Alabama personal representative compensation
Ala. Code § 43-2-848(a) allows reasonable compensation subject to a ceiling of two and one-half percent (2.5%) of the value of all property received and under the personal representative’s possession and control PLUS two and one-half percent (2.5%) of all disbursements.
Sources reviewed August 9, 2026. Latest primary-source re-fetch October 3, 2026.
The ceiling therefore applies to receipts and disbursements, not to the whole estate value. Extraordinary services may be allowed additionally (§ 43-2-848(b)), and a will or written agreement can vary the amount (§ 43-2-848(c)–(d)).
The calculator applies the Alabama schedule to the value you enter, measured against the money the estate actually received and paid out. Extraordinary services such as litigation, tax work or managing real property are approved separately on top, and a fee the will fixes controls unless the court is asked to change it.
Alabama’s compensation provisions sit in Title 43 of the Code of Alabama. The state’s own publication point responded on the date below — HTTP 200, roughly 59 KB — and contained exactly one navigable link, pointing back at itself. The titles, chapters and sections are assembled in the browser after load, so a request for the code returns the application that would display the code rather than the code.
This is the same failure mode as South Dakota and a different one from Hawaii, and the distinction matters when reading a blank on this site. Hawaii refuses the request. Alabama answers it, successfully, with something that is not the law. A monitoring check that only records status codes would report Alabama as healthy and this page as complete.
Compensation is a particularly bad figure to infer for Alabama, because the secondary summaries that circulate describe a percentage-of-receipts-and-disbursements structure rather than a percentage of the estate. A structure of that shape produces very different answers depending on how much money moved through the estate, not on how large the estate was — so a number restated without its base would be actively misleading rather than merely unverified.
The probate court of the county in which the estate is administered applies the current Title 43 provisions to the accounting actually filed, and is the authority for both the rate and the base it is applied to.
Authority that would settle this: Code of Alabama, tit. 43 (compensation of personal representatives). The access attempt described above was made on 2026-09-17. Nothing is quoted from it, because nothing could be read from it; a figure restated from a secondary summary would look like a sourced answer without being one.
The rate is only half of the answer; the other half is the number the rate is applied to, and in Alabama that number is specific. The reviewed rule measures compensation against the receipts-and-disbursements. The 2.5% + 2.5% ceiling is applied separately to (i) property received and under the PR’s control and (ii) disbursements — NOT to gross estate value. Applying it to total estate value would over- or under-state the cap.
Reviewed source note: which shall not exceed two and one-half percent of the value of all property received and under the possession and control of the personal representative and two and one-half percent of all disbursements
What this means: Ceiling of 2.5% of property received/controlled PLUS 2.5% of disbursements — the base is receipts-and-disbursements, NOT gross estate value. Critical not to apply this to whole-estate value.
Alabama record: 7/7 verified, 23 matched checks, latest source re-fetch October 3, 2026. Source record · method · report a correction