Shehbaz was born on 23 September 1951[1][7][8] and belongs to the Sharif family, a Punjabi-speaking Kashmiri political family in Lahore, Punjab, Pakistan.[4] His father, Muhammad Sharif, was an upper-middle-class businessman and industrialist whose family had emigrated from Anantnag in Kashmir for business, and eventually settled in the village of Jati Umra in Amritsar district, Punjab at the beginning of the twentieth century.