Who inherits in Taiwan, in what order, and what share?
The spouse always inherits; everyone else queues, and only one rank in the queue takes anything. Civil Code Article 1138 lists four ranks in order — lineal descendants, then parents, then siblings, then grandparents — and the presence of a single person in a higher rank shuts out every rank below. Article 1144 then fixes the spouse's share against whichever rank is present: an equal per-head share alongside descendants, one-half alongside parents or siblings, two-thirds alongside grandparents, the whole estate if no rank survives. Article 1141 divides that rank's portion equally per head, Article 1139 prefers the nearer degree, and Article 1140 lets a predeceased child's own children take the child's share by representation. Text as consolidated by the Ministry of Justice to 21 August 2026.
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Only one rank inherits — the others are not in the queue at all
Taiwan does not divide an estate among everyone who is related. Civil Code Article 1138 says that heirs other than the spouse take in the following order: first, lineal descendants; second, parents; third, siblings; fourth, grandparents. The order is exclusive, not a priority for larger shares. If one child of the deceased is alive, the deceased's parents inherit nothing, his siblings inherit nothing, and his own mother inherits nothing — not a smaller share, nothing. This is the single most misread rule in the Taiwanese family, because the household that gathers after the funeral is rarely the household the statute recognises.
Inside rank one, two further rules decide who stands where. Article 1139 gives priority to the nearer degree of kinship, so a living son excludes his own son — a grandchild does not inherit alongside a parent who is still alive. Article 1140 supplies the exception that matters: where a rank-one heir died before the succession opened, or lost the right to inherit, that person's own lineal descendants take the share by representation. A grandchild therefore inherits only in the place of a parent who is gone, and takes exactly what that parent would have taken, divided among the siblings in that branch.
Article 1141 then does the arithmetic: where several people inherit in the same rank, they take equally per head, unless the law provides otherwise. Three surviving children take one-third each of the rank-one portion. There is no premium for the son who ran the business, no discount for the daughter who married out, and no adjustment for who cared for the parent. Those questions are real, and Taiwanese families argue them for years; the statute simply does not ask them.
The spouse's share is not fixed — it depends on who else survives
Article 1144 gives the surviving spouse a mutual right of inheritance and sets the share in four cases. Inheriting alongside rank one, the descendants, the spouse takes an equal share per head with the other heirs. Alongside rank two, the parents, or rank three, the siblings, the spouse takes one-half of the estate. Alongside rank four, the grandparents, the spouse takes two-thirds. Where no heir of any of the four ranks survives, the spouse takes the whole estate. The spouse is never in the queue; the spouse is measured against it.
The arithmetic runs plainly. A father dies leaving a wife and three children: four heads under Article 1144(1) and Article 1141, so one-quarter each. A father dies leaving a wife and his own two parents and no children: the wife takes one-half under Article 1144(2), and the parents share the other half, one-quarter each. A father dies leaving a wife, no children, no living parents, and two brothers: the wife again takes one-half, the brothers one-quarter each. A father dies leaving only a wife: she takes everything. The same estate produces four completely different answers depending on who is alive on the day of death, and the day of death is not a date the family chooses.
This is why the composition of a Taiwanese family changes the plan without anyone rewriting it. A child born, a parent who dies first, a brother who dies before his elder brother — each of these silently re-cuts every share in the estate. A family that agreed a division in 2020 and never wrote it down is not holding an agreement in 2026; it is holding a memory of a different statute-driven outcome.
The debts come with it, and two three-month clocks start when you find out
Article 1148 says the heir succeeds, from the moment succession opens, to all the rights and obligations attached to the deceased's property, except those personal to him. The second paragraph is the one that lets a family sleep: since the 2009 reform, an heir is liable for the deceased's debts only to the extent of the property received through the inheritance. Taiwan is no longer a jurisdiction in which a child can inherit a bankruptcy. But the protection is a ceiling on liability, not an exemption from process — the estate is still administered, and the debts still consume it before anyone receives anything.
Two deadlines then run from knowledge, not from death. Article 1156 requires the heir to file an inventory of the estate with the court within three months of learning that he is entitled to inherit. Article 1174 gives the heir the right to renounce the inheritance outright, in writing, to the court, within three months of learning that he is entitled — and requires him to give written notice to the person who becomes an heir as a result of the renunciation. That last clause is the one families forget: renouncing does not make the problem disappear, it hands the problem to the next person in the Article 1138 order, who is usually a sibling, a mother, or a child.
One warning about the reserved portion, and it is a warning about the official database rather than about the law. The reserved portion — the fraction of a statutory share that a will cannot take away — is set by Article 1223. An amendment to Article 1223 was promulgated on 17 August 2026 and, by the terms of the promulgation recorded on the Ministry of Justice database, comes into force six months after promulgation. The database's default article view already displays the amended text, which lists four classes and no longer includes siblings; the superseded version, still in force today, lists five classes and gives siblings one-third of their statutory share. Anyone reading the article page on the assumption that it shows current law is reading next year's rule. Check the effective-date note at the top of the page, and read the historical version alongside it.
The Singapore assets: what a Singapore structure changes, and what it does not
Start with what does not change. Article 58 of the Act Governing the Application of Laws to Civil Matters Involving Foreign Elements provides that succession is governed by the national law of the deceased at the time of death. For a Taiwanese national who dies domiciled in Taiwan, that is Taiwan's Civil Code — including the Article 1138 order, the Article 1144 spousal share, and the Article 1223 reserved portion — and it does not stop applying because an account is booked in Singapore. Nor does the location of the money change the tax: Taiwan's estate tax follows the person, not the asset, and reaches the worldwide estate of a decedent habitually resident in Taiwan. That is a separate page on this site.
What Singapore genuinely changes is the timetable and the mechanics. Singapore charges no estate duty on deaths on or after 15 February 2008 and has no inheritance, gift or net-wealth tax, so the Singapore leg adds no second tax bill on top of the Taiwanese one. But a Singapore bank will not release a Singapore-situs account on a Taiwanese family agreement, or on a Taiwanese court paper alone: it wants a Singapore grant of representation. Families who have not planned for that discover it in the fourth month, when the Taiwanese estate-tax return is due and the money that would pay it is behind a foreign probate queue.
A trust changes the position more fundamentally, and only if it is settled while the founder is alive. An asset settled into a Singapore trust before death is not in the estate at death, so it is not divided by Article 1138 and it does not wait for a grant. Singapore trusts can run for up to 100 years, sit on no public register, and section 90 of the Trustees Act 1967 shields a Singapore-law trust with Singapore-resident trustees from foreign forced-heirship claims where the settlor was neither a Singapore citizen nor domiciled in Singapore when the trust was created — a condition a Taiwanese founder ordinarily meets. Now the honest limit, because it is the whole point. Section 90 binds a Singapore court. It does not bind a Taiwanese one. A reserved-portion claim brought in Taiwan over Taiwan-situs assets is decided in Taipei under Article 1223, and Taiwan's estate tax continues to reach the founder's worldwide estate whatever any deed says. Singapore takes a category of assets out of the fight and out of the queue. It does not take the family out of Taiwan.