How to Muslim
Zakat is the third pillar of Islam. Once your savings pass a set threshold and stay there for a lunar year, 2.5% of them stops being yours and becomes a right the poor have over your wealth.
Indeed, the men who practice charity and the women who practice charity and [they who] have loaned Allah a goodly loan - it will be multiplied for them, and they will have a noble reward.
Zakat is a set share of specific kinds of wealth, owed to specific people. It is an act of worship in the same way prayer and fasting are, not a donation you decide the size of. Zakat is the third pillar of Islam — see how it fits with the other pillars, and, like Hajj, is only owed once you can genuinely afford it without hardship.
Tax, council tax, national insurance and utility bills do not count towards it. Those go to the state; Zakat goes to the people named in the Quran.
Zakat is due on wealth once all three of these are true:
Age is not one of them. If a child owns savings above the Nisab, Zakat is still due on that money, and whoever manages it pays on their behalf.
The Nisab is the minimum you must own before Zakat is due at all. Below it, you owe nothing.
The Quran names eight categories, and Zakat has to go to one of them:
You do not have to cover all eight. Giving your whole Zakat to any one of them is enough.
Both are giving, but only one is owed:
This is the small payment made at the end of Ramadan, and it is separate from everything else on this page. There is no Nisab and no lunar year. If you have food beyond what your household needs on Eid day, you owe it. See Zakat al-Fitr for the full rules.
Add up the value of these on your Zakat date:
Farmed crops and grazing livestock are also Zakatable, but at their own rates and on their own schedule rather than 2.5% once a year.
Things you own to live with, rather than to grow wealth, are not counted:
Before working out 2.5%, take off what you actually owe right now:
You cannot subtract the whole outstanding balance of a mortgage or a long-term loan. Only the part due within the current year comes off.
Your Zakat year runs from the day your wealth first reached the Nisab. One Islamic year later, that is your date, and it stays the same every year after. If you genuinely cannot work out when that was, pick a date you will remember, such as the 1st of Ramadan, and keep to it.
On that date, total your cash, savings, bank balances, gold, silver, investments and business stock. What matters is what you hold on the day, not what passed through your account during the year.
Take off the debts and bills due in the current year to get your net Zakatable wealth.
If that net figure is at or above the Nisab, multiply it by 0.025. If it is below, you owe nothing this year.
Zakat goes to people, not to projects. It cannot be spent on building or running a mosque, school, hospital or community centre, and it does not cover funeral costs or general fundraising. If you are giving through an organisation, check they have a separate Zakat fund that goes to the eight categories.
Giving locally is worth considering first, through a mosque or Muslim organisation near you that will pass it to people in need in your own area. Sending it abroad is also fine, and often better where the need there is greater. A few well-known options:
New to all of this? Start from the beginning.
Where to take this further.
A curated hub of Sunni videos, books, and dawah resources.
islamic-library.org · FreeResearch-driven answers to the doubts and questions Muslims actually have.
yaqeeninstitute.org · Free