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Delaware personal representative compensation

Delaware executor fees

Court of Chancery Rule 192 governs: commissions of personal representatives, and the fees of the attorneys who represent them, shall be allowed in a reasonable amount. Rule 192(b) lists the factors used to fix a reasonable figure — time spent, risk and responsibility, novelty and difficulty of the questions, skill and experience, any will provision on compensation, comparable local rates, and the character and value of the estate assets — and provides that commissions and fees are not unreasonable merely because based on hourly rates, on the value of the probate estate, or on the value of assets. Delaware publishes no percentage schedule; the amount is set case-by-case by the court.

Sources reviewed August 9, 2026. Latest primary-source re-fetch October 3, 2026.

How Delaware sets executor compensation

Delaware sets no percentage schedule, so no fee can be computed from the estate value. The Court of Chancery (Register of Wills) decides what is reasonable for the work actually done; the governing text is quoted in the source below.

Delaware sets no statutory commission percentage

12 Del. C. § 2305(a) is one sentence: "Commissions and attorneys’ fees shall be allowed as provided by rule of the Court of Chancery." Delaware deliberately does not put a percentage in the code, so any figure quoted as "the Delaware executor fee" is coming from a court rule or from custom, not from the statute.

What the statute does supply is two ways a commission can be cut. Subsection (b) bars any commission to an executor or administrator who has not complied with Chapter 13 of Title 30, with the penalty holding off until one month after the Division of Revenue gives notice of the delinquency. Subsection (c) lets the Court of Chancery "reduce commissions and attorneys’ fees if the accounts required to be filed by this chapter are not filed within the required time period."

Both levers are about paperwork rather than effort. A Delaware personal representative who does the work well but files late, or who leaves a Title 30 obligation open, is exposed on compensation in a way that a percentage schedule would not produce.

Source: 12 Del. C. § 2305, read from the enacting state’s own published code on 2026-09-17. Quoted wording is the statute’s; the surrounding explanation is this site’s reading of it and is not legal advice.

Compensation source

Delaware record: 4/4 verified, 16 matched checks, latest source re-fetch October 3, 2026. Source record · method · report a correction

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