Sibling buyout calculator
One of you wants to keep the house. The rest want their share. This works out what that costs: the net equity after the mortgage, each person’s share of it, and credit for whoever has been paying the mortgage or fixing the roof since the funeral. Free, no sign-up, no lead form, and nothing you type leaves your browser.
Arithmetic, not advice
Vendwright publishes spreadsheets. We are not a law firm, not a lender and not an estate agent, and there is nothing on this page that earns us a commission on your decision. Property, inheritance and transfer taxes differ by country and, in the United States, by state, so this tool calculates none of them and does not pretend its figure is what anyone ends up with after costs. Get the transfer costs from a local adviser before you agree a price.
Everything is worked out in your browser. Nothing you type is uploaded, saved or shared. Last updated 8 August 2026.
1. The property
The value is the one figure nobody can check from a kitchen table, and every number below hangs off it. Use a written valuation, or the average of three.
2. Who owns a share
One row per heir, including the one doing the buying. Shares can be uneven; if they do not add up to 100 they are treated as proportions and the tool says so. Put in is money that person has spent on the property that the others agree to repay. Owes is anything going the other way, such as an agreed occupation charge.
3. The deal
Who is keeping the house, and what happens to the mortgage on the day it changes hands.
A buyout is a share of the equity, never of the value
Almost every stalled negotiation starts here, and it is settled by one subtraction.
Appraised value
- Work the house needs (only if the valuation ignored it)
- Sale costs avoided (optional, and negotiable)
- Mortgage
- Other charges and liens
= NET EQUITY
Net equity
- Money any heir put in and is owed back
+ Money any heir owes the estate
= THE POT THAT IS DIVIDED BY SHARE
Each heir gets: their share of the pot, plus what they put in,
minus what they owe.
The buyer pays: everyone else's figure, added up.Take the figures this page opens with. The house is valued at 420,000 with 145,000 of mortgage still on it, so the family owns 275,000, not 420,000. Alex paid 12,000 towards the mortgage after the death and is repaid that first, leaving 263,000 to divide three ways at roughly 87,700 each. Alex therefore leaves with 99,700, Sam with 87,700. Jordan is keeping the house, so Jordan pays Alex and Sam, which is 187,400 with each payment rounded to the nearest 100.
Jordan also has to clear the old mortgage to remortgage in their own name, so the money that has to appear on completion day is 332,400, not 187,400. That figure is the one that decides whether a buyout is possible at all, and it is the one people forget until the lender asks for it.
The four adjustments families actually argue about
The division is easy. These are the parts that take three months.
1. One of you has been living there
Someone stayed in the house after the funeral, sometimes because they always lived there. The rest see a sibling housed for free out of an asset they part own. A workable settlement is to charge a rent-equivalent amount for the period since the death and credit them with the mortgage, insurance, tax and upkeep they paid over the same period, then net the two. Enter both figures and the tool nets them for you. Whether either is legally enforceable varies by country and often by the wording of the will, so this is a family agreement being priced, not a right being asserted.
2. One of you paid for something big
A roof, a boiler, a year of mortgage payments. Repaying it off the top before the split is the treatment most people agree is fair once it is spelled out: they get all of their money back, then share what is left equally. The alternative, adding it to their share, silently returns them only their share of it. On a three-way split, someone who spent 12,000 would get 4,000 back. That is the arithmetic behind an argument that usually gets conducted in adjectives.
Money spent that increased the value is different again, because the increase is already in the appraisal. Repaying the spend out of the appraised value gives that heir the improvement twice. If the work is why the house is worth what it is worth, say so and agree a smaller credit.
3. The no-agent discount
A sale on the open market would have taken agent fees, legal fees and months of carrying costs out of everyone’s share, so the sellers argue nobody nets the headline figure anyway. The buyer, though, gets no chain, no survey renegotiation and no sale falling through in week nine. Both are true. The optional percentage lets you put a number on it and split the difference, which is faster than arguing about the principle.
4. The valuation
Nothing else on this page matters if this number is wrong, and it is the number with the strongest incentives pulling in both directions. The buyer wants it low, the sellers want it high, and both can find an estate agent who agrees with them. Three independent written valuations averaged, or one formal appraisal paid for by the estate, is the cheapest thing in this whole process.
What each input means
- Appraised market value
- What the house would sell for today, in its current condition, from an independent written valuation. Not the insurance value, not what a neighbour got, not what it was worth before the kitchen came out.
- Mortgage still secured on it
- The redemption figure from the lender, not the last statement balance. Ask for a redemption statement: it includes interest to the date and any early repayment charge, and it is often a few thousand different from what anyone expected.
- Other charges or liens
- Anything else registered against the property: a second charge, an equity release plan, unpaid property tax, a contractor’s lien, a local authority charge for care costs. They all come off before the split because they follow the house.
- Work the house needs
- Only use this where the valuation assumed the work was already done. A valuer who has walked through the house has usually already priced the state of it, and deducting again is double counting. Where it is genuine, get a builder’s written quote rather than an estimate, for the same reason as the valuation.
- Sale costs avoided
- A percentage of the value, deducted before the split. It represents the agent and legal fees a real sale would have cost. There is no correct figure and no jurisdiction sets one, which is why it defaults to zero: turn it on only if the family has agreed to it.
- Share
- What the will or the intestacy rules give each person, as a percentage. Uneven splits are common and perfectly normal. If your shares are fractions, enter them as percentages: a quarter is 25, a sixth is 16.67. If they do not total 100 the tool treats them as proportions and tells you.
- Put in
- Money that person has spent on the property since the death, or before it under an agreement, that the others accept should be repaid: mortgage payments, insurance, property tax, repairs, the funeral if it was paid from their own pocket and is being settled here.
- Owes
- Money going the other way: an agreed occupation charge, rent collected and kept, a share of an insurance payout already taken. Anything that reduces what they should walk away with.
- The existing mortgage is repaid on transfer
- Normally yes. A lender will not usually leave a loan in a dead person’s name, so the buying heir raises a new mortgage covering both the payout and the old balance. Untick it only where the loan genuinely transfers, which is rare and which the lender has to confirm in writing.
Worked examples
All produced by the calculator above. Change one input and watch which line moves.
Two siblings, one has been living there
A house valued at 300,000 with no mortgage, split equally. One sibling has lived in it for the eighteen months since the death. The family agrees an occupation charge of 9,000, and credits them with the 4,500 of insurance, property tax and repairs they paid in the same period. Net, that sibling owes the pot 4,500.
| Net equity | 300,000 |
|---|---|
| Charged to the occupier | 4,500 |
| Pot divided by share | 304,500 |
| The occupier’s share, after the charge | 147,750 |
| The other sibling’s share | 152,250 |
| If the occupier buys the house, they pay | 152,250 |
The 4,500 does not come off the buyer’s payment. It moves 2,250 across, because the charge is added to the pot everybody shares and then taken off the occupier’s own line. That is the part people expect to work differently, and it is worth showing on paper before anybody feels short-changed.
Four heirs, uneven shares, a mortgage
A house at 550,000, a mortgage of 210,000, no other charges. The surviving spouse holds 40% and three children hold 20% each. Equity is 340,000. The spouse’s share is 136,000 and each child’s is 68,000. If a child buys the house, they pay 136,000 to the spouse and 68,000 to each of their two siblings, so 272,000 in total, and they need 482,000 on the day once the old mortgage is cleared. On those numbers most families discover the honest answer is a sale, and finding that out in ten minutes is worth something.
Negative equity
A house at 180,000 with 195,000 of mortgage. Net equity is minus 15,000, so there is nothing to buy out and the tool says so instead of printing a cheerful number. The decision is no longer how to split an asset; it is whether anybody wants the property and its debt. That is a conversation with the lender first and an adviser second.
What this calculator does not do
Said once, plainly.
- No tax. Transfer duty, stamp duty, capital gains against the date-of-death value and inheritance tax all differ by country and often by region. The figure here is before any of them.
- No finance. There are no interest rates on this page and no payment schedules, because we would rather not be in the business of pricing a loan between siblings. If the payout is being made over time, put it in writing, secure it properly and take independent advice on both sides.
- No view on who is entitled. The shares are what you type. What the will or the intestacy rules actually give each person is a legal question, and it is the one thing worth paying a professional to confirm before money moves.
- No valuation. It cannot tell you what the house is worth, and every number it produces is only as good as the figure you put at the top.
Questions about buying a sibling out of an inherited house
How do I calculate a sibling buyout on an inherited house?
Start from the appraised value, take off the mortgage and any other charge secured on the property, and you have the net equity. Divide the equity by each heir’s share. The buying heir already owns their own share, so what they pay is the total of everyone else’s shares. On a house worth 420,000 with a mortgage of 145,000 and three heirs sharing equally, the equity is 275,000, each share is about 91,667, and the buying heir pays the other two about 183,333 between them.
Do I buy out their share of the value or of the equity?
Of the equity. This is the mistake that turns a fair offer into an insulting one and back again. A third of a 420,000 house is 140,000, but if 145,000 of mortgage is still secured on it, a third of what the family actually owns is about 91,667. Whoever takes the house also takes the debt, so the debt comes off before the split, not after.
What if one sibling has been living in the house?
It is one of the few things worth negotiating rather than calculating. A common settlement is that the occupier is charged a rent-equivalent amount for the period after the death, and credited with what they paid for the mortgage, insurance, tax and upkeep in the same period. Enter the two figures separately in the tool and you can see the net effect on their share. Whether any of it is enforceable depends on where you are and on what the will says, so the tool records the agreement rather than deciding it.
What if one sibling paid the mortgage or replaced the roof?
Put it in as money they put in. The tool repays it off the top before the equity is divided, which is the usual fair treatment: they get their money back first, then share what is left equally with everyone else. Adding it to their share instead quietly gives them only a fraction of it back, which is how these arguments start.
Should a buyout be discounted because no agent is involved?
It is a genuine question and there is no universal answer. The argument for a discount is that a sale on the open market would have cost agent fees, legal fees and months of carrying costs, so the family nets less than the headline value. The argument against is that the buying heir gets the house without a chain, a survey renegotiation or a sale falling through. The tool has an optional percentage deduction so you can price the argument and then decide it, rather than arguing about it in the abstract.
Can we agree a value without a formal appraisal?
You can, and it goes wrong more often than the arithmetic does. Every number on this page hangs off one figure that nobody can verify from a kitchen table. A written valuation from an independent professional, or an average of three, costs very little next to what the disagreement costs, and it gives everyone something to point at that is not a sibling’s opinion.
What if the house is worth less than the mortgage?
Then there is no equity to divide and there is nothing to buy out. The tool shows the negative figure rather than hiding it, because the decision that follows is a different one: whether anyone wants to take on the property and its debt at all, or whether it goes back to the lender. That is a conversation to have with the lender and an adviser before anyone signs anything.
Is a sibling buyout taxable?
It can be, and it depends entirely on where the property is. Some countries charge a transfer duty or stamp duty on the share being transferred, some tax a gain against the date-of-death value, and some treat a transfer between beneficiaries of the same estate differently from an ordinary sale. There is no honest general answer, so this page does not calculate tax and does not pretend the figure it gives you is a net figure. Ask a local tax adviser what the transfer costs before you agree a price.
What if we cannot agree?
Most jurisdictions have a route for one co-owner to force a sale of a jointly owned property when agreement fails, usually through a court. It is slow, it costs money out of the same pot everyone is arguing over, and it usually produces a worse price than an agreed sale. Mediation before that point is cheaper than the first hearing. The calculation on this page is often useful precisely because it moves the argument from what feels fair to which specific number people disagree about.
Is anything I type here saved or uploaded?
No. The whole calculation runs in your browser. Nothing is uploaded, stored or logged, there is no account and no email address is asked for. Close the tab and the figures are gone, so print the page if you want to bring the numbers to a family conversation.
Two related tools: the probate checker works out whether a grant is needed before the property can be transferred at all, and the inheritance equalisation calculator handles the other common fairness argument, where one child was given money years before anybody died.
If the house is one line in a whole estate
This page settles one asset and forgets it when you close the tab, which is deliberate and stays free. It cannot hold the rest of the estate around it. The Estate Executor Organizer (€12, one .xlsx for Excel, Google Sheets or LibreOffice, no macros) carries the date-of-death inventory, a debts register that updates itself as you pay, an estate account ledger with a running balance and missing-receipt flags, and a distribution table showing every beneficiary entitled, received and remaining, which is where a buyout figure like this one lands. One payment, no subscription, no account.
See the Estate Executor Organizer