question of who is entitled to inherit. This is one more example of how the who-inherits question and the how-much-tax question run on separate, sometimes unrelated, tracks.

Choice of Law for Cross-Border Estates

When someone dies owning property, or living, in a country other than their own, a threshold question is which country's succession law applies. Historically this depended on rules like domicile, nationality, or the location of each asset, which could split a single estate across multiple, sometimes conflicting, legal regimes, with real property often governed by the law of the country where it sits and other assets governed by the law of the deceased's home country.

Within the European Union, the EU Succession Regulation (often called Brussels IV) addresses this directly for participating member states: it generally applies the law of the country where the deceased was habitually resident at death, but allows a person to choose the law of their own nationality instead, by saying so in a will. That choice can matter enormously in practice, since it can determine whether a forced-heirship regime or a testamentary-freedom regime governs the estate. Countries outside that regulation apply their own conflict-of-laws rules, which may or may not permit the same kind of choice. Separate Hague Convention instruments address related but distinct questions, including which country's rules govern whether a will was validly executed in the first place, a question that matters even when the substantive inheritance law applied is not in dispute. A cross-border estate plan needs to account for which set of rules applies before relying on any single country's inheritance law.

Marital Property and What Counts as the Estate

Before succession law even applies, marital property rules can determine what is actually in an estate. Community-property systems treat most property acquired during a marriage as jointly owned by both spouses, so on the first spouse's death, the survivor may already own half of that property outright, leaving only the deceased's half subject to succession rules at all. Separate-property systems generally treat assets as individually owned unless jointly titled, which can leave a much larger portion of the household's property subject to a will or intestacy, since nothing is automatically carved out as the survivor's own before succession begins.

This distinction matters most for married couples with cross-border ties, since the marital property regime that applies is itself a separate legal question from both succession law and inheritance tax, and the three can point in different directions for the same estate. A couple who married in a community-property country and later moved to a separate-property country, for example, may find that the property regime they assumed still applied does not travel automatically, and that a local court applies its own default rule instead absent a valid marital agreement saying otherwise.

Will Formalities Across Traditions

Separate from who is entitled to inherit is the question of what makes a will legally valid in the first place, and traditions differ sharply here too. Witnessed wills, typically signed by the person making the will in front of two or more witnesses who also sign, are the standard form in most common-law and many civil-law countries. Notarial wills, executed in front of a notary who is a legal officer rather than a lay witness, are the default or preferred form in a number of civil-law countries and generally carry a strong presumption of validity precisely because a legal professional supervised their execution. Holographic wills, entirely handwritten and signed by the person making them without any witness requirement, are recognized in some jurisdictions and not recognized at all in others, making a handwritten will that is perfectly valid in one country legally worthless in a neighboring one.

This matters for cross-border estates for the same reason choice-of-law questions do: a will valid where it was signed is not automatically treated as valid everywhere, which is exactly the gap the Hague Convention on the form of testamentary dispositions is designed to narrow by recognizing a will as formally valid if it complies with the law of any of several connected countries, such as where it was signed, where the person was domiciled, or where they were a national.

Separately, some civil-law systems give a surviving spouse a usufruct, a legal right to use, occupy, and draw income from certain estate property (most commonly the family home) for life, rather than outright ownership of a share of it. Full ownership then passes to the children or other heirs, subject to the spouse's lifetime right. This is a meaningfully different outcome from a common-law spousal share, since a usufruct holder cannot generally sell the underlying property outright, and understanding which model applies is important for anyone assuming a surviving spouse simply "inherits" a fixed portion of the estate outright.

Inheritance and wills law by country

Explore the full guide for each country we cover. Every country page cites its own primary legislation and is kept up to date.

Europe

• UK Wills, Probate & Inheritance Tax: A Plain Guide
• Ireland Wills and Probate: Probate, Inheritance Tax and Care Planning
• Wills and Estates in France: Inheritance, Forced Heirship, and Succession Tax
• Erbrecht: The Complete Guide to German Inheritance Law
• Italian Wills and Inheritance Law: An Overview
• Belgian Inheritance Law and Inheritance Tax: How It Actually Works (2026)
• Inheritance Law in Spain: Wills, Heirs, the Legítima and the Tax (2026)
• Dutch Succession Law (Erfrecht): Wills, Estates and Probate
• Inheritance Law in Austria: Erbrecht Overview (Wills, Compulsory Share, Probate and Tax)
• Switzerland Inheritance Law: Wills, the 2023 Reform and Cantonal Tax

Americas

• Wills, Probate & Estates in Canada by Province

Asia-Pacific & Africa

• Wills and Probate in Australia: A Guide by State and Territory
• New Zealand Wills and Estates Law: Wills, Probate, and EPAs
• Wills, Estates and Power of Attorney in Singapore
• South Africa Wills and Estates: Wills, Deceased Estates and Intestate Succession (2026)

For the United States, see our state-by-state guide to probate and our last will and testament generator.

This page provides general legal information about how this area of law differs between countries. Laws change frequently and can vary by region within a single country. It is not legal advice. For a specific situation, consult a qualified lawyer in the relevant jurisdiction.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is forced heirship?

Forced heirship is a rule, common in civil-law countries, that reserves a portion of a deceased person's estate for specific close relatives, usually children and sometimes a spouse, regardless of what the will says. Only the remaining, undisposed portion of the estate can be left freely.

Can a will override forced heirship?

Generally no. In a forced-heirship system, a will can direct how the freely disposable portion of the estate is distributed, but it cannot defeat the reserved share owed to protected heirs. Some jurisdictions allow limited exceptions or a valid choice of a different governing law in cross-border cases.

Does testamentary freedom mean a will can leave out family members entirely?

In principle, yes, in most common-law countries. In practice, a spouse, child, or other dependant who was left without reasonable financial provision can often bring a family-provision or dependants'-relief claim against the estate, and a court can award them a share even though the will excluded them.

What happens if someone dies without a will?

Every country has intestacy rules that set a default order of heirs, typically starting with a spouse and children, and a formula for dividing the estate among them. These default rules also fill any gap left by a will that does not address the entire estate, and they can treat unmarried partners very differently from country to country.

Is inheritance tax the same as estate tax?

Not exactly. An estate tax is generally charged against the estate as a whole before distribution, while an inheritance tax is charged to each heir individually, often at a rate that depends on their relationship to the deceased. Some countries use one system, some use the other, and some have little or no tax on inheritances at all.

Can lifetime gifts affect how an estate is divided?

In many civil-law systems, yes. Clawback and collation rules can treat certain lifetime gifts as advances on a beneficiary's eventual share, pulling their value back into the calculation used to check whether a reserved share has been respected. Rules on how far back this reaches, and whether it can affect gifts made to people outside the family, vary by country.

Which country's law applies to a cross-border estate?

It depends on where the case is being decided. Within the European Union, the EU Succession Regulation generally applies the law of the deceased's last habitual residence unless they chose the law of their nationality in a will. Outside the EU, countries apply their own conflict-of-laws rules, and international instruments like the Hague Conventions address related questions such as the formal validity of a will.

Is a handwritten will valid everywhere?

No. A fully handwritten, unwitnessed will (a holographic will) is legally valid in some countries and not recognized at all in others. A will valid where it was signed is not automatically valid in every country, which is one reason international instruments exist specifically to address which country's rules govern a will's form.

What is a spousal usufruct in inheritance law?

A usufruct is a right some civil-law systems give a surviving spouse to use, live in, and draw income from certain estate property, often the family home, for the rest of their life, while full ownership passes to the children or other heirs subject to that right. It is a different outcome from simply inheriting a share of the property outright, since the usufruct holder generally cannot sell the underlying asset.