Updated September 5, 2026. Quick answer: Georgia has no elective share at all; it abolished dower and curtesy and never adopted a Uniform Probate Code election. The only guaranteed protection against disinheritance is Year’s Support under O.C.G.A. Sec. 53-3-1 et seq, a court-set award sized to the family’s circumstances rather than a fixed percentage.
What Georgia actually sets out
| What the statute sets out | What it says |
|---|---|
| O.C.G.A. Sec. 53-3-1 et seq. (Year’s Support) | “The surviving spouse and minor children of a testate or intestate decedent are entitled to year’s support in the form of property for their support and maintenance for the period of 12 months from the date of the decedent’s death.” |
| What protects the surviving spouse instead | none; no statutory percentage exists; Georgia abolished dower/curtesy and never adopted an elective share. The only guaranteed protection is ‘Year’s Support,’ a court-determined award of property for 12 months’ support that a spouse must elect instead of any will bequest expressly made ‘in lieu of year’s support.’ |
| Regime type | no elective share; a different statutory protection instead |
| Can it be waived | no dedicated elective-share waiver statute exists (none needed); a will can force an election by stating a bequest is ‘in lieu of year’s support’ |
| Time limit to file | a Year’s Support petition must be filed within 2 years of the decedent’s death |
How it works in practice
- The actual protection here is Year’s Support, a court-set award sized to the family’s circumstances and prior standard of living; not a fixed percentage of the estate, and a will can force a choice between it and a bequest.
- Not applicable here: there is no elective share to plan around in the first place.
- Waiver: No dedicated elective-share waiver statute exists (none needed); a will can force an election by stating a bequest is ‘in lieu of year’s support’.
- The election has to be affirmatively filed on a deadline: a Year’s Support petition must be filed within 2 years of the decedent’s death.
The national picture, including the Uniform Probate Code sliding-scale schedule that a minority of states actually use, is on the elective share calculator page; this page is the record for Georgia specifically, and its own numbers above should be used instead of the calculator’s national default for a Georgia estate. The one thing that reliably defeats an elective share in every state that has one is explained on whether a prenup can waive the elective share. A newly widowed reader working through the fuller list of irreversible decisions, of which this is one, can start from the surviving spouse checklist.
What this page does not settle
- This session confirmed the core figure above against a primary or verbatim-mirror source, with one open point: The absence of any elective-share statute is a negative claim, well-corroborated by multiple independent secondary sources but not provable by an exhaustive official index.
- A state can amend or repeal this section without the page around it changing, and a detail specific to a reader’s own situation, such as a pending divorce, a premarital agreement, or property held jointly with right of survivorship, can change which part of the statute actually applies.
- Whether a revocable trust changes the outcome in Georgia is explained above; that answer is specific to this state and does not generalize to any other one.
- Every quotation here was read against the source on September 5, 2026. Nothing on this page is legal advice, and the exact dollar or percentage amount a court awards depends on facts this page cannot know.
Whether this statute reaches a given family’s actual facts is decided by a court, not by this page. Nothing here is legal advice, and no one should sign a waiver or forgo an election on the strength of a web page.
Sources
The sources above were retrieved and read against the state text on September 5, 2026. Every quotation on this page was checked against those bytes.