How Much Did Aretha Franklin Leave Behind?

The legendary Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin, passed away on Aug. 16, 2018, of pancreatic neuroendocrine cancer.

Contrary to her lawyer’s advice to establish a will and trust before her death, Aretha did not leave behind an estate plan for her estimated $80-million estate. Recently, the estate announced that it had finally paid off a delinquent IRS balance of $7.8 million.

According to the Detroit Free Press, by 2021, four different wills were discovered in searches of Franklin’s Detroit home, including three handwritten notes and a typewritten but unsigned document prepared by a law firm in 2017.

A July 11, 2023, verdict ended a yearslong legal dispute among three of the soul singer’s four sons over which of three informal wills found in her home should take precedence over the others. Under Michigan law, other documents—even those “with scribbles, scratch-outs, and hard-to-read passages”—can act as a will. A handwritten will in a spiral notebook, found wedged between couch cushions months after Franklin’s 2018 death, was deemed valid, a jury in Pontiac, Michigan, has decided.

Now that the tax debt has officially been paid off, Franklin’s estate alleges that all new funds are to be shared evenly among her four sons. It will be their responsibility to pay taxes from that point on.

As a result, the four-page document, drafted in 2014, will now guide how the singer’s multimillion-dollar estate and royalties will be distributed among her heirs.