Estate Planning: The Documents, the Process, and What It Costs (2026)

Updated August 4, 2026. Quick answer: estate planning is five documents, one process, and four taxes. The documents are governed by state law and the thing that most often invalidates one is procedural — a witness count, a notarisation, a signature in the wrong place. The process after a death is a dated sequence, and most estates never need the full version of it. This page is the front door to all of it: every reference table below cites the statute it came from and records the date that statute was read.

Nothing here is legal advice, and none of it is a substitute for a lawyer where one is warranted. It is written so you can tell which situation you are actually in before you pay anyone.

The documents

Five instruments do almost all the work. Each one is governed by state law, so each has a by-state machine behind it – the requirement that decides whether the document is valid is usually a witness count or a notarisation rule, not anything about your estate.

A will — what one costs, and when the cheap route is the right one
Will requirements by state — witnesses, notarisation, holographic and self-proving rules, statute cited
Trusts — the whole trust wing – revocable, irrevocable, special-needs, gun, charitable
What a beneficiary can demand — the accounting and information a trustee owes, and the deadline to object
Will vs trust, priced — the probate fees a funded trust avoids, against what the trust costs
Power of attorney — the financial POA and what it costs
POA requirements by state — execution rules, and which states compel a bank to accept one
Advance directive — the health-care document, and the two things it is not
Advance directive rules by state — witness and notary requirements, statute cited
Transfer-on-death deed — which states authorise one for real property, and the limits
Beneficiary designations — why they beat the will, and what that costs families

The process after a death

What actually happens is a sequence with deadlines, not a single event. Most estates never need the full version of it.

Settling an estate — the whole job, start to finish
The roadmap — the dated sequence, in order
When probate is required — and the common cases where it is not
Probate cost by state — fee model, statutory schedule and filing fee for 50 states + DC
Small-estate limits by state — the affidavit that skips probate, and the threshold in each state
Affidavit or summary administration — two shortcuts that are not the same shortcut
The executor’s job — the duties, and the liability most executors do not know about
Executor compensation by state — which states publish a schedule and which use a reasonableness standard
Creditor claims — the window creditors get, and what happens after it closes
When the estate cannot pay — the statutory order of payment

The money

Four separate taxes and one spousal right decide what heirs actually receive. They are commonly collapsed into “the death tax”, which is why so much published advice is wrong about them.

Estate tax by state — the jurisdictions that levy one in 2026, with exemptions and rates
Inheritance tax by state — the states that still levy one, by heir class
The federal exemption — the lifetime gift and estate tax exclusion
Form 706 deadline — when a return is due even if no tax is owed
Form 1041 — the estate’s own income tax return
The elective share — what a surviving spouse can claim regardless of the will
Inherited IRAs — the 10-year rule, the annual-RMD overlay, and the beneficiary categories
Medicaid estate recovery — what the state may take back after paying for care
Medicaid and the house — the exemptions, the liens, and the caregiver-child rule
Selling an inherited house — the stepped-up basis, and the gain that survives it

The tools and the data

Every calculator runs in the browser and stores nothing. Every reference table cites the statute it came from and records the date that statute was read.

Probate cost calculator — statutory fees from each state’s own tier schedule
Estate tax calculator — federal and state exposure, returned separately
Executor fee calculator — statutory or reasonable compensation, by state
Elective share calculator — what a surviving spouse can claim
Sibling buyout calculator — what buying out co-heirs on an inherited house costs
Ancillary probate calculator — what property in a second state costs the estate
Medicaid penalty calculator — the transfer penalty from the state’s own divisor
Deadlines after a death — the dated sequence of filings and elections
Probate cost statistics — the headline numbers, formatted for citation
The datasets — downloadable CSVs, free with attribution, with the statute provenance behind them

If your situation is not the standard one

The default advice assumes a married couple with adult children and a house. Where that is not the shape of it, the answer changes:

Doing it yourself

A straightforward estate — one state, no business, no disabled beneficiary, no blended-family conflict — is one of the few legal jobs where a form genuinely can be enough, provided the execution rules for your state are followed exactly. Check your state’s witness and notarisation requirements first; that is what decides whether the document works. Where the estate is not straightforward, the case for a lawyer is set out honestly, including the situations where a form is a false economy.

Make a will at LawDepot

That is a sponsored link and it is marked as one. It does not change anything on this page: the by-state requirements are read from each state’s own code, and the calculators return the same numbers whether you use it or not. See our affiliate disclosure.

Checklists

If you would rather work from a list than a map: the estate planning checklist is the gap-first version of this page — each item names what skipping it costs. If someone has already died, the financial checklist after a death sequences the whole job by when it actually matters, from the first week to the first year.

How this is sourced

Each by-state table records the statute relied on and the date the statute itself was read — which is not the same as the date the page was edited, and the two are kept in separate columns. Both are published: the statute provenance dataset lists, for every state-law page, which primary source was read and when, alongside SHA-256 fingerprints of those source documents so anyone can check later whether the law has been rewritten. Method is in the methodology; mistakes go in corrections.

Unfamiliar word? The estate planning glossary defines 32 terms without circularity — ademption, abatement, per stirpes, elective share — each with its own link anchor, and each state-specific term routed to the page that cites the statute.

The 2026 report: The State of Estate Planning 2026 collects the eight findings from this site’s statute-cited data in one citable place — including the five jurisdictions whose small-estate route reaches real property, and the sixteen that publish a probate fee schedule at all. Free to reuse under CC BY 4.0.

The newest layer of the estate. Digital accounts follow their own statute, and the platform tools outrank the documents — who can access your digital accounts after death.

The default rules on this page reach spouses and blood relatives. For partners who never married they do nothing at all — estate planning for unmarried couples.

Life insurance sits across two of the sections above at once: it is the instrument most often used to give an estate liquidity — cash that arrives in days, outside probate, when the estate’s own money is frozen — and it is an asset with its own set of decisions once the need for it has passed. The life insurance wing covers both, including the point that catches estates with real money in them: income-tax-free is not estate-tax-free.