Kentucky personal representative compensation
KRS 395.150 caps the personal representative’s compensation at five percent (5%) of the value of the personal estate of the decedent, PLUS five percent (5%) of the income collected.
Sources reviewed August 9, 2026. Latest primary-source re-fetch October 3, 2026.
The base is the personal estate (plus income collected), not real property.
The calculator applies the Kentucky schedule to the value you enter, measured against the gross value of the probate estate. 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.
KRS 395.150(1) provides that the compensation of an executor, administrator or curator, for services as such, “shall not exceed five percent (5%) of the value of the personal estate of the decedent, plus five percent (5%) of the income collected by the executor, administrator or curator for the estate.”
Two boundaries follow from the wording. The base is the personal estate, so real property that is not sold in the course of administration is outside the percentage. And income collected during administration is a second, additive 5% base rather than being folded into the first — a long administration that generates rent or interest therefore increases the ceiling in a way a single closing-value percentage would not.
Subsection (2) supplies the escape valve. On proof that additional services have been performed, the court may allow such additional compensation as would be fair and reasonable, but only where the additional services were either (a) unusual or extraordinary and not normally incident to administering a decedent’s estate, or (b) performed in connection with real estate, or with estate and inheritance taxes claimed against property that is not part of the decedent’s estate but is included in it for the purpose of asserting those taxes. Paragraph (b) is how work on non-probate property that is nonetheless inside the taxable estate gets paid for, given that the subsection (1) base excludes it.
The section’s history line is unusually short: effective October 1, 1942, recodified by 1942 Ky. Acts ch. 208, sec. 1 from Ky. Stat. sec. 3883. The percentages have not been revisited since, which is worth knowing before treating the 5% figure as a current market rate rather than a statutory ceiling.
Source: KRS 395.150, 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.
The rate is only half of the answer; the other half is the number the rate is applied to, and in Kentucky that number is specific. The reviewed rule measures compensation against the personal-estate-plus-income-collected. The 5% ceiling is on the value of the personal estate; a separate 5% applies to income collected. Do not apply it to real property value.
Reviewed source note: sha ll not e x c e e d five pe rc e nt (5% ) of the va lue of the pe rsona l e state of the de c e de nt, plus five pe rc e nt (5% ) of the income c oll e c ted
What this means: 5% ceiling on the value of the personal estate PLUS 5% of income collected — base is personal estate, not real property. Letter-spaced text; quote is an exact substring.
Kentucky record: 5/5 verified, 17 matched checks, latest source re-fetch October 3, 2026. Source record · method · report a correction