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 28 quotations are the statute’s own words, and a test fails the build if any of them stops matching the publisher’s live text.
- Every figure carries a date. The source ledger records when each statute was last re-fetched, with 109 named conditions checked across 28 sources.
- 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 9 states, not fifty. A state is published only when three separate rules have been located in primary sources, quoted verbatim, and confirmed present in the live government text. Generating the other forty-one from general prose would multiply traffic and destroy the only thing this site has.
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
The pilot was assembled from primary government records verified on August 7, 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.
28 detailed state subroutes are deliberately kept out of the search index during the pilot. The published claim is narrower than the underlying data, which is the correct direction for that gap to run.
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 statute 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.