Updated September 4, 2026. Quick answer: West Virginia has no statutory fee schedule for probate attorneys. The graduated 5/4/3/2 percent scale quoted all over the internet, W. Va. Code section 44-4-12a, is the personal representative’s statutory commission, and that same section bars a lawyer serving as personal representative from also charging separate legal fees on top of it. The estate attorney’s own fee is a reasonable amount treated as an administration expense and reviewed by the fiduciary commissioner and county commission.
West Virginia sets no percentage fee for probate attorneys
West Virginia Code Chapter 44 contains no provision that fixes a percentage or dollar schedule for attorney compensation in estate administration. The only percentage schedule in the chapter, W. Va. Code §44-4-12a, applies to the personal representative’s commission, 5% of the first $100,000, 4% up to $400,000, 3% up to $800,000, and 2% above that, with a separate 1% allowance on certain unsold real estate and non-probate property. Section 44-4-12a itself draws the line: it says that where the personal representative is a lawyer who renders professional legal services, additional compensation for those services beyond the commission is not allowed, which only makes sense if the commission and the attorney’s fee are two different things.
Who decides: the fiduciary commissioner and county commission, not a probate judge
West Virginia has no free-standing probate court. Under W. Va. Code §44-3-1, each county commission appoints fiduciary commissioners, who must themselves be attorneys admitted to practice in the state, and these commissioners review and settle every fiduciary’s accounting, including the expenses and compensation claimed in it. Because there is no statewide percentage benchmark for legal fees, it is the fiduciary commissioner, subject to county commission oversight, who evaluates whether an attorney’s claimed fee is reasonable when the accounting under §44-4-2 is settled.
A genuine West Virginia nuance: no single statewide attorney-fee benchmark
Because fee reasonableness in West Virginia estates is adjudicated locally by fiduciary commissioners under county commission supervision, rather than by one statewide probate court applying one published schedule, there is no single, uniform, citable rate guide for probate attorney fees analogous to the executor commission table in section 44-4-12a. Practitioners instead build a record of time and services for the fiduciary commissioner to review.
The rest of the arithmetic: West Virginia 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 West Virginia probate filing fee.