Is there an inheritance tax in Paraguay?
None exists. No inheritance, estate, gift or net wealth tax appears anywhere in Paraguay's national tax laws, so the tax office assesses nothing when someone dies. Ownership passes to the heirs by operation of law, and what remains are procedural costs, plus a deferred 8% income tax charge that applies only when a resident heir later sells. PwC's country summary lists all three headline rates, inheritance, gift and net wealth, as N/A.
Paraguay Inheritance Tax: No, It Does Not Exist
Paraguay inheritance tax is not low; it is absent. No Paraguayan law imposes a tax on what a person inherits, and the Civil Code that governs death is a transmission statute, not a taxing one. Article 2443 of the Civil Code (Ley 1183/85) provides that from the moment of a person's death, ownership of the assets and rights that make up the estate passes to those entitled to receive them. Ownership moves by operation of law. The code regulates the transfer and charges nothing for it.
The tax statutes agree. Ley 6380/2019, the law that sets every national income tax rate, covers only the corporate tax (IRE), the personal income tax (IRP) and the non-resident tax (INR). Succession appears in it exactly twice: an estate being partitioned counts as a temporary IRP taxpayer until the assets are adjudicated (Art. 50), and inherited Paraguay assets enter IRP as deferred capital income at 8%, taxed when the heir later sells (Art. 57 num. 9, Art. 58 num. 2, Art. 60). That is an income tax timing rule, not a death duty. The older tax code, Ley 125/1991, creates IVA, consumption taxes and a tax on acts and documents, and it contains no succession levy either; the 2004 reform moved gratuitous transfers toward the personal income side instead of creating one.
Outside summaries confirm the zero. PwC's Worldwide Tax Summaries page for Paraguay lists the headline inheritance tax rate, the headline gift tax rate and the headline net wealth tax rate each as 'N/A', in a page last reviewed 7 February 2026. When a Big Four summary cannot even name a rate, it is because the law has none to name.
Paraguay Estate Tax: Also No, and the Estate Owes Nothing New
There is no estate tax either: no levy assessed against the estate as a whole, no filing that computes tax on everything the deceased owned. What the estate interacts with is procedure, not assessment. The assets pass through a court succession and a notarial partition, and the costs there are fees for work done, not tax on value transferred. The costs section below puts numbers on them.
One obligation does follow the estate, and it is worth knowing in advance. Under Art. 50 of Ley 6380/2019, an estate in course of partition, called a 'sucesión indivisa', is itself a taxpayer until the assets are adjudicated, and the heirs are responsible, jointly and in proportion to their shares, for the deceased's outstanding tax obligations. A zero estate tax does not erase the deceased's unfiled returns or unpaid IRP; it hands that responsibility to the people inheriting. And while the estate holds real estate, the ordinary municipal obligations continue, the same ones covered in our property taxes guide.
Paraguay Gift Tax: No, With One Deferred Catch
No gift tax exists. You can transfer Paraguay property to your children, or receive property from a parent, and owe the tax office nothing at the moment of the gift. The catch is timing. For a tax resident, the gratuitous incorporation into your patrimony of movable or immovable property located in Paraguay, or of rights to be fulfilled or exercised in Paraguay, is capital income under Art. 57 num. 9 of Ley 6380/2019. Art. 58 num. 2 fixes when it is taxed: the income is imputed when the recipient disposes of the asset. The rate is the flat 8% capital rate of Art. 60.
So the gift costs nothing today, and the 8% arrives only when the recipient sells. That is deferral, not exemption, and it is the single most misrepresented fact in summaries that call Paraguay '0%' on gifts. The mechanics of that disposal are covered in full in our capital gains guide, and the rate card it sits on is in our personal income tax rates guide.
Paraguay Wealth Tax: No
There is no net wealth tax. No annual levy on net assets appears in Ley 6380/2019, Ley 125/1991 or anywhere else in the national tax system, and PwC's summary again lists the headline net wealth rate as 'N/A'. Under Paraguay's territorial system, the tax law does not even watch foreign income, let alone stockpiled wealth.
The closest thing to a wealth tax in Paraguayan law is not a wealth tax at all. Art. 57 num. 11 of Ley 6380/2019 makes 'every unjustified patrimonial increase' taxable capital income. That rule targets unexplained money appearing in your name, not wealth you hold, and it has a bite worth understanding before you make large undocumented transfers. The next two sections cover both rules.
The One Nuance That Matters for Residents: 8% When You Later Sell
Here is the sequence almost no summary publishes. A tax resident inherits an apartment in Asunción. At the inheritance, no tax is due: the asset entered the patrimony gratuitously (Art. 57 num. 9), and the taxable moment is deferred to the heir's disposal (Art. 58 num. 2). Three years later the heir sells. At that point the gratuitous incorporation is imputed as capital income and taxed at the flat 8% of Art. 60. The tax existed all along; it simply waited for the sale. Any summary that stops at 'no inheritance tax' without this sentence is telling you half the rule.
Who this applies to is a residency question, not a citizenship one. IRP is the resident personal income tax, so the 8% follows heirs who are Paraguay tax residents. Where you stand on the ladder, from temporary to permanent residency, decides whether the rule reaches you, and heirs who are not Paraguay residents sit in a different regime entirely, covered below. For context, numeral 9 is one of eleven capital income categories listed in Art. 57; its neighbors include real estate gains and leases (num. 6) and the unjustified increases of num. 11, covered next.
In practice, when a resident individual sells real estate, the intervening notary collects the tax at the deed itself. Resolución General 42/2020 makes the notary the withholding agent: IRP at 8% over a presumed base of 30% of the sale price, unless the seller elects real-gain taxation, sale price minus the documented purchase cost and itemized expenses such as notary fees, taxes, registration fees and intermediary fees, recorded in the deed. The capital gains guide walks through that arithmetic; the point here is only that the deferred 8% has a collection mechanism and it works.
The Unjustified Increase Trap: Art. 57 Numeral 11
The gift rule has a shadow. If a large sum lands in your account and you cannot document where it came from, the tax administration can treat it as an 'unjustified patrimonial increase' under Art. 57 num. 11, which is taxable capital income at the same 8%. Worse, the final paragraph of Art. 58 back-dates the imputation: an increase detected this year is imputed to the immediately preceding year.
The practical difference is documentation. A gift documented as a gift, with a deed or a clean bank trail, is num. 9 territory: deferred to your later disposal. The same money with no paper trail risks being read as unexplained wealth, taxed at 8% now and back-dated a year. Large undocumented cash transfers within a family are exactly the pattern the rule exists to catch. The fix is cheap: a notarized gift deed, the donor's bank record, and a copy kept by whoever receives. Documentation converts a back-dated problem into a deferred one, which is the outcome the law intends.
How Succession Actually Works for a Foreigner's Paraguay Assets
Paraguay has no direct notarial succession. Every transfer of a deceased person's assets, including a foreigner's Paraguay real estate, requires a judicial succession before a First Instance Civil and Commercial judge, ending in a 'declaratoria de herederos' that names the heirs, or in the approval of a will. The 'extrajudicial' part people mention is what follows: after the declaratoria, a notary drafts the partition escritura, the notarial deed that divides the estate, and the registrations are made. Court first, notary second.
The lawyer fee statute, Ley 1376/88, shows in its Art. 27 how the work is staged: initiation of the suit, then the proceedings up to the declaratoria de herederos or the approval of the will, including the publication of the edicts and the taking of the inventory, then partition. The edicts are the public notice period; the inventory fixes what the estate contains before anyone divides it.
Heirs do not need to travel. A special power of attorney, apostilled and ideally signed at a Paraguayan consulate, lets a local lawyer open and run the succession, and the notary can handle the partition escritura the same way. Foreign wills can be recognized if they meet Paraguayan formalities, but they must be validated through the same judicial process; ownership of Paraguay assets still moves through the declaratoria. A will written abroad does not skip the process, it becomes one of the documents the process recognizes.
What Succession Costs: the Statutory Notary Scale and the Practice Estimates
Zero tax does not mean zero cost, and the two kinds of numbers should never be mixed. The notary fee is statutory. Ley 1307/87, the public notary fee statute, fixes the scale in its Art. 4, and this is the official text:
| Escritura amount | Statutory notary fee (Ley 1307/87, Art. 4) |
|---|---|
| Up to Gs 1,000,000 | Base fee of 5 jornales, never more than 90% of the 2% scale |
| Over Gs 1,000,000 | 2% |
| Over Gs 50,000,000 | 1.75% |
| Over Gs 75,000,000 | 1.5% |
| Over Gs 100,000,000 | 1.25% |
| Over Gs 150,000,000 | 1% |
| Over Gs 200,000,000 | 0.75% |
Art. 3 of the same law defines the unit: fees are calculated in percentages and in multiples of the 'jornal', the minimum wage set for miscellaneous unspecified activities in the capital. Two honest caveats belong next to that table. First, the guaraní thresholds date from 1987 and have never been indexed; the statute reads today exactly as it read then, and ordinary property values passed those thresholds long ago, which pushes most real escrituras into the small-percentage brackets. Second, the tier wording does not itself settle whether each bracket applies to its slice or the final rate applies to the whole amount; this page quotes the scale rather than computing a fee, and the notary calculates the liquidation. One statutory discount exists: property registered under the Bien de Familia regime gets a 20% fee reduction.
The rest of the bill: practice estimates
Everything beyond the notary scale is practice, and should be read as practice. No consolidated official cost table exists for the full succession stack. Current practice estimates run: court fees around 1% of the estate; lawyer fees commonly 1-3% of the estate; registration around 0.74% of asset value; publication of the edicts Gs 500,000 to Gs 1,000,000; the apostille at the foreign ministry Gs 223,000 per document; a will search at the judiciary archive about Gs 35,220. An estate with no assets at all still carries a floor of 60 jornales, about Gs 7,020,000 at the Gs 117,077 jornal cited in 2026. As a planning number, budget roughly 2-4% of the estate for court and professionals, plus about 0.74% registration, and treat every figure in that list as an estimate that varies with the estate, not as an official tariff.
A Worked Example: a Gs 500,000,000 Estate
One 2026 Paraguayan succession guide works a full example: an estate of Gs 500,000,000, about USD 84,000 at the September 2026 exchange rate, incurs about Gs 19,500,000 (about USD 3,300) in total procedural cost, court, professionals and registrations combined. That is under 4% of the estate, and all of it is paperwork. The tax office's share is zero. A partition escritura of that size sits in the statute's 0.75% bracket, the one above Gs 200,000,000, which is the bracket effect those 1987 thresholds produce.
Nothing in that number is tax: the Gs 19,500,000 buys the declaratoria, the professionals, the deed and the registrations. Countries with a real estate tax take a percentage of everything at death; here the whole stack is procedural, paid once, and known in advance from a statute plus prevailing practice. The honest total is still not zero: the estate pays its fees once, a resident heir who later sells pays the deferred 8%, and anyone who tells you the lifetime total is zero has not read Art. 58.
Non-Resident Heirs: Nothing on the Succession, Real Tax on the Sale
Heirs who are not Paraguay tax residents owe Paraguay nothing on the succession itself. The declaratoria, the partition and the registrations cost fees, not tax. What changes for them is the exit. When a non-resident sells inherited Paraguay real estate, that sale is a non-resident tax event, and Resolución General 42/2020 puts the collection at the notarial deed: the notary withholds IVA at 5% over a presumed base of 30% of the transfer value, an effective 1.5% of the price, plus INR at 15% over that same 30% base excluding IVA, an effective 4.5%. Our non-resident tax guide covers the regime in full.
The Home Country Leg: Paraguay's Zero Does Not Follow You Home
Paraguay taxing nothing at death does not stop your own country from taxing everything. The United States estate tax follows citizenship: a US citizen's worldwide estate stays in scope no matter where the property sits or where the person lived. Most other countries assess inheritance or estate tax by domicile, which turns on where you actually lived, not on where the assets are registered. If your home country levies either kind of tax, a Paraguay asset is simply one more asset on that return, and the Paraguay zero does nothing to reduce that bill.
That cuts both ways, and it is the reason 'Paraguay has no inheritance tax' is the start of an answer, not the whole one. The Paraguay side of a plan is genuinely simple: no tax on death, no tax on gifts, a court process with a statutory notary scale and one deferred 8% rule for resident heirs. The other side depends entirely on which passports and which domicile your family carries, and that half has to be checked where it lives.