Guardianship Cost Estimator: What the Court Charges in Your State

Updated September 6, 2026. Quick answer: the court’s own filing fee is the only part of a guardianship bill that anyone can price in advance, and it is almost always the smallest part. On a $150,000 estate with both offices sought it runs from $5 in Nevada to $1,500 in Rhode Island, a three-hundred-fold spread, with a median of $150. In 12 of 51 jurisdictions no filing fee for this proceeding is published at all, and this tool prints nothing for them rather than inventing a figure. The bond, the lawyers and the court-appointed representative are the real money, and no statute in the country prices any of them.

Why the filing fee is the only honest number here

A guardianship bill has six parts: the court filing fee, a court-ordered investigation or capacity evaluation, your own lawyer, a court-appointed lawyer or guardian ad litem for the person you are petitioning about, a physician’s declaration, and the premium on a surety bond. Only the first is fixed by law. The other five are priced by whoever provides them, and they are together far larger.

That is why this page computes one number and refuses to compute five. Every figure it shows was read in a state’s own fee statute or its court’s own published fee schedule, and every figure it will not show is a place where those sources state nothing. The wider guide to what guardianship costs makes the same point at length: if you meet a confident national figure for a guardianship, ask what it is sourced to, because the answer is usually nothing.

Where the size of the estate changes the court’s fee, and where it does not

Most people assume a bigger estate means a bigger court fee. In 43 of these 51 jurisdictions it makes no difference whatever. In 8 it does, and those eight work in four genuinely different ways:

• A straight percentage. Rhode Island charges 1.0% of the ward’s personal property, floored at $30 and capped at $1,500, which is why a $150,000 estate already hits the ceiling and a $2,000,000 estate pays exactly the same $1,500. Iowa charges 0.2% of the gross inventory less life insurance, with no cap at all, so the same $2,000,000 estate pays $4,000. Wisconsin charges $20 up to $50,000 of property and 0.2% above it.
• A percentage bolted onto a flat fee, then capped. North Carolina is $106 for the General Court of Justice plus 40 cents per $100 of the gross estate, plus a $10 facilities fee and a $4 telecommunications fee. The ad valorem part is capped at $6,000, so the fee climbs to $6,120 and then stops.
• Brackets. Oregon prices a conservatorship at $278, $591, $882 or $1,176 by estate value. South Carolina runs a six-step ladder that turns marginal above $100,000 at 0.15% and again above $600,000 at 0.25%.
• A threshold, and a deferral. Nevada charges $5, and nothing at all where the stated value of the estate is $2,500 or less. The District of Columbia charges no filing fee for a guardianship and $45 for a conservatorship, then assesses an ad valorem court cost later, at the conservator’s first account rather than at the petition, which on a $300,000 estate is a further $575.

Asking for the person and asking for the money are not the same price

Nearly every state runs two offices rather than one: someone who decides where the protected adult lives and what care they get, and someone who controls the money. Some states charge for those separately, and the gap can be larger than the fee itself. 7 jurisdictions price the two routes differently: District of Columbia, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Oregon, South Carolina, Wisconsin.

Massachusetts charges nothing to file for a guardian and $240 for a conservator. Oregon charges $124 for a guardianship and, on a $150,000 estate, $591 for the conservatorship, so asking for both costs $715. Maine charges $90 for either alone but $115 for a joined petition, which is less than the $180 you would get by adding them. Hawaii prices a guardianship and a conservatorship as two separate proceedings but at the same $100 each, and does not say what one petition for both costs. Wisconsin prescribes no fee at all for a guardianship of the person.

The names differ too, and getting the name wrong is how people file the wrong petition. In California and Tennessee the adult proceeding is a conservatorship and a guardianship is for a minor. Connecticut reserves guardian for minors and for adults with intellectual disability. Louisiana has no guardianship at all: the proceeding is interdiction, the protected adult is the interdict, the fiduciary is the curator and an undercurator supervises. The estimator states the correct term for the state you pick, because it is the first thing a court clerk will correct.

The bond is not a fee, and nobody publishes its price

A bond is not money you pay the court. It is a surety’s promise to make the estate whole if the fiduciary mishandles it, and what you actually pay is a premium to that surety. The statutes are precise about the size of the promise and silent about the price of it.

In 20 of the 51 the penal sum is measured the same way, because they share the Uniform Probate Code’s formula: the aggregate capital value of the estate property in the fiduciary’s control, plus one year of estimated income, less securities the court has restricted and land the fiduciary cannot sell without leave. That is why the estimator shows the bond as your estate value plus a year of income rather than as a dollar total: the income term is real and this tool has not asked you for it. In the rest, the amount is simply what the court orders.

On who pays the premium, three waves of statutory reading found an express general rule in only five jurisdictions: Alaska, Colorado, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Iowa. Alaska’s runs the other way from the rest, letting the court order the premium paid from court funds where the conservator cannot afford it. Three more have a rule that applies only to veterans’ benefit cases (South Carolina, Wisconsin, Wyoming) and must not be generalised. Everywhere else the question is unanswered in the statute, and the answer in practice is that it comes out of the estate.

Two dollar caps on a court-appointed representative in the whole country

Most of these statutes provide for a guardian ad litem, court-appointed counsel, or both, for the person the petition is about. Almost none of them says what that may cost. Across all 51 jurisdictions there are exactly two hard statutory caps: Rhode Island caps court-awarded guardian ad litem fees at $800, with discretion to exceed it where circumstances warrant, and Delaware caps the attorney ad litem, which is what Delaware calls the role, at $750. Everywhere else the standard is reasonable compensation with no number attached.

Who ultimately pays is better documented than what it costs, and it is not always the family. Nebraska charges the fees to the ward’s estate or, failing that, to the county or the petitioner. West Virginia falls back on Supreme Court of Appeals funds when the estate is empty. Vermont works a pro bono private-bar list first and legal services second for an indigent respondent, which is not a state payment obligation at all. Missouri fixes the allocation rather than the amount: the estate pays if the person is found incapacitated, the county pays if the estate cannot, and the petitioner pays if the person is found not to be incapacitated.

The cost that does not stop

Appointment is the beginning of a recurring obligation, and the recurring part is where the money goes over a long guardianship. 27 of the 51 records state a cadence in their own statute, and the word most pages use for it, annual, is wrong in several of them. Delaware requires a first account at one year and thereafter not more often than once in two years, and a guardian of the person there has no duty to account at all absent a court order. Ohio is biennial for both the report and the account. Wyoming’s guardian files a semiannual condition report while the conservator’s accounting is annual, and the District of Columbia splits the same way. West Virginia files at six months and then annually on a December 31 cycle. New Hampshire and Vermont run from the appointment anniversary rather than the calendar year, so “due every January” is wrong for both.

Only 10 jurisdictions attach a dollar figure to the filing itself, and where they do it can be substantial: California charges $355 to file the account, New Hampshire $105, Oklahoma $33 for the annual guardianship report, Texas $25, North Carolina and Alabama $15, Ohio $12, Hawaii and South Carolina $10, Nebraska $5. The preparation, usually by a lawyer or an accountant, is the larger cost and no statute prices it. What a guardian owes the court afterwards is the part families are least warned about.

The 12 jurisdictions this tool will not price

Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, Wyoming.

Two of those are refusals rather than gaps, and they are worth stating plainly because they are facts about the law rather than about our reading. Louisiana sets no flat fee at all. Its statute fixes a ceiling schedule the clerk may charge up to but not exceed: $20 to initialize, $6 for the first page of a document and $4 for each page after it, $2 for each name indexed. What you pay depends on how long your petition runs, so no single number is honest. Wyoming has two candidate schedules and the statutory text does not resolve which one governs a guardianship: either $110 under the probate schedule plus $40 court automation, $10 indigent legal services and $5 per $10,000 of value once the estate reaches $5,000, or a flat $160 as an ordinary civil action. Picking one would be a coin toss presented as research. Missouri is the third: its guardianship chapter sets no amount, though it does fix who pays.

The remaining nine are ordinary honest gaps: the fee exists, and we could not reach a primary source that states it. They are the first thing a later pass will close.

What this tool does not do

• It does not price a lawyer. Not yours, not the court-appointed one. No statute in these 51 jurisdictions does either, apart from the two caps above, so any range you see elsewhere is somebody’s guess dressed as a figure.
• It does not price the bond premium, the capacity evaluation, or the court investigator. Same reason.
• The contested question changes what it tells you, not what it charges you. Of the 51 guardian ad litem and attorney-fee records read here, four contain any contest-conditional language at all, and none of the four sets a different fee for a contested case. A control that moved a dollar figure on that evidence would be inventing one.
• It covers adults only. Guardianship of a minor is a different proceeding at a different price in several of these states, and where a statute sets a separate minor figure it was deliberately kept out.
• Fee waivers exist and are not modelled. Arkansas, Alaska, Missouri, Vermont, West Virginia and North Dakota all provide for waiver or exemption in terms, and several others do in practice.
• Some figures carry a currency warning. Where the underlying cell was read from a dated code edition or an archived capture rather than a live official page, the estimator says so above the result instead of hiding it.

Every jurisdiction, side by side

The table below is the estimator run once for every jurisdiction on the same input: a $150,000 estate with both offices sought. Each row links to that state’s own page, which quotes the statute rather than summarising it.

Where this fits

What guardianship costs, the guide this tool belongs to · the private route that keeps a court out of it · what a guardian owes the court afterwards · why the time to sign is before anyone needs it.

Scope, method and sources

Every figure on this page comes from one of three primary-source packages built for this site: 15 jurisdictions read on 11 August 2026, 20 read on 12 August 2026, and 16 more, including the District of Columbia, read the same day. Together they cover all 50 states and DC across four dimensions: the petition filing fee, the bond, guardian ad litem and attorney fees, and the periodic accounting. Each of the 204 cells carries its own statutory citation, the exact URL read, the retrieval date, and a verification stamp; the same packages are the source of the 51 state pages linked above, so the tool and the pages are quoting the same rows. Where a cell rests on a dated code edition or an archived capture rather than a live official page, the estimator says so on the result rather than in a footnote. Amounts are those in force on the retrieval date and fee statutes change: Wisconsin’s $20 becomes $36 on 1 November 2026, Kansas replaced its entire guardianship act on 1 January 2026, and Idaho replaces its chapter on 1 January 2027. General information about court fees, not legal advice.