Legal Calculators

Why these exist

A number you can check, before the meeting

Most legal questions do not have an arithmetic answer. A few of them do, and those few are the ones people most often get wrong, because the rule is in a statute nobody reads and the arithmetic is unforgiving. Whether a claim is out of time. How much of an estate a will can actually dispose of. What the Land Registry will charge on the day of transfer. Whether a tenancy is inside the rent control regime or outside it.

Each of the four tools below applies one statutory rule and shows the provision it applied. None of them asks for a name, an email address or a telephone number. Nothing is sent anywhere; the arithmetic runs in the browser.

Where an answer depends on a document rather than on a date or a figure, the tool says so instead of guessing.

Transfer fees and VAT

The Department of Lands and Surveys charges on a rising scale, and the fee is halved in the cases where the reduction applies. Buying in joint names splits the price across the buyers for the purposes of the scale, which can move the whole purchase into a lower band. VAT and transfer fees do not both fall on the same transaction in the same way, and the reduced VAT rate has conditions attached to it.

The tool takes a price and the way the purchase is structured and returns the figures with the scale it used shown alongside. Open the transfer fees and VAT calculator.

Limitation periods

The Limitation of Actions Law, Law 66(I)/2012, sets different periods for different causes of action, and the period is only half of the question. What starts the clock, what suspends it, and what starts it again are all in the statute, and an acknowledgment of a debt or a payment on account can reset a period that had almost run.

The tool covers the claim types in the Law, applies the extensions and suspensions it provides for, and names the section it relied on. Open the limitation periods calculator.

A limitation point is the one thing that cannot be fixed later. If the answer is close to the line, it is close enough to act on now.

Forced heirship

A will made in Cyprus does not dispose of the whole estate. Section 41 of the Wills and Succession Law, Cap. 195, caps the disposable portion by reference to which relatives survive, and section 44 fixes the surviving spouse's share of what is left. Section 42, the provision foreign nationals used to rely on, was deleted in 2015.

The tool asks whether there is a will, then who survives, and returns the disposable portion and the statutory portion as exact fractions. Open the forced heirship calculator.

Rent control

Whether a tenancy falls inside the Rent Control Law depends on three things at once: where the property is, what it is used for, and when the tenant went into occupation. The controlled areas are not a matter of impression; they are set by a statutory instrument, and a property a few streets outside one is outside the regime entirely.

The tool works through the three questions in order and tells you which of them decided the answer. Open the rent control checker.

The limits, stated plainly

These are calculators, not advice. Each applies a rule to the facts you type in, and it has no way of knowing whether those are the facts a court would find. A limitation answer turns on when a cause of action accrued, which is a question about evidence. A succession answer assumes Cyprus law governs the estate, which is itself a prior question. A rent control answer assumes the tenancy is what the parties call it.

Every tool states its own assumptions on its page and gives the provision it applied, so the working can be checked rather than taken on trust. Where the law has been amended since a page was written, the page says when it was last checked.