Every year, hundreds of millions of Muslims across the world pay a proportion of their wealth as zakat, one of the five pillars of Islam mandating an annual payment of a proportion of an individual’s productive wealth, broadly representing 2.5 per cent.
Consequently, zakat represents a significant part of how redistribution and social protection works in practice. And yet there have been almost no empirically robust estimates of its quantum and effect. Since 2021, a partnership between the ICTD and the Lahore University of Management Sciences has enabled more systematic accounts of how zakat is paid in practice, including through a new nationally representative survey of 7,500 Sunni Pakistanis conducted via computer-assisted telephone interviews in 2024. Using this novel data, this factsheet explains how much zakat we can estimate is being paid in Pakistan every year – and where the money is going.
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