Zakat nisab today, Libya

Two thresholds are set: twenty mithqals of gold (report of ‘Ali, and agreement of the scholars) and two hundred dirhams of silver (hadith of Abu Sa‘id al-Khudri). By weight this gives 85 g of pure gold and 595 g of pure silver (Ibn ‘Uthaymin; Kuwait Zakat House). If you own only gold, or only silver, the threshold of your metal applies.

For cash and trade goods, scholars differ:

• gold: the Kuwait Zakat House, the Diyanet (with 80.18 g), Egypt’s Dar al-Ifta (85 g of 21-carat gold), Jordan, the Grand Mosque of Paris, the Algerian ministry;
• the lower of the two, silver today, “the most beneficial for the poor”: the Hanafi and Hanbali schools for trade goods, the Fiqh Council of the Muslim World League, the Permanent Committee, Ibn Baz.

The calculator uses gold by default and tells you when the silver nisab would change the result.

Zakat is on pure gold. A piece of 18-carat jewellery contains 18/24 gold: 100 g of 18-carat jewellery counts as 75 g of pure gold. So you need 113.33 g of 18-carat gold, 97.14 g of 21-carat gold or 92.73 g of 22-carat gold to reach the 85 g of the nisab.

The prices in the table are international market prices converted at the official exchange rate. Your jeweller’s buy-back price is lower; some institutions use it as the reference (Jordan uses the jewellers’ buying price). In the calculator you can enter your jeweller’s price.

The nisab is a weight of metal, not a fixed sum: its value follows the price of gold and silver and that of your currency. You check it on your zakat day. Some institutions publish a rounded nisab for the year (the Grand Mosque of Paris, the Algerian ministry): it is shown above when there is one.