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.

One more belongs on that list any time a trust is involved, and it is the one nobody warns you about. If property was held in a living trust, the bank or the title company will ask the trustee to prove their authority, and the document that does that without handing over the trust itself is the certificate of trust. What a bank may legally demand alongside it is a good deal narrower than most institutions behave as though it is.

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. No court asks for it. A brokerage or transfer agent does, because domicile decides which state may tax the transfer before any stocks or bonds can be released.

Which institutions demand it, what your state calls it, the snowbird trap that gets these rejected, and a field-by-field walkthrough are all in our full guide to the affidavit of domicile.

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.

Five separate documents carry that name, and which one you need depends on how the deed was written rather than on who inherits. Which version applies to a joint tenancy, a trust, or a recorded transfer on death deed, where your county publishes the form free, what it costs to notarize and record, and the second California filing that carries a 150-day deadline are all in our full guide to the affidavit of death. The deed that creates that joint tenancy in the first place is the survivorship deed, and it comes undone more easily than most families expect.

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 used instead of a probate filing rather than alongside one.

Texas Estates Code Chapter 203 calls it nonjudicial evidence of heirship, and that is exactly what it is: a record of who the heirs are, not a transfer of the property. It becomes accepted evidence only after five years on record, it does not cut off an omitted heir or a creditor, and the two disinterested witnesses everyone cites are a title company convention rather than a statutory requirement. Our full guide to the affidavit of heirship works through the statute, the separate form for a vehicle, and the walkthrough field by field.

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 an heir 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 an executor’s deed, an administrator’s deed, a fiduciary deed, a deed of distribution, or a personal representative’s deed. Five names, one instrument, and which one your county uses is purely a matter of local vocabulary. 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 the reason is worth understanding. We checked the full catalog of every legal form service we work with and none of them carries it, which is not an oversight on their part: the deed has to recite your court, your case number, and the date your letters issued, and those facts live in your probate file rather than in a template. Our full guide covers the eight things it has to say, whether you need a court order to sell, what happens when a representative deeds the property to themselves, and why an outside buyer usually keeps the house anyway: personal representative deed. If you expect several questions like this rather than one document, an attorney-on-call membership can come out ahead of paying per document, and we compared the two in our review of LegalShield’s prepaid legal plan.

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

Other Helpful Resources

• Transfer on Death Deed: Forms and Rules in Every State (2026)
• Letters Testamentary: How to Get Them in Every State (2026)
• Top 10 Tips for Writing an Obituary That Truly Reflects a Life Well-Lived
• How to File a Life Insurance Claim After a Loved One Passes Away (Step-by-Step)
• Letters of Administration: Who Qualifies in Your State