Probate Documents and Forms: What You Actually Need in 2026

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What Documents Do You Need for Probate?

Somebody handed you a word. It might have been a bank teller saying they need letters before they can talk to you about the account. It might have been a brokerage asking for an affidavit of domicile before they will release the stocks, or a county clerk mentioning a deed of distribution as though everyone knows what that is. Whatever the word was, you had never heard it before this week, and the person who said it did not explain it, because to them it is Tuesday.

Here is the part nobody leads with: your state almost certainly publishes the form you are being asked for, at no cost, on a website you have never been sent to. Ohio, Georgia, South Carolina, Connecticut, Arizona, Virginia, Minnesota, Massachusetts and most of the rest maintain a full public library of probate forms. What none of them publishes is the one thing you actually need, which is a list of which of those forms applies to your family.

So that is what this page is. Every document an estate is commonly asked for, one at a time, in the order you will be asked for it. What each one does, in plain words, and where the free version lives when there is one.

Then an honest answer about the four or five documents no court will ever hand you. Those are the ones that cost money, and they are the ones people get wrong.

What Documents Do You Need for Probate?#

Most estates need somewhere between six and twelve documents, and which ones depend on two things: what state the person lived in, and whether they left a will. Everything else follows from those two answers. Ohio, for one example, expects a straightforward estate with no will to produce roughly eight separate forms, and it publishes every one of them at no charge while publishing nothing at all about which eight a given family needs.

The documents fall into three groups, and keeping them straight will save you more time than anything else on this page.

Group one, what the court wants. The petition that opens the case, the original will if there is one, a certified death certificate, an inventory of what the person owned, a notice to creditors, and a final accounting at the end. Your state court publishes all of these, free, and they are the forms in that public library.

Group two, what a bank or a brokerage wants. This group surprises people, because these institutions do not care what the court published. They keep their own list.

An affidavit of domicile before they will move securities. A medallion signature guarantee, which is a bank stamp and not a form at all. Often their own internal paperwork on top of the court’s.

Group three, what a county recorder wants. If a house is involved, moving it into someone else’s name is a separate job with separate paperwork, and it happens at the county land records office rather than at the probate court. No court publishes these.

One practical thing before the list, because it holds people up more than any form does. Order certified copies of the death certificate early, and order more than you think you need. Every institution on this page will want one, most will keep it, and almost none will accept a photocopy.

Ten is a reasonable starting number for an estate with a house, a couple of bank accounts, and any investments. Reordering later is possible everywhere, but it costs another fee and another wait, and it stalls everything else in the meantime.

Before you chase any of it, it is worth knowing whether your family needs the court process at all. Many do not, and the threshold is not close between states. Our free probate cost calculator answers that in a couple of minutes using your own state’s rules, and the probate guide walks the process end to end.

Which Probate Forms Your State Gives You Free#

Start here, always, before you buy anything. The court that will hear your case publishes its own forms and it does not charge for them. Using a paid version of a form your court publishes is the single most common way families waste money on this, and worse, a generic version sometimes gets rejected at the counter because it does not match what that court expects to see.

The quality varies more than you would expect. Michigan publishes form PC 598 as a clean fillable PDF. New York runs a free guided program that interviews you and fills the form out as you answer, which is the best free tool any state offers.

Others publish nothing. California has no statewide version of the bank affidavit and expects you to ask the bank for theirs. New Jersey has no statewide form either, and the county Surrogate prepares it in their office. Texas leaves it to individual counties and simply legislates what the document has to contain.

Below is where each state’s probate forms live, and how many people are looking for them, which tells you something about how hard they are to find.

One caution that applies everywhere. Court websites reorganize, and a form number that was current last year may have been replaced. Always take the version dated most recently, and if your court offers a self-help center, a five minute phone call there will tell you exactly which forms your case needs. That call is free and it is the most underused resource in this entire process.

The Documents No Court Publishes#

Now the part that costs money, and the reason this page exists. There is a second category of document that no probate court anywhere publishes, because they are not court filings. They are sworn statements and property transfers that live outside the courthouse, and the institutions that demand them expect you to arrive holding one.

There are four you are most likely to meet: the affidavit of domicile, the affidavit of death, the affidavit of heirship, and whichever deed your state uses to move real property out of an estate. A fifth, the receipt and release your beneficiaries sign at the end, is published by some courts and not others.

Before going further, one correction worth making, because the most widely read article on this subject gets it wrong. A power of attorney is not a probate document. A power of attorney lets someone act for a living person, and it terminates the moment that person passes.

If you are holding one, it stopped working at the moment of death and it has no role in settling the estate. Families lose weeks believing that document still gives them authority. What replaces it is a court appointment, covered on letters testamentary when there is a will and letters of administration when there is not.

The Affidavit of Domicile: What the Brokerage Actually Wants#

An affidavit of domicile is a short sworn statement saying which state the person legally lived in when they passed. That is the whole document. It is usually one page.

You will be asked for it by a brokerage, a transfer agent, or a mutual fund company before they will sell, move, or retitle any stocks or bonds. The reason is tax: which state gets to tax the transfer depends on where the person was legally domiciled, meaning their true permanent home rather than wherever they happened to be. A snowbird with a Florida condo and an Ohio house is exactly the situation this document exists to settle.

No court publishes one, because it is not a court filing. Ask the brokerage first, because many keep their own version and will send it to you, and theirs is guaranteed to be accepted. Computershare, which administers shareholder accounts for a large share of American companies, publishes its own. If yours does not have one, any standard version works as long as it is notarized.

How to Fill Out an Affidavit of Domicile#

Open the form in a second tab now and fill it in as you read this. It takes about ten minutes, and the only field that regularly causes trouble is the third one.

One thing to have ready before you sit down: the brokerage will almost always ask for a medallion signature guarantee alongside this affidavit. That is not a notary. It is a stamp from a bank that is a member of a signature guarantee program, and the bank takes on financial liability when it applies one, which is why most will only do it for their own customers and only in a branch. Line that up in the same week, because it is the step that most often adds a month to this process.

The Affidavit of Death: Getting a Name Off a Title#

An affidavit of death is a sworn statement, recorded at the county land records office, that says the person named on a property title has passed. Its job is to clear their name off that title so the surviving owner holds it cleanly.

You need it when the person owned property jointly with a right of survivorship, or when they had recorded a transfer on death deed naming someone to receive it. In both cases the property already passed automatically at the moment of death, without probate. But the public record still shows the deceased person as an owner, and until that is corrected the surviving owner cannot sell, refinance, or borrow against the property. Title companies will stop the sale.

There are two versions of this document and picking the wrong one wastes a trip to the recorder. An affidavit of death of joint tenant is used when two or more people held the property together with a right of survivorship, and it clears the deceased owner off so the survivor holds it alone. An affidavit of death of trustee is used when the property was held in a living trust and the person who passed was the trustee, and it establishes that the successor trustee named in the trust is now the one who can sign. Same idea, different paperwork, and the county recorder will reject the wrong one.

Which you need is answered by pulling the current deed and reading how the property is titled. If the deed says “as joint tenants with right of survivorship,” it is the first. If it says the property is held by a named trust, it is the second. If the deed shows the person as sole owner with nobody named after them, neither one applies and the property has to go through the court process instead.

Some counties publish their own version, particularly in California, where county recorders in Los Angeles, San Diego and Sacramento all provide one. Check your county recorder’s site first. Outside those counties there is usually nothing published, and you will need a version that satisfies your state’s recording requirements. Expect to attach a certified death certificate and expect the whole thing to be notarized before you take it to be recorded.

The Affidavit of Heirship: When a Family Skips Probate Entirely#

An affidavit of heirship is a sworn statement of who a person’s legal heirs are, recorded in the county land records so the chain of title on a property can continue without a court case. It is used most heavily in Texas, and it is not a companion to a probate filing. It is used instead of one.

Two people who have no stake in the estate have to sign it. That is the design of the document: the statement carries weight because the people making it gain nothing from it. Neighbors who knew the family for decades, a longtime family friend, a former colleague. Not the heirs themselves.

And here is the part that almost nobody publishes, which matters more than anything else in this section. Under Texas Estates Code 203.001, a recorded affidavit of heirship becomes accepted evidence of who the heirs are only after it has been on record for five years or more.

You can record one tomorrow, and it is worth recording tomorrow, but it does not carry that weight on day one. Families who record one and assume the title question is settled that afternoon are sometimes surprised years later when a buyer’s title company will not insure the sale. The same statute, at subsection (c), points to the specific form the state prescribes.

If your family is in that five year gap and needs to sell now, that is the moment to talk to a real estate attorney rather than to record another document. If you are simply getting the record straight for the future, which is the ordinary case, recording it now starts that clock running.

The Deed With Five Names, and Why You Cannot Buy One#

If the estate holds a house and it is going to the heirs or to a buyer, one more document has to be prepared and recorded: the deed that moves the property out of the estate. Depending on which state you are in, it is called a personal representative’s deed, an executor’s deed, an administrator’s deed, a fiduciary deed, or a deed of distribution. Five names, one instrument, and which one your county uses is purely a matter of local vocabulary.

Whatever it is called, it does one thing. It transfers the property under the authority the court gave you when it appointed you, and it says so on its face by reciting your appointment and the case number.

You cannot buy this one from a form site, and I want to be direct about why. We checked the full catalog of every legal form service we work with, and none of them carries it. That is not an oversight on their part.

This deed has to recite your court appointment accurately, quote the correct case number, use the legal description of the property exactly as it appears in the existing records, and satisfy formatting rules your specific county recorder sets and that differ from the county next door. A generic fill-in-the-blank version gets rejected at the recording window. You will have paid for it and lost the trip.

The right answer here is the estate’s attorney if you have one, or the title company handling the sale if you are selling, and many title companies prepare it as part of the closing at no separate charge. If you are transferring to heirs without a sale, a local real estate attorney typically prepares one for a few hundred dollars. That is the correct cost, and paying it is cheaper than a rejected recording.

Do not confuse this with a quitclaim deed. A quitclaim transfers whatever interest the signer happens to hold, with no promise that they hold anything at all. It is a fine document between family members who already own something together and know exactly what they have. It is the wrong instrument for moving property out of an estate, and using it there can cloud the title for the next owner.

The Estate Inventory, and the Workbook You Can Download#

The inventory is the list of everything the person owned on the day they passed, with a value beside each item. Most states require you to file one with the court within a set window after your appointment, and it is the document that decides several other things without announcing that it is doing so.

It decides whether the estate qualifies for your state’s shortened path, because the qualifying number comes from this list. In some states it drives the court’s filing fee. And it is the record that protects you personally if a beneficiary later questions what happened to something.

What counts toward that qualifying number is where states genuinely disagree, and the differences are large enough to change the answer for the same family.

Michigan closes the shortened path entirely if the person owned any real estate at any value. New York does not count real estate toward it at all, so a house does not push a family over the line the way it would almost anywhere else. New Jersey counts real estate and personal property together against one number.

Arizona counts them in two separate buckets and values real estate at the county assessed value rather than market value, which usually helps. California counts everything at full market value, then will not let the affidavit transfer the house anyway. Five states, five different answers, one family.

Building the inventory is tedious rather than difficult, and it goes far faster with a structure to work from than with a blank page. Work through it in passes rather than all at once: real property first, then accounts, then vehicles, then the personal items that actually carry value. Date every valuation and note where the number came from, because that note is what answers a question two years from now.

We keep a library of free executor workbooks and checklists you can work from, including a 25 step master checklist and a first 30 days timeline, and none of them asks for payment.

Once the inventory is finished you will know your qualifying number, and that number tells you whether your state’s small estate affidavit is open to you. If it is, that single document can replace the entire court process, and it is worth checking before you commit to anything longer. The probate cost calculator gives you your state’s limit and its waiting period in about two minutes, and if you are new to the role, the executor’s step by step guide puts all of this in order.

Questions Families Ask About Probate Documents#

These are the questions families search for most often on this subject, answered plainly.

About the Author Gabriel Killian Founder, Memorial Merits · US Navy Certified Instructor · #1 in Journal Writing on Amazon Memorial Merits grew out of years of personal loss. Gabriel’s father passed away unexpectedly while he was deployed at sea with the Navy, and he was left to find out through unofficial channels, unable to leave the ship for days. In the years that followed, he saw firsthand how grieving families are exploited during the most vulnerable moments of their lives by the very systems meant to protect them. During an injury while serving, complications led to a severe blood clot that left him facing his own mortality, and in those uncertain hours he wrote letters to the people he loved, afraid the words would go unsaid. Those letters became the Legacy Journal series, now #1 in Journal Writing and 5-star rated on Amazon. Everything on this site was built by someone who has been where you are. As Featured In CBS · ABC · Fox · AP · Business Life Magazine · The New York Telegraph · Insider Weekly · Tampa Bay Observer · Benzinga · SociologyGroup.com · Animal Hospice Group · MemoriaSky.com Member in the Spotlight, Home Funeral Alliance · Cake.com Professional Directory · Cited by Google AI Overviews Memorial Merits Amazon Author Page LinkedIn

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• Transfer on Death Deed: Forms and Rules in Every State (2026)
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• Letters of Administration: Who Qualifies in Your State