Estate administration rules are scattered across statutes, court fee schedules, county forms, and local instructions. Someone who has just become an executor has to assemble all of it while grieving, usually within days, usually for the first time. This site puts the controlling source next to each working answer so the assembly takes minutes instead of evenings.
The problem this addresses
Search for what probate costs in a given state and you will find confident numbers with no citation, pages that promise a calculator and contain no form controls, and articles last reviewed years ago with no date shown. Several of the most visible pages in this category require an account before they show you anything.
None of that is dishonest, exactly. It is just optimised for something other than being checkable. A number without a source cannot be verified, and a number without a date cannot be trusted to be current.
What is different here
- Every figure is quoted, not summarised. All 254 quotations are the publisher’s own words — usually a statute, and where a state moves a figure by other means, the court form, fee schedule or agency notice that actually sets it. A live verification run re-fetches each one; the release build checks the resulting authenticated ledger text, and cannot go out while any quotation or assertion fails.
- Every figure carries a date. The source ledger records when each statute was last re-fetched, with 952 named conditions checked across 254 sources. The current snapshot was generated on September 15, 2026.
- Unknowns stay unknown. Where a controlling amount is set by county rule, no figure is published. A silent zero in a cost tool reads as “free”, which is the worst available way to be wrong.
- Nothing is gated. No account, no email, no trial. Case entries stay in the browser and are never transmitted.
- The data is exportable. The full source catalog downloads as JSON or CSV so the work can be checked, or reused, without asking permission.
What this refuses to do
Coverage is all 50 states, and it was built the slow way. A rule is published as a figure only when it has been located in a primary source, quoted verbatim, and confirmed present in the live government text; where it could not be, the page says so and names the section to read instead of showing a number. A live verification run re-fetches each figure from the state’s own publisher, and the release gate rejects a stale or mismatched ledger instead of silently publishing an old claim.
The scope is also narrow by choice: post-death administration cost and route questions. Not estate planning, not tax, not who inherits, not contested proceedings. Those are the questions people most want answered, and they are exactly the ones that cannot be answered responsibly from a fee schedule.
Current review status
This edition was assembled from primary government records, and every one of the254 sources behind it is represented in the ledger with a recorded re-fetch and machine check; the current snapshot date is September 15, 2026. It has not been reviewed by an attorney and makes no claim that it has. Where other sites in this category display an “attorney reviewed” badge, that claim is only meaningful if a named licensed attorney reviewed the specific material, so this site does not make it.
No named human author or reviewer is currently published for this project. NoPerson, reviewedBy, or attorney-review claim is emitted because none would be true today. The organisation is accountable for publishing this site, while the verification report, methodology, and editorial policy show the checks and boundaries a reader can inspect. A named reviewer will be added only with a real dated review and scope.
Some figures move on their own schedule rather than by amendment. California readjusts its small-estate limits every three years by Judicial Council form; Colorado and Michigan index theirs; Indiana’s has changed twice by statute. For those states the limit is applied by the decedent’s date of death, and the screening tool returns no figure at all until a date is entered, because measuring an older estate against today’s ceiling would give a confident wrong answer.
Operator
Estate Settlement Cost is an independent informational website. It is not a law firm, a court, a government agency, a filing service, or a referral service. It does not accept payment to change a figure, a route recommendation, or a caveat, and no commercial links are active.
How to check the work
Every claim on this site is designed to be falsifiable by a reader with a browser. Open thesource ledger, pick any citation, follow it to the government site, and search the page for the quoted sentence. If it is not there, or the figures differ, the published source governs and this site is wrong — and a correction naming the citation and the language you see maps directly onto a specific check in the ledger.
The methodology describes how sources are selected and verified, the editorial policy sets the publication standard, and thechangelog records corrections including the ones found in this site’s own initial data.
The source record for each figure shows its government URL, citation, verbatim quotation, publisher version or effective-date signal when available, response hash, and verification date. The dataset snapshot records the machine-readable release that was used for this page.
Use the tools
The estate settlement navigator walks through one case privately in this browser. The executor fee calculator applies the reviewed state schedule, and the small estate calculator checks the reviewed limit. For guidance on specific tasks, start with theestate administration guides.