What a LegalZoom Will or Living Trust Actually Costs After the First Year
LegalZoom will sell you a complete estate plan for $149. That number is real, it is on their own page, and it is less than three of the online will services we have reviewed here. What the $149 does not tell you is that the attorney access bundled into it lasts thirty days, and on day thirty-one your card is charged $25, and it is charged $25 again every month after that until you call or click to stop it. On the trust side the same feature continues at $199 a year.
None of that is hidden. It is printed in the footnotes of the page you land on. But of the pages currently ranking on Google for the exact questions people type about LegalZoom wills and LegalZoom trusts, and I checked every one of them, not a single page tells you. Not the review sites, not the retirement organizations, not the law firm blogs writing about whether you should use LegalZoom at all. The number people quote is the sticker. The number families actually pay is the sticker plus a subscription nobody mentioned.
So that is what this page is. Real prices for every tier, pulled from LegalZoom’s own checkout pages and re-verified before publishing. A straight answer on the renewal. An honest answer to the question underneath all of this, which is whether a document you filled out on a website holds up when your loved ones actually need it. And a clear line on who should use LegalZoom and who should spend their money somewhere else, including three places we would send you instead.
- Pro Will, $149 individual and $249 for couples. Last will, financial power of attorney, medical power of attorney, healthcare directive, HIPAA authorization, pet care provisions, online document storage.
- Basic Trust, $399 individual and $499 for couples. Living trust, pour-over will, healthcare directive, both powers of attorney, and probate avoidance.
- The attorney access is a trial, not an inclusion. Thirty days on the will tiers, then $25 charged and $25 every month after. A full year on the trust and Premium tiers, then $199 a year. Cancel online or by phone.
- Documents are generated state specific from your answers, and the process tells you what your own state requires at signing.
- Notarization is not what makes a will valid in 50 of the 51 US jurisdictions. Witnesses supply validity; notarization supplies self proving status. Louisiana is the single exception.
What You Get at Each Price: Will Tiers and Trust Tiers Compared
LegalZoom sells estate planning in four packages, two on the will side and two on the trust side, and each one has an individual price and a couples price. The confusing part, and the part that costs people money, is that LegalZoom shows different entry tiers depending on which page you land on. Their last will and testament page opens at a $129 Basic Will that is only the will itself, with no powers of attorney and no healthcare directive. Their estate plan page does not sell the $129 tier at all, and starts instead at the $149 Pro Will, which includes the will plus both powers of attorney plus the healthcare directive.
That twenty dollar gap is the difference between one document and five. If you saw $129 advertised somewhere and arrive expecting it, this is why the price on your screen says something else.
| Package | Individual | Couple | What is included |
|---|---|---|---|
| Basic Will | $129 | $229 | Last will only, plus pet care provisions and online storage. Sold on the will page, not on the estate plan page. |
| Pro Will | $149 | $249 | Everything above plus healthcare directive, medical power of attorney, financial power of attorney and HIPAA authorization. Attorney consultations for 30 days. |
| Premium Will | $299 | $399 | Everything above plus attorney consultations for a full year, an attorney review of your finished documents, and unlimited revisions for a year. |
| Basic Trust | $399 | $499 | Living trust, pour-over will, healthcare directive and both powers of attorney. Keeps assets out of probate court. |
| Premium Trust | $549 | $649 | Everything in Basic Trust plus attorney consultations for a year, attorney document review, unlimited revisions and printed documents. |
Reading that table, the honest summary is this. The $129 Basic Will is a will and nothing else, and a will alone leaves the two situations most families actually hit uncovered, which are somebody needing to make a medical decision for you and somebody needing to pay your bills while you are alive but unable. The $149 Pro Will closes both of those gaps for twenty dollars more, which is why it is the tier we point people to. The $299 Premium Will buys you a full year of attorney access and an attorney reviewing your finished documents instead of thirty days of it. And a LegalZoom living trust, starting at $399, buys you probate avoidance, which is a different product solving a different problem.
If you are not sure whether you need a will or a trust, that question is worth settling before you spend anything, because the gap between the two is $250 and a lot of ongoing work. Our probate guide walks through what probate actually costs and how long it actually takes in your state, which is the number that decides whether a trust earns its price for your family or not.
The Attorney Plan Renewal Nobody Puts in the Headline
Here is the mechanic, stated as plainly as I can state it, because this is the single most useful thing on this page.
The attorney access that makes LegalZoom feel safer than a template site is a separate product called the Legal Assist Plan, and it is bundled into your estate plan as a trial rather than sold to you as a subscription. On the will tiers, that trial runs thirty days. LegalZoom’s own footnote states that after the thirty day period your card is automatically charged $25 and the plan then renews automatically each month at $25 a month. On the trust tiers and the Premium tiers, the same benefit runs a year and then continues automatically at $199 per year. You can cancel online or by calling. Nothing about it is deceptive, and the disclosure is right there on the page. It is simply written in the place people do not read, at the moment they are least likely to be reading carefully.
Run the arithmetic on a $149 Pro Will and it stops being a $149 product. If you never cancel, year one is $149 plus eleven monthly charges of $25, which is $424. Year two is $300 with no documents attached to it. That is not a scam, it is a subscription, and for some families a lawyer on call for $25 a month is genuinely worth having. But it should be a decision you make on purpose rather than something you discover on a statement.
Two things make this easy to handle. First, if you want the attorney relationship, the $299 Premium Will already includes a full year and includes an attorney reviewing your documents, so you are paying $299 once instead of $149 plus twelve charges. Second, if you do not want it, put a reminder on your calendar for day twenty-eight and cancel. That is the entire defense, and it costs nothing.
I believe this is the part of the process where families lose the most money for the least reason, and it is not because anyone lied to them. It is because the paperwork got done at eleven at night, the footnote was in six point type, and nobody was in the room to say the one sentence that mattered.
Do LegalZoom Documents Hold Up in Court?
This is the most asked question about LegalZoom, and it is asked in a dozen different phrasings, and almost every answer online gets the fundamental point wrong.
A will is not valid because a lawyer drafted it. A will is valid because it was signed and witnessed the way your state’s law requires. Those are two completely different things, and the second one has nothing to do with where the document came from. A will drafted by the most expensive estate attorney in your city and signed with one witness in a state that requires two is invalid. A will generated by a website and signed correctly in front of two qualified witnesses is valid. The document is the easy part. The signing is where wills fail.
Which means the real question is not whether LegalZoom is legitimate. It is whether the document gets executed correctly, and that depends entirely on the state you live in. The rules genuinely differ. Ohio, to take the strictest example in the country, defines conscious presence in its statute so narrowly that it excludes anything sensed by telephonic or electronic or other distant communication, which you can read for yourself in Ohio Revised Code section 2107.03. Louisiana is the only state in the country where notarization is part of what makes a will valid at all. Pennsylvania requires no witnesses whatsoever for a will to be valid, though it needs two to prove the will at probate, which is a distinction nearly every consumer article collapses into one thing. And in thirty-two of the fifty-one US jurisdictions, at least one step of executing a will still requires another human being physically in the room with you.
We built the full breakdown, all fifty-one jurisdictions with witness counts, notarization status, self proving affidavit rules and the statute citation for each one, and published it on our FastWill review. Find your state there before you sign anything, whichever service you use. For the underlying legal distinction between a valid will and a self proving one, Cornell’s Legal Information Institute is a clean, non-commercial explanation.
Where LegalZoom genuinely helps is that its questionnaire generates state specific documents from your answers and then tells you what your own state requires at signing. That is not nothing. The failure mode with online wills has almost never been the document. It has been a family discovering, two years later at the worst possible moment, that the signing was done wrong.
How to Set Up Your Estate Plan With LegalZoom
The whole process runs about twenty to forty minutes of actual work, plus whatever time it takes you to arrange the signing. Here is every step, including the one that costs money if you skip it.
- Open the estate plan page, not the will page. The estate plan page starts at the $149 Pro Will, which bundles the directives and powers of attorney. The will page starts at $129 for the will alone.
- Pick your tier. Pro Will $149 individual or $249 for couples covers the will, both powers of attorney and the healthcare directive. Basic Trust $399 or $499 adds probate avoidance and a pour-over will. Premium at $299 or $549 is the same documents plus a year of attorney access instead of thirty days.
- Answer the guided questions. You name an executor, decide who receives what, and name a guardian for minor children. Your documents are generated state specific from those answers.
- Sign under your own state’s rules. This is the step that decides whether any of it works. Most states need two witnesses who are not beneficiaries. Notarization makes a will self proving in most states rather than valid, and Louisiana is the one exception where it is part of validity.
- Decide on the attorney plan before day thirty. On the will tiers the Legal Assist Plan charges $25 when the thirty days end and renews monthly at $25. On the trust and Premium tiers it runs a year and then continues at $199 a year. Keep it deliberately or cancel it online, but decide rather than drift.
The step people skip is the last one, and it is the only step with a price attached to it. Everything else is just answering questions.
LegalZoom or Trust and Will: Which One Fits Your Situation
These two get compared constantly, and the comparison is usually written by somebody selling one of them. We are partnered with both, which means we have no reason to push you either direction and every reason to get it right.
The short version. Trust and Will is the cleaner, faster, better designed experience, built specifically for estate planning and nothing else, and it is the better choice for a straightforward situation where you want the documents done well with minimal friction. LegalZoom is the broader platform with attorney access attached, and it is the better choice when your situation has a complication in it, when you want a licensed attorney in your state looking at what you produced, or when you want a will and a power of attorney and a business filing under one login.
Put more bluntly: if the only thing you need is a good will, the design-led option will feel better to use. If there is a second marriage, a child with a disability, property in more than one state, a family business, or an heir you expect to contest something, the attorney access is worth more than the interface.
One note on discount codes, because we get asked. Trust and Will’s EXCLUSIVE10 code is a universal public code, not a Memorial Merits exclusive, and it takes ten percent off. LegalZoom has no public code. What LegalZoom does run is a seasonal Make-A-Will Month promotion of up to twenty percent off that expires on the thirty-first of August. We are not going to build urgency out of that. If you are reading this after it ends, the list prices on this page are what you will pay, and they are the prices we based every recommendation on.
Power of Attorney and Healthcare Directives, Priced Separately
These two documents are the ones families need first and buy last, and I feel that is exactly backwards.
A will does nothing until you die. A financial power of attorney and a healthcare directive do their work while you are still alive, at the moment you cannot speak for yourself, which for most families arrives years before a will is ever read. If somebody has a stroke and there is no financial power of attorney, the mortgage does not get paid by good intentions. Somebody petitions a court for guardianship, and that costs thousands and takes months, and it happens because a fifteen dollar document did not exist.
LegalZoom sells both individually, a power of attorney and a healthcare directive or living will, and both are already bundled into the $149 Pro Will tier and above. Buying the bundle is close to always cheaper than buying the pieces. If all you want is those two documents on their own and you want the cheapest legitimate route, Legal Templates sells attorney drafted versions on a subscription, and the honest caution there is that its seven day free trial converts to $49.95 a month rather than the advertised annual rate unless you select annual billing at signup.
Who Should Look Elsewhere
Preserving trust matters more to us than any single commission, so here is the part most review pages leave out.
If price is the deciding factor and you want to pay once and never again, Quicken WillMaker is the better answer. It runs $109 for Basic, $149 for Plus, and $219 for All Access, one time, with $39.99 a year afterward only if you want ongoing document updates. There is no monthly subscription waiting on day thirty-one. It is not available in Louisiana or the US territories.
If what you actually need is not a document but organization, meaning your loved ones would not know where the policies, passwords, deeds and accounts are even if the will were perfect, then a will is solving the wrong problem first. Our primary recommendation in that lane is LVED, which handles the documents and the vault together.
If your estate is genuinely complex, and by that we mean taxable estate size, a special needs trust, business succession, or a contest you can already see coming, hire a licensed estate attorney in your state. No online platform, LegalZoom included, is the right tool for that, and any page telling you otherwise is selling.
And if you are not ready to spend anything yet, do the free thing first. Our estate readiness tool shows you which documents you are actually missing, and our free planning worksheets are yours to keep, print, or hand to the person who will one day have to sort all of it out.
Because that is the whole point of the exercise, and it is worth saying out loud at the end of a page full of prices. Nobody buys a will because they want a will. They buy it so the people they love are not sitting at a kitchen table at two in the morning, guessing, in the worst week of their lives. Whichever service gets you there, get there.
LegalZoom Estate Planning: Questions Families Ask
These are the questions people actually search before buying, answered directly.
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