Inheritance and Property in Morocco for Foreign Owners

Article 18 of the Dahir of 12 August 1913 on the civil status of French nationals and foreigners, still published as part of Morocco's current legal corpus by the Ministry of Justice, states that the succession of movable or immovable property situated in Morocco is governed by the national law of the deceased, as to who inherits, the order in which they are called, their respective shares, and the validity and effects of any will. In plain terms, as of 2026 a non-Muslim foreign owner's estate in Morocco is settled according to the inheritance law of their own country, not Moroccan law, even though the property itself sits in Morocco.

That is the opposite of what a lot of buyers assume. People picture inheritance as following the location of the asset. For a foreign-owned Moroccan property, it is closer to the other way round: the property follows you.

That nationality rule has one major carve-out. If the deceased was Muslim, whichever nationality they held, Moroccan courts treat the estate as subject to Islamic inheritance rules rather than the deceased's civil nationality law, according to Giambrone & Partners' guide to international succession in Morocco. This catches out Moroccans living abroad who have taken a second nationality and assumed the rules of their new home country would apply to everything they own, and foreign nationals who converted to Islam, often to marry, without realising the change carries through to how their Moroccan estate is divided.

It also means that where someone holds Moroccan nationality alongside another, Moroccan courts will generally only look at the Moroccan nationality for this purpose, which puts Islamic inheritance rules back in play even if the person lived their whole life abroad.

Because the 1913 dahir's nationality rule extends explicitly to "the intrinsic validity and effects of testamentary dispositions", a will drawn up correctly under your own national law can set out exactly who gets what among your heirs, rather than leaving the default order of succession under that law to decide it. For a non-Muslim foreign owner, that is real control: you are not stuck with whatever your home country's intestacy rules would produce.

A will made abroad is not automatically usable in Morocco, though. It generally needs to go through exequatur, recognition by a Moroccan court, before a Moroccan notary or the land registry will act on it, as Giambrone & Partners sets out. That is a process worth starting the moment a will exists, not the moment it is needed, since it runs in parallel with everything else your heirs will have to do.

If you are Muslim, a will cannot simply override the forced shares Islamic inheritance law sets for close relatives. It can still be useful for anything outside those shares, which is exactly the kind of detail worth checking with a lawyer who knows which rule actually applies to your situation rather than assuming.

Nobody inherits a Moroccan property automatically on paper. Whatever law decides the shares, the property stays registered in the deceased's name at the ANCFCC, the land registry, until the heirs complete the formal transfer process described in how a Moroccan notary handles title changes. Until that happens, the property cannot be sold or mortgaged, no matter how clear the will or the law is.

The first step is establishing, in a document a Moroccan institution will accept, exactly who the heirs are and what they are each entitled to. For a Muslim estate this is the acte d'hérédité, drawn up by adoul. For a non-Muslim foreign estate it is typically an act of notoriety, which in practice is usually produced in notarial form, and a version drawn up by a foreign notary still needs that same exequatur recognition before it carries weight in Morocco. Only once that document exists can the land registry record the change of ownership, which is the point your heirs can actually deal with the property rather than just owning it on paper.

Transferring a Moroccan property to heirs through a gratuitous transfer such as a succession attracts registration duty at a reduced rate, rather than the rate charged on an ordinary sale. Under Article 133-I-C-4° of Morocco's General Tax Code, introduced by the 2017 finance law (Law 73-16) and still the applicable provision in 2026, a 1.5% registration duty rate applies to gratuitous transfers of certain property categories, including declarations made in direct line between parents and children and between spouses, siblings. That is well below what registration duty costs on a straightforward purchase, which makes sense: the state treats a transfer on death differently from a sale between strangers.

That duty comes on top of, not instead of, the notarial or adoul fees for drawing up the act of heirship, and the land registry's own charge for recording the new ownership. None of those later fees are fixed enough across sources to quote a figure here with confidence, so budget for them as a real cost and ask your notary for the exact total before the file is submitted, rather than assume the registration duty is the only line.

Once the title is formally in your heirs' names, a sale works the same way any other Moroccan property sale does, including the rules for getting the proceeds out of Morocco if your heirs do not live there. Being an heir rather than the original buyer does not change that process. What it does add is time: the title transfer has to be finished first, which is one more reason to get the act of heirship moving as soon as possible rather than waiting until a buyer is already interested.