Probate source dataset for all 50 states

What this dataset is

This dataset is the machine-readable source ledger behind Estate Settlement Cost. Each row is a primary legal source that the site relies on directly: usually a state statute, and where a state sets a figure another way, the court fee schedule, court form, session law, or agency notice that actually controls it. The published quotation is verbatim, the source URL points to the government publisher, and the verification ledger records when that page was last re-fetched and which machine assertions still matched it.

Coverage is nationwide. The current snapshot spans all 50 U.S. states and includes the source records the site uses for four recurring probate questions: the small estate procedure and its limit, the probate filing charge, the executor or personal representative compensation rule, and the statutory creditor-claim deadlines where this site has verified them to its primary-source standard. When a state does not support a trustworthy number, the related page publishes an explicit gap instead of a guessed figure; the dataset preserves that same bias toward omission over invention.

The point of the dataset is provenance, not just downloadability. A citation tells you where to look; this ledger also records that the source was looked at, when it was checked, and whether the passage still contained the named conditions the site depends on. The human-readable history of corrections and editorial changes remains on the changelog; this page exposes the dataset-specific snapshot metadata that a librarian, journalist, or researcher needs in order to cite one release rather than a moving target.

How to use the downloads

Use /sources/export.csv when you want a flat, one-row-per-source table. The CSV columns are id, citation,title, publisher, url, quote,editorialNote, lastVerified, and sourceClass.

Use /sources/export.json when you want the same source rows plus the jurisdiction index that maps each state to the source ids it uses. That JSON export is the better starting point for search, reuse, and per-state filtering, because it keeps the source catalog and the state grouping in one document.

Use /sources/export.csl.json when you need citation-manager input. It is a CSL JSON bibliography with one record per verified source, including the formal citation, publisher, quotation, source URL, and verification date.

For a state-sized subset, the per-jurisdiction source-record pages under /sources/ expose the same primary-source rows in human-readable form and now carry their own dataset markup. That gives search engines and data reusers both a national landing page and state-specific landing pages without duplicating the source text into fifty hand-maintained files.