Updated August 4, 2026. Quick answer: American estate planning is governed almost entirely by state law, and the rules that decide outcomes are procedural rather than financial. A small-estate affidavit reaches real property in five jurisdictions. Only 16 publish a probate fee schedule. Thirteen levy an estate tax and five an inheritance tax, with Maryland alone levying both. This report assembles what we have published across those wings into one citable place. Every finding below links the page that owns it, with the statute and the date it was read.
Free to reuse under CC BY 4.0 with attribution and a link. This is the estate companion to The State of Advisor Fees 2026.
The findings
Eight, each already published with its source. Nothing here is new research; the contribution is putting them in one place and saying what they mean together.
A small-estate affidavit almost never clears a house.
Across all 51 jurisdictions only five — Arizona, California, Oregon, West Virginia and Wyoming — state that the small-estate route reaches real property. Thirty-one confine it expressly to personal property and fifteen are silent, which in practice means a title company will not rely on it. The binding constraint is the character of the asset, not its value, and every “is my estate small enough” article that leads with a dollar threshold has the question backwards. The page that owns this.
Most states publish no probate fee schedule at all.
Only 16 jurisdictions set compensation by a published schedule; the rest use a reasonableness standard. That is why probate quotes vary so widely, and why any calculator returning a precise figure for the other 35 is guessing. The page that owns this.
Thirteen jurisdictions levy an estate tax and five an inheritance tax.
Twelve states plus the District of Columbia on the estate side, and Maryland alone levies both. Counts of “death tax states” that run higher than this usually include states whose tax was repealed. The page that owns this.
The surviving spouse does not take everything, and the blended-family case is the expensive one.
Under the Uniform Probate Code as enacted — Neb. Rev. Stat. § 30-2302, UPC § 2-102 — where there are surviving issue one or more of whom are not issue of the surviving spouse, the spouse takes one-half of the intestate estate. No threshold amount first. A surviving spouse living in the house can find it half-owned by a stepchild. The page that owns this.
“By representation” is defined by statute and differs between states.
The shares are counted at the nearest degree with a survivor in it, and a deceased person generates a share only if they left surviving issue. Some states use strict per stirpes, some per capita at each generation. The same family produces different results in different states, and any article giving one national rule is describing one state without saying which. The page that owns this.
A simple will costs less than most people expect, and the expensive failure is elsewhere.
Our published national figures: an attorney median of $625 for a simple will (middle 50% $450–$1,000) against a DIY platform range of $129–$599. The costly mistake is not overpaying for the document — it is an unfunded trust, an outdated beneficiary designation, or an execution rule missed. The page that owns this.
The 70% long-term-care statistic is real and routinely misused.
Someone turning 65 has almost a 70% chance of needing some type of long-term care. The same federal source says a third will never need any, that 59% receive unpaid care only, and that just 35% ever use a nursing facility. The 70% and the 35% are different rows of one table and differ by half. The page that owns this.
Reverse-mortgage heirs owe nothing personally, and the 95% rule is a ceiling, not a price.
24 C.F.R. § 206.27(b)(8) bars a deficiency judgment — the lender may enforce the debt only against the house. And § 206.125(c)(2)(ii) caps the Commissioner-set minimum sale price at 95 percent of appraised value; it is a ceiling on the minimum, not a discount heirs may demand, and it bites only when the balance exceeds the value. The page that owns this.
What they mean together
Read as a set, the findings point one way: the failures that cost families money are procedural, not financial. A witness count, an unfunded trust, a designation never updated, an affidavit that cannot touch the house, a 30-day letter unanswered. None of those is a question of how much money the estate holds, and none is fixed by buying a more expensive document.
The second pattern is that the most-repeated numbers in this subject are the ones most often stripped of their qualifiers — the 70% long-term-care figure without the one-third who never need care, the 95% reverse-mortgage rule reported as a price rather than a ceiling, “death tax states” counted to include repealed taxes. Each of those is a correction we could only make because we read the source.
How this was built
By synthesis, not by new research. Every claim above is live elsewhere on this site with its primary source attached, and the provenance behind the state-law half is itself published as a downloadable dataset:
- 148 — state-law pages whose primary source and read-date are published
- 47 — jurisdictions covered by that provenance record
- 141 — of those pages carrying an established verification date — the other 7 say so
- 108 — primary-source statute documents fingerprinted with SHA-256
- 95 — of those fetched cleanly; 11 unreachable and 2 behind a bot interstitial, all labelled
Both datasets are at the datasets page under CC BY 4.0. The wings this report draws on: probate cost, small-estate limits, will requirements, POA execution, TOD deeds, estate tax and inheritance tax.
Honest limits
Coverage is not uniform. The provenance dataset covers 47 jurisdictions, not 51, and four wings, not every wing. Seven of its 148 rows have no established verification date and say so in the data rather than being quietly dated from the page. Thirteen of the 108 source documents could not be fetched cleanly and are labelled, not dropped.
One claim in this report is a worked example rather than a national rule. The intestacy finding quotes Nebraska as an enacted-UPC state; roughly a third of states never adopted the UPC, and those that did amend their own thresholds. It is presented that way on its own page too.
A DOI is queued, not minted. This report and its two underlying datasets are candidates for deposit; none has been uploaded, and this page does not imply a DOI it does not have. The research library lists what is deposited.
Cite this report
Suggested citation: “The State of Estate Planning 2026,” Clear Money Guide, 2026, clearmoneyguide.com/state-of-estate-planning-2026/. Free to reuse with attribution and a link; no permission needed. Every section above has a stable anchor, so a single finding can be cited directly.
Working from it rather than citing it? Start at the estate planning front door, or the gap-first checklist. If someone has already died, the financial checklist after a death sequences it. Method: methodology. Mistakes: corrections. Citation-formatted numbers: probate cost statistics and the statistics index. Comparing the products: online will makers compared.