US Probate Cost and Small-Estate Limits by State, 2026

How each US state sets personal-representative and attorney compensation in probate (statutory percentage schedule, reasonable-fee standard, or a hybrid), the basis on which that fee is computed, typical court filing fees, and the small-estate threshold below which a simplified procedure is available, with statutory citations and a per-row confidence grade. Coverage: 51 jurisdictions (30 reasonable-fee, 14 hybrid, 7 statutory-percentage). Methodology. Compiled from state statutes and official court sources and verified in July 2026; the governing citations for each row are in the `statutes` column. `probate_fee_model` is `statutory_percentage` where the code sets a percentage schedule, `reasonable_fee` where compensation is a reasonableness standard, and `hybrid` where a reasonableness standard is capped or guided by a percentage. `small_estate_limit` records the threshold and the procedure it unlocks; several states index it annually, and where the base and the adjustment mechanism differ both are stated in the cell rather than collapsed to one number. Property scope was classified from statutory text with exclusion language taking priority over positive mention, after a naive keyword match was found to misclassify New York. The percentage schedules were validated against published third-party figures: a USD 1,000,000 California estate computes to USD 46,000 in combined statutory fees. How to read this responsibly. Filing fees vary by county in many states; `filing_fee` records a typical range or "varies by county" rather than a false precision. Statutory fee schedules are usually a maximum or a default, not a fixed price. Actual cost depends on estate complexity, whether the estate is contested, and any written fee agreement. Percentage schedules apply to different bases across states (gross probate estate, inventory value, or property received plus disbursements). Do not compare headline percentages between states without reading `fee_basis`. Small-estate thresholds frequently exclude real property, and whether they do is the single most consequential detail for most readers. This is a compilation of law as of July 2026, not legal advice. This table is reproducible from the surviving primary research output by `tmp/build_probate_costs.py --compare`, which rebuilds it from `context/estate/estate_cost_research_2026-07-23.json` and diffs it against the published version: 50 of 51 states match on every field. The one difference is Florida's citation for disposition without administration, published as Fla. Stat. 735.304 where the research recorded 735.301 - flagged for a human check against the statute rather than silently resolved. `filing_fee` reads "varies by county" for 13 states. For six of those the research did establish that fees vary locally; for the other seven (Arkansas, District of Columbia, Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, Montana) it recorded only that no official schedule was verified, which is a weaker claim - and the District of Columbia has no counties. Read that cell as "not established" for those seven. Cite as: "Probate Cost Statistics," Clear Money Guide, 2026, https://clearmoneyguide.com/probate-cost-statistics/ Canonical page: https://clearmoneyguide.com/probate-cost-statistics/