Updated September 4, 2026. Quick answer: Montana used to tie the attorney’s fee to a formula linked to the executor’s own compensation, but the legislature repealed that provision in 2019. Today Mont. Code Ann. 72-3-631 only guarantees the personal representative reasonable compensation, and the attorney’s fee is reviewed separately for reasonableness, not set by a percentage schedule.
The 2019 repeal: from a formula to reasonable compensation
Montana once had an attorney-specific fee provision, former Mont. Code Ann. 72-3-633, Compensation of attorney, but the official Montana Code Annotated site confirms it was repealed by Sec. 105, Ch. 313, L. 2019. What remains on the books is Mont. Code Ann. 72-3-631, which states only that a personal representative is entitled to reasonable compensation for services, and no comparable percentage-based section exists for attorneys today.
How the attorney’s fee actually gets set now
Because the 2019 rewrite removed the old attorney provision without substituting a new formula, an attorney hired by the personal representative is paid on a reasonableness standard, reviewed by the court under Mont. Code Ann. 72-3-634, which authorizes the court to determine the propriety of employing counsel and the reasonableness of the compensation and to order a refund of any excess. Montana courts apply a multi-factor reasonableness test to attorney fee disputes generally, the same kind of inquiry used across other Montana civil fee-shifting contexts.
Old percentage habits can still linger
Because the repealed statute previously expressed the attorney’s compensation in relation to the personal representative’s own fee, some older client-facing material and calculators built before 2019 may still describe Montana probate legal fees in percentage terms carried over from that repealed rule. The exact pre-2019 statutory wording or multiplier could not be independently re-verified from a primary source, only its repeal date and citation, so any specific historical percentage figure for Montana should be treated with caution.
The rest of the arithmetic: Montana probate cost.
How the fee models compare across all 51 jurisdictions: probate cost by state, and the national picture on what a probate attorney costs.
Statutory text read at each state’s own legislature or official code publisher. General information, not legal advice; fee statutes change and a court retains the final say on what is reasonable.
The attorney fee above is separate from what the court itself charges just to open the case, see the Montana probate filing fee.