Two measures, set in metal
The Prophet ﷺ did not fix the nisab as an abstract sum of money — money inflates and currencies vanish. He fixed it in weights of precious metal, which hold their meaning across centuries. There are two:
- Gold20 mithqāl of gold — 87.48 grams. Worth roughly $11,742 today.
- Silver200 dirham of silver — 612.36 grams. Worth roughly $1,312 today.
Values as of June 11, 2026, from a daily basket of named gold and silver sources — see the methodology. The mithqāl and dirham are the classical units; the gram weights are their modern equivalents, used consistently across this site.
Parity in the Prophet’s ﷺ time
In the early Islamic economy, these two thresholds were equivalent. Twenty gold dinars and two hundred silver dirhams traded at roughly the same value — about ten dirhams to the dinar — and either sum was enough to sustain a modest household for a year. A person who held that much, beyond their needs and for a full year, was understood to be genuinely surplus: secure enough that a small share of their wealth rightfully belonged to those who were not. That, not an arbitrary number, is what the nisab was always meant to capture.
Why the two have diverged
That ancient parity broke. Over the modern era the gold-to-silver price ratio widened enormously — from roughly 10 or 15 to one, to often eighty or ninety to one. Gold became the store of value central banks hoard; silver became an industrial metal, far cheaper by weight. The result is that the two nisab thresholds, once identical, now stand far apart: the silver threshold sits at a small fraction of the gold one.
This is not a flaw in the law — it is the law faithfully applied to a world that changed. But it does force a real choice, because the two thresholds now classify very different people as zakat payers. Which one should you use? We lay out both cases →
The year matters too: the hawl
Crossing the nisab is necessary but not sufficient. Zakat is owed only once a full lunar year — the hawl — has passed with your wealth at or above the threshold. The clock starts the day you first cross the line; one Islamic year later, that date becomes your zakat anniversary, and you recalculate every lunar year thereafter. Brief dips below the nisab during the year do not normally reset the clock, as long as you remain above it at the start and the end. Because the lunar year is about eleven days shorter than the solar one, anchoring zakat to a solar date quietly skips a year every few decades — so the lunar calendar is part of the obligation, not a detail.
Above the line, and below it
If your net zakatable wealth is below the nisab at your anniversary, you owe no zakat for that year. You are not a payer — and, depending on your circumstances, you may even be among those eligible to receive it.
If you are at or above the nisab, zakat is due on the entire net amount — not merely on the surplus above the threshold. A person whose net zakatable wealth equals the gold nisab of $11,742 owes 2.5% of that whole figure, not 2.5% of the few dollars by which they cleared the bar. The threshold is a gate, not a deductible.
One more point often missed: it is your net zakatable wealth that meets the nisab — your zakatable assets minus the debts actually due in the coming year. The full zakat calculator works that net figure out for you and tells you whether you have crossed the line.