In trust law, corpus refers to what?

• A. The trust's principal assets
• B. The income generated by the trust
• C. The grantor's contributions
• D. The beneficiary's rights

Answer: (A)

In trust law, corpus refers to the trust’s principal assets—the property that is placed into the trust and forms the base of the trust estate. It’s the actual assets the trustee holds and manages for the beneficiaries. Any earnings the trust generates, like interest, rent, or dividends, are considered income produced by that corpus. The grantor’s initial contributions help form the corpus, but the term itself points to the assets that constitute the trust. Beneficiaries have rights to the benefits from the trust as specified in the trust instrument, which come from the corpus’s income or principal, not from the corpus itself as a separate concept.