1. Primary sources only
Enacted statutes, judiciary fee schedules, and court-published forms are the only material that becomes a published legal input. A figure is publishable only when its citation, verbatim quotation, URL, publisher, and verification date are all recorded together.
Secondary material — legal blogs, law-firm summaries, competitor pages — can identify a lead. It never becomes a source. Nothing on this site is derived from another commercial site’s summary of the law.
2. Quotations are verbatim, and that is enforced
Every quotation on this site is the statute’s own words. This is checked mechanically rather than promised: a script re-fetches each cited section from the publishing body, normalises markup and typography, and asserts that the quoted string is present in the response. All 28 quotations currently pass. If any one of them failed, the build would fail with it.
The distinction matters because a paraphrase of a statute is a summary of the law written by someone who is not the legislature. Presenting one as a quotation misrepresents what the law says, however accurate the underlying number happens to be.
Character encoding
Several state legislatures still serve pages as windows-1252. Decoding those bytes as UTF-8 corrupts section symbols and currency figures, which would silently break the comparison. The verifier honours each publisher’s declared character set for this reason.
3. Every number carries named conditions
A citation says where to look. It does not say what was found. Each published figure is therefore tied to named conditions that must appear in the live text —109 of them across 28 sources, all currently matching.
Florida’s commission schedule, for example, does not publish until four separate rate clauses and the statutory definition of “compensable value” are all found on the page. That definition matters: the commission is computed on inventory value plus income earned during administration, which is not the same as the gross probate estate.
4. Ownership before value
The working probate total includes assets marked solely owned without a beneficiary. Assets marked joint with survivorship, beneficiary-designated, or trust-owned appear in a separate removed ledger so the reasoning is visible rather than hidden inside a total.
This is a screening convention. Actual title language, state property law, whether a beneficiary survived, whether a trust was genuinely funded, and any dispute can all change the classification. An asset marked “not sure” makes the route result indeterminate rather than being assumed either way.
5. Three-valued results, and no silent zeros
- Likely within the limit: every modelled condition is known and satisfied.
- Likely outside the limit: a known threshold or waiting condition fails.
- More information needed: ownership or a controlling legal value is unresolved.
An unresolved value is never converted to zero. In a cost tool a silent zero reads as “free”, which is the most damaging possible way to be wrong. Unknown values carry a reason and, where one exists, a pointer to where the answer is actually published.
6. Filing-cost arithmetic
Where a statute states a computable schedule, it is modelled the way the statute expresses it — fixed charges, value bands, or a per-unit charge — and every component is itemised so each line can be checked against the quoted text. Totals are court charges only.
Where a phrase such as “per one hundred dollars, or major fraction thereof” appears, a remainder greater than half a unit is charged as a whole unit and an exact half is not, because an exact half is not a major fraction. Where a statutory sentence is genuinely ambiguous — North Carolina’s $6,000 cap is the clearest example — the reading used is stated on the page rather than presented as settled.
Where the controlling amount is set below the statute by county or court rule, no figure is published at all. Ohio is the example: the statute enumerates charges, but each county probate court adds its own, so a statewide total would be fiction.
7. Compensation arithmetic
Where a state publishes a percentage schedule, each marginal band is applied once to its own bracket, never to the whole estate. Where the law uses a reasonable-compensation standard, this site does not manufacture a percentage or a range to fill the gap.
The displayed base is a working screen. Statutes define the compensation base differently from one another and differently from the net probate estate, and those differences are described on each state’s compensation page.
8. Court material is linked, and the links are tested
Statutes state the rule; courts publish the paperwork. Court forms and fee schedules are linked separately from sources, and every link is probed before release — currently13 of 13 reachable. A link that stops resolving fails the build rather than remaining on the page.
Where a state publishes no statewide small-estate form, that is stated explicitly. An absent form should read as a finding about the state, not as an oversight here.
9. Scope discipline
This site answers cost and route questions in post-death estate administration. It does not cover intestate succession shares, elective shares, family allowances, creditor priority, tax filings, real-property transfer mechanics, or contested proceedings. Those questions are real and common; answering them from the sources verified here would require inventing the parts that are missing.
Coverage grows when sources are verified. It does not grow by generating a page for every state and filling the gaps with generic prose. 9 states are published because9 states have complete verified records.
10. Review and corrections
Each state record displays its review date, and the source ledger shows when every record was last re-fetched. Changes are logged on the changelog.
A credible conflict with a primary source pauses the affected figure until the source is rechecked. Because every number maps to a named condition, a correction can be stated precisely: name the citation, quote the language you see, and the mismatch becomes reproducible rather than a difference of opinion.
Send a source URL and the affected page to corrections@estatesettlementcost.com.