Tennessee probate filing cost: not published

Why Tennessee has no statewide figure

The small-estate filing fee is set locally: the Small Estates Act directs the clerk to charge fees "as authorized and provided in §§ 8-21-401 and 32-1-112", and Tenn. Code Ann. § 8-21-401 is the county-clerk fee statute whose amounts are collected and supplemented at the county level; no single statewide dollar figure exists. Where the amount is set: Tenn. Code Ann. § 8-21-401 (clerks of court fees) and § 32-1-112; the clerk of the Chancery/Probate Court in the county of domicile..

Tennessee court costs: what could not be verified for this page

Tennessee sets clerk fees by statute in Title 8, Chapter 21, with probate-related charges collected by the clerk of the court exercising probate jurisdiction. That title is on the same LexisNexis-only distribution as the rest of the code, so the fee schedule could not be read from a government host on the date below.

Court costs are also the figure least safe to carry over from a secondary source. They are amended more often than substantive probate rules, they vary with what is actually filed, and several Tennessee counties add locally authorised charges on top of the statutory line.

Rather than reproduce a number of unknown vintage, this page leaves the Tennessee court-cost line unstated and points at the office that collects it.

A county probate clerk will quote the current total for the specific filings an estate needs, which is the number that actually appears on the receipt.

Costs are also the one figure on this site where a neighbouring state is no guide at all. Compensation rules cluster — the uniform-code states share wording almost verbatim — but filing fees are set state by state with no common source, and the states nearest Tennessee demonstrate the spread: Kentucky charges a flat $33.00 county-clerk recording fee for a will of five pages or fewer, North Dakota runs probate filings through a civil schedule whose two candidate lines are $160 and $20, and Massachusetts charges $375 to open an estate and then bills the accounting by size and by year.

Against that spread, an unsourced Tennessee number would carry no useful prior at all. It could plausibly be anywhere from twenty dollars to several hundred, and nothing on this page would tell a reader which.

Authority that would settle this: Tenn. Code Ann. tit. 8, ch. 21 (fees of clerks). 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.