Zakat on cash, savings and salary

Today’s money (notes, accounts) has the rules of gold and silver: zakat is due on it once it reaches the nisab and a year has passed (International Islamic Fiqh Academy, resolution 21, 1986). You pay 2.5% of all the money you own on your yearly date: cash, current accounts, savings accounts, even blocked ones, and foreign currency converted.

There is no zakat on a salary when you receive it (Egypt’s Dar al-Ifta). You count what is left of it on your yearly date, with the rest of your money:

• one fixed date (Hanafi school, Diyanet, Kuwait Zakat House): salaries received during the year are added to the capital; you pay 2.5% of the balance on that day;
• one year per sum (Maliki, Shafi‘i and Hanbali schools): each saved salary has its own year; Ibn Baz advises paying everything on the date of the first nisab, which amounts to paying the zakat of recent sums early.

The first method is the simplest and the safest for the poor: it is the one the calculator uses.

Interest is not lawful wealth: it is not counted in zakat and is not given as zakat. You get rid of it by giving it to good causes (Kuwait Zakat House; Diyanet; National Zakat Foundation). Egypt’s Dar al-Ifta counts both the capital and the interest.

• Lent to someone able to pay who acknowledges the debt: counted every year (Hanafi, Shafi‘i and Hanbali schools); you may wait for repayment and then pay for the past years (Ibn Baz). In the Maliki school, it is zakated once, for one year, on repayment.
• Lent to someone who cannot or will not repay: nothing before repayment; then a new year starts (Hanafi school, Ibn Baz, the Fiqh Academy) or you pay for one year (Maliki school, Ibn ‘Uthaymin).