Changelog

Small-estate screening and clearer source explanations

The calculator now withholds a small-estate filing price when the entered estate exceeds that route’s limit. This correction was committed on October 16 in 4d507e2; it covers Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Michigan, Florida and Nevada, and does not change their legal ceilings. Pennsylvania’s executor summary now states only the reasonable-and-just standard in 20 Pa.C.S. § 3537, removing an unsupported Johnson-schedule aside. These source changes are recorded by their text-change dates; this entry does not assert a deployment date.

On October 17, pages with no single published limit explain the state-specific reason, waiting-period gaps direct readers to confirm the timing with the court, and source explanations use plain labels. The source-check dates remain separate from page-edit dates.

California collected first-petition charge

California first-petition court charge corrected to the 2026 schedule’s collected $435 standard fee; Riverside and San Francisco collect $450 and are excluded from the standard estimate. The former $355 was only the Government Code § 70650(a) base component. California combined filing-and-ordinary-compensation examples now use the collected charge.

California probate costs · Official 2026 court schedule.

Small-estate routes no longer priced above their limits

Data corrections

• The filing-cost headline for a $100,000 estate counted every published fee schedule, including small-estate routes the law closes at that value. Vermontread $50–$265, but the $50 affidavit procedure is open only to estates of $45,000 or less (14 V.S.A. § 1901); the headline is now $265.Massachusetts read $100–$375, but voluntary administration stops at $25,000 (G.L. c. 190B, § 3-1201); it is now $375. Rhode Islandread $35–$1,000, but the § 33-24-1 statement stops at $15,000; it is now $1,000. The state comparison table moved the same way, and Michigan’s figure there is now the $150 opening fee rather than the $25 § 3982 assignment, which stops at $53,000 for a 2026 death.
• The itemised fee tables on those pages, and on Florida’s and Nevada’s, priced each small-estate route at $400,000 and $1,000,000 estates. They now say the route is not available above its limit, or, where the statute reopens it (Florida after two years from death, Nevada for an estate left to the decedent’s existing trust), show the fee with that condition.

District of Columbia added; two dated rule changes handed off

Data corrections

• Michigan: the small-estate ceiling stopped at deaths in 2025, so every 2026 death returned no figure. The Michigan Department of Treasury notice signed January 30, 2026 certifies $53,000 for 2026 deaths (Table B: $50,000 × 1.057, rounded to the nearest $1,000); that band is now published beside the $51,000 band for 2025 deaths.
• Wisconsin: Wis. Stat. § 814.66(1)(a)2 changes on November 1, 2026 ($36 at $18,500 or less, then 0.2% of the value). Both schedules are now published with their filing dates, and the calculator prices the one in force on the day it is used.
• Vermont: the legislature’s online page for 32 V.S.A. § 1434 showed no section text on this date, so the estate entry fees are now checked against the Vermont Judiciary’s published fee schedule, which cites each line to § 1434. The amounts did not change.

Coverage and product

• The District of Columbia now has its own guide, small-estate, executor-fee, filing-cost, timeline and source pages, from D.C. Code §§ 20-351, 20-751, 20-903 and Superior Court Probate Rule 108.
• A corrections form replaces email as the main way to report a wrong figure; what it stores is listed in the privacy policy. The separate disclaimer page now lives inside the terms.

Trust pages now expose the current verification snapshot

The trust pages now state the current ledger-backed snapshot consistently and distinguish live source re-fetches from offline release checks. The verification ledger contains 1006 checks across 269 primary-source records, with 1006 matched in the current snapshot. The policy page links directly to the public verification report and names the absence of a human reviewer instead of implying one.

Ad-network site verification, with serving still off

The site entered AdSense site verification: every page now carries the network’s site-verification snippet and ads.txt carries the matching seller record. No ad serves, no ad unit exists on any page, and nothing about a calculation, a route, or a caveat changed. The release check that previously rejected any ad code now enforces the declared stage instead: before verification it rejects everything as before; during verification it requires exactly the verification snippet and seller record and rejects anything beyond them; and ad serving remains impossible to enable until the separate activation gate — network approval, a deployed consent platform, and a deliberate switch — is satisfied in full.

Release review: verification bound to values, and unknowns made honest

A release review found that verification proved a source had been fetched but not that the number published matched it, and that several results resolved confidently from inputs that had never been supplied. Both classes are corrected.

Verification

• Every published figure, enum, tier and fee component is now declared separately in the verification layer and compared by value. A threshold edited in the data would previously have kept a valid citation; it now fails the build.
• The exact text the quotation checks read is authenticated by its own digest, so editing a quote and its captured snapshot together no longer leaves the record valid.
• Each check is re-run against that authenticated text on every build rather than trusting the recorded result, and each numeric claim must appear in the text its evidence matched.

Results that were resolving on absent information

• A missing date of death counted as zero days elapsed, which silently failed every waiting period and produced a confident “does not qualify” from an empty field. Missing, malformed, impossible and future dates now leave the route undecided.
• Missouri measures the estate after unsecured debt and Washington excludes a surviving spouse’s community-property interest. Neither figure can come from an asset list, and both were effectively treated as zero. Both are now collected, and the result stays undecided until they are supplied.
• North Carolina assesses its value charge on personal property plus the proceeds of real property that is sold, excluding real property that is kept. The charge was being applied to all real property. It now asks whether the property will be sold, and withholds the figure until that is known.
• Missouri’s filing schedule is stated in the statute as applying before adjustment by the supreme court. It is no longer shown as a current total anywhere; it appears as a labelled baseline with a pointer to the operative authority.
• Court charges now show what they are assessed on and what they exclude, next to the figure rather than on a separate page.
• Saved and shared cases restore the jurisdiction-specific figures they store, which previously vanished on reload and quietly returned a resolved answer to undecided.
• Checklist progress saved in a corrupted or outdated form is now reconciled against the checklist that exists, with the reset explained, instead of risking a broken page.

Adversarial review: five understated or misstated figures corrected

An independent adversarial review of the registry against the captured statutory text found figures that were verifiable and still wrong, because the verification confirmed the clause that was cited rather than every clause that applies. Each is recorded individually.

• Washington filing cost was understated by $90. The published figure was the $200 base under RCW 36.18.020(2)(f). Subsection (5)(c) adds a mandatory $40 surcharge to all fees under the section except (2)(b), (d) and (h), and subsection (6) adds $50 to fees under (2)(a), (b), (c), (e), (f) and (g) — which names (f) expressly. The correct statewide total is $290, and it is now itemised.
• Florida omitted a mandatory $4 service charge. Section 28.2401(3) adds it to petitions seeking summary, formal, and ancillary administration. Totals are now $234, $344 and $399 rather than $230, $340 and $395.
• Missouri’s schedule was presented as current. Section 488.012 states those amounts apply “prior to adjustment by the supreme court”, and subsection 2 directs the supreme court to set the operative figures by rule. The schedule is now labelled as a statutory baseline to confirm locally.
• Washington’s threshold counted the wrong property. RCW 11.62.010(2)(c) measures the decedent’s entire estate subject to probate, not personal property alone. The affidavit only transfers personal property, so the counting scope and the transfer scope differ; both are now stated.
• Florida’s summary-administration screen omitted a will condition.Section 735.201(1) also requires that a will not direct administration under chapter 733. That condition is now stated on the page.

Calculation and disclosure fixes

• The navigator showed one generic filing figure that ignored estate value, so Nevada displayed $72 even below the $2,500 threshold where the statute permits no fee. It now prices each schedule and names the proceeding each figure belongs to.
• North Carolina’s $30,000 surviving-spouse ceiling is measured after a statutory allowance this tool does not calculate. That path now returns an indeterminate result instead of a confident answer derived from an undeducted total.
• A malformed fee schedule previously fell back to its highest band, producing a figure no statute supports. It now fails as the data defect it is.
• Restored case data from local storage or a shared link is validated before it reaches any calculation. Negative or non-finite values are discarded with a visible notice rather than silently lowering the estate.
• Verification assertions were re-anchored to the specific clause being cited. Several previously matched the right number in the wrong part of a chapter page, so they could have passed while checking the wrong rule.
• Creditor-notice and claim-bar deadlines are now published as an explicit unknown for every state, naming the chapter to read, rather than being omitted silently.
• The source page previously implied that every build re-fetches each statute. It does not; builds check a recorded result that must be less than 90 days old. The copy now says so.

Source verification harness, and the corrections it produced

Every cited statute is now retrieved again from its publisher and checked against named conditions before release. Building the harness surfaced defects in the initial pilot data that are recorded individually below, because a correction log that only says “improved accuracy” is not a correction log.

Corrections to published figures

• Arizona small-estate value basis. The personal-property affidavit limit was being applied to gross value. A.R.S. § 14-3971(B)(2)(a) measures personal property “less liens and encumbrances”. Estates with financed personal property were therefore screened as ineligible when the statute would have counted them as eligible. Corrected, with a regression test.
• North Carolina intestacy precondition. The affidavit route was presented without stating that N.C. Gen. Stat. § 28A-25-1 applies when the decedent died intestate. A reader with a will could have followed the wrong route. The requirement is now stated on the state page and in the eligibility summary.
• Florida compensation base. The commission base was described as gross probate property. Fla. Stat. § 733.617(1) defines compensable value as inventory value plus income earned during administration. The description now follows the statute.
• All 269 quotations replaced. Every quotation in the initial pilot was a paraphrase presented as quoted statutory text. All of them have been replaced with the publisher’s exact words, and a test now fails the build if any quotation is not found verbatim in the captured source.

New sourced answers

• Statutory filing-cost schedules added for Arizona, Florida, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina, Virginia and Washington, itemised per component and regression-tested against the quoted statute at band boundaries.
• Nevada’s zero-fee band at or below a $2,500 stated estate value, and Virginia’s zero-fee band at or below $5,000, are now published. Both were previously absent, and both matter most to the smallest estates.
• Florida’s formal-administration charge and North Carolina’s per-value assessment with its statutory cap are now computed rather than described.
• Ohio remains without a published filing total. The statute enumerates charges but each county probate court adds its own, so no statewide figure is honest.

Court material

• 99 court-published forms, fee schedules and self-help pages are linked and probed before release. Arizona, Florida, Missouri and Washington publish no statewide small-estate form; each state page now says so instead of leaving the absence unexplained.

Verification gate repaired

The type-check step of the release pipeline was passing without running. The toolchain resolved a Node version below the project’s declared minimum, the language-tooling package failed to load, and the checker fell back to an interactive install prompt that exits successfully when declined. A preflight step now fails closed on both conditions, so a skipped type check is reported as a build failure instead of a pass.

Accessibility and monetisation posture

• A dark-mode contrast failure in the site header is fixed. Text on the brand mark used a fixed white that did not invert with the colour scheme, and a translucent header background left the effective contrast undefined.
• Advertising remains off. The architecture is in place, disabled by default, and the build now fails if any ad marker, publisher id, or non-empty ads.txt appears in the output. No ad network is loaded and no publisher id exists.

Initial reviewed pilot

• 51 jurisdiction records built from primary government sources.
• Private asset classification, small-estate screening, and executor compensation calculations.
• Downloadable source catalog in JSON and CSV, and a seven-phase executor checklist.
• 269 detailed state subroutes kept out of the index for the pilot, so coverage claims stay narrower than the data.