Is Inheritance Community Property in Louisiana?

No. In Louisiana, inheritance is not community property — it is the separate property of the spouse who received it, under Louisiana Civil Code Article 2341.¹ Your spouse has no ownership claim to what you inherit, whether the inheritance arrives before or during the marriage. The catch is that the income an inherited asset produces usually does become community property, and a few routine mistakes can quietly convert the inheritance itself into shared property. Keeping an inheritance separate takes a little deliberate housekeeping.

Why Louisiana Treats Inheritance as Separate

Louisiana’s default marital property regime, the community of acquets and gains, presumes that anything either spouse acquires during the marriage belongs to both of you equally.² Article 2341 carves out specific exceptions. Inheritance is one of them, alongside gifts made to one spouse individually, property owned before the marriage, and new property bought with traceable separate funds.¹ The logic is simple: an inheritance comes from a family relationship, not from the joint efforts of the marriage.

So the base rule is clear. What complicates it is everything that happens after the money or asset lands in your hands.

Income From Your Inheritance Usually Becomes Community Property

This surprises most people. Under Article 2339, the rent, interest, dividends, and royalties generated by your separate property are community property by default.³ If you inherit a rental house that brings in $1,500 a month, the house is yours, but your spouse has a legal claim to half the rent. The same goes for interest on an inherited savings account, dividends on inherited stock, and mineral royalties on inherited land.

Filing a Reservation of Fruits

You can keep that income separate by filing a document called a reservation of fruits. Article 2339 requires the declaration to be made either as an authentic act (signed before a notary and witnesses) or as a private document that has been formally acknowledged. You also have to deliver a copy to your spouse before you record it.³

Where you file depends on the type of property:

Real estate: the conveyance records of the parish where the property sits.
Investments, bank accounts, and other movable property: the conveyance records of the parish where you live.

There is no deadline. But the reservation only works going forward, from the moment it has been given to your spouse and recorded. Any income the inheritance produced before that date is already community property and stays that way. Filing soon after the inheritance arrives is the only way to protect the full stream of future income.

How an Inheritance Loses Its Separate Status

The most common way people turn an inheritance into community property is by commingling — mixing inherited funds with marital funds until the two can no longer be told apart. Deposit a $50,000 inheritance into the joint checking account you both use for groceries and bills, let a year of deposits and withdrawals run through it, and the separate character of those dollars starts to disappear.

The Louisiana Supreme Court addressed this in Curtis v. Curtis. Simply placing separate funds alongside community funds in one account does not automatically convert everything to community property. The problem is traceability: once the dollars are mixed so thoroughly that you can no longer identify which came from the inheritance, the law treats the whole account as community.⁴

Two practical rules follow. Keep inherited cash in an account in your name alone that you do not use for household expenses. Don’t retitle an inherited asset into both spouses’ names — doing so is strong evidence you intended to give your spouse an ownership interest. And hold onto the paperwork: succession records, probate filings, the initial bank statement showing the transfer in.

Proving the Inheritance Is Yours

At divorce, the burden is on you. Article 2340 presumes that any property either spouse holds during the marriage is community property, and the spouse claiming separate status has to prove it.⁵ Without documentation, the court will split the asset equally.

The evidence that overcomes the presumption:

Succession and probate records from the estate that transferred the property to you.
Bank statements showing the initial deposit of inherited funds into a separate account.
Deeds or account registrations in your name alone, traceable back to the inheritance.
A clean paper trail for every transfer, if the funds have moved between accounts.

When Your Spouse Can Claim Reimbursement

Even if the inheritance stays clearly separate, your spouse may have a reimbursement claim for how community resources were spent on it.

If community money paid the mortgage, taxes, or renovation costs on your inherited property, your spouse is entitled to reimbursement for half of what was spent. The property is still yours.⁶ The claim runs in the other direction too: if you spent inheritance money paying down the mortgage on the family home or improving community property, you are entitled to half the value back, though your spouse’s liability is capped at the value of their share of community property after community debts.⁷

There is also a claim tied to shared labor. If both spouses spent significant uncompensated time improving the inherited property — personally renovating an inherited house, for example — the non-inheriting spouse can claim half of the resulting increase in value.⁸

What Happens at Divorce and at Death

Because inherited property is separate, it is not divided at divorce. You keep it, subject to any reimbursement your spouse is owed for community contributions.

At death, the treatment is different in a way that costs money. When one spouse dies, both halves of community property receive a stepped-up basis to fair market value under federal law.⁹ Separate property only gets a step-up on the deceased spouse’s share; the surviving spouse’s own separate property gets no adjustment. For a long-held inherited asset that has appreciated, keeping it separate can mean a larger capital gains bill when the surviving spouse eventually sells.

One Louisiana-specific wrinkle at death: forced heirship. Certain children — those 23 or younger when you die, and children of any age with a disability preventing self-care — are entitled to a guaranteed share of your estate regardless of your will.¹⁰ Your inherited separate property counts as part of your estate for that calculation.

Creditors Can Still Reach Your Inheritance

Separate status protects an inheritance from your spouse. It does not protect it from your own creditors. Under Article 2345, a debt you personally owe can be collected from both community property and your separate property, including anything you inherited.¹¹ The protection runs the other way: your spouse’s separate inheritance generally cannot be seized to pay your separate debts, and if community funds are used to pay one spouse’s separate obligation, the other spouse has a reimbursement claim for half.¹²

1
Louisiana State Legislature. Louisiana Civil Code Article 2341 – Separate Property
2
Louisiana State Legislature. Louisiana Revised Statutes, Chapter 2 – The Legal Regime of Community of Acquets and Gains
3
Justia. Louisiana Civil Code Article 2339 – Fruits and Revenues of Separate Property
4
Justia. Curtis v Curtis
5
Justia. Louisiana Civil Code Article 2340 – Presumption of Community
6
Louisiana State Legislature. Louisiana Civil Code Article 2366 – Use of Community Property for the Benefit of Separate Property
7
FindLaw. Louisiana Civil Code Tit VI Art 2367 – Use of Separate Property for the Benefit of Community Property
8
Justia. Louisiana Civil Code Article 2368 – Increase of the Value of Separate Property
9
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 26 USC 1014 – Basis of Property Acquired From a Decedent
10
Justia. Louisiana Civil Code Article 1493 – Forced Heirs
11
Justia. Louisiana Civil Code Article 2345 – Satisfaction of Obligation During Community
12
Louisiana State Legislature. Louisiana Civil Code Article 2364 – Satisfaction of Separate Obligation With Community Property