Updated August 3, 2026. Quick answer: on a modest estate the minimum annual fee, not the headline percentage, is what you actually pay — and on every schedule below with a stated minimum, the floor binds well above the advertised rate. Here are 9 schedules from 7 institutions, each read from the document itself.
The schedules
| Institution | Service | Tiers | Minimum | Effective |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Virginia National Bank Trust & Estate Services | corporate trustee | first $1,000,000 — 1.20% next $1,000,000 — 1.00% next $3,000,000 — 0.80% over $5,000,000 — 0.40% | $5,000 | 2025-04-23 |
| Virginia National Bank Trust & Estate Services | executor / personal representative | first $300,000 — 5.0% next $200,000 — 4.0% next $500,000 — 3.0% over $1,000,000 — 2.0% | $5,000 | 2025-04-23 |
| Vanguard National Trust Company | corporate trustee | first $5,000,000 — 0.55% (0.25% admin + 0.30% advisory) next $5,000,000 — 0.30% next $15,000,000 — 0.10% above $25,000,000 — 0.05% | $3,500 trust administration floor; administration fee capped at $17,500 for trusts of $10M and above | none printed |
| Frost Bank (Frost Wealth Advisors) | agent for trustee / investment management | first $5,000,000 — 0.80% next $5,000,000 — 0.60% over $10,000,000 — 0.50% | $5,000 ($500 per related sub-account) | 2018-10-01 |
| The Private Trust Company, N.A. (Commerce Trust) | corporate trustee | first $1,000,000 — 0.65% next $2,000,000 — 0.55% next $2,000,000 — 0.45% next $5,000,000 — 0.35% above $10,000,000 — 0.25% | $5,500 personal trusts; $4,200 charitable trusts | 2020-09-16 |
| Bank & Trust Company (Litchfield, Illinois) | executor / personal representative | first $25,000 — 5% next $50,000 — 4% next $75,000 — 3% next $150,000 — 2.5% to $1,000,000 — 2% over $1,000,000 — negotiable | $500 | 2025-04-01 |
| Bank & Trust Company (Litchfield, Illinois) | corporate trustee | income collected — 6% of income principal, market value of securities — 0.40% | $500 | 2025-04-01 |
| The Baptist Foundation of California | corporate trustee | brokerage accounts — 0.50% plus costs all other assets — 1.35% | — | 2024-02-15 |
| Argent Advisors / Argent Trust Company | investment management (accounts custodied at the affiliated trust company) | first $500,000 — 1.25% next $500,000 — 1.00% next $1,000,000 — 0.90% over $2,000,000 — 0.70% | $350 (plus a $240 base fee at the affiliated custodian) | 2025-03-21 |
All retrieved 2026-08-03. Fee schedules change without notice; treat these as evidence of how the pricing is structured, not as a current quote. Every row links to the document it came from in the dataset.
THE FINDING: the minimum is the real price
On a modest estate the MINIMUM annual fee, not the headline percentage, is what you actually pay.
| Case | Headline | What the arithmetic gives | Effective rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Commerce Trust, $500,000 personal trust (its own stated minimum account size) | 0.65% | 0.65% of $500,000 = $3,250, but the minimum is $5,500 | 1.10% |
| Frost Bank, $500,000 account | 0.80% | 0.80% of $500,000 = $4,000, but the minimum is $5,000 | 1.00% |
| Virginia National Bank investment-management tier, $200,000 | 1.20% | 1.20% of $200,000 = $2,400, but the minimum is $2,500 | 1.25% |
Every retrieved schedule with a stated minimum behaves this way. Below the crossover point the percentage is decorative.
So the question to ask an institution is not what its rate is. It is at what account size does your minimum stop binding — and below that number, the percentage on the brochure is decorative.
What the percentage does not include
Across every schedule retrieved, the headline percentage excludes tax-return preparation, real-estate management, termination and distribution fees, court accounting where the trust is judicially supervised, management or sale of closely held businesses and mineral interests, and extraordinary officer time billed hourly at $150 to $250.
Executor and trustee are priced completely differently
Institutions offering both price them very differently, confirmed from four separate documents. VNB charges 40 to 120 basis points a year for ongoing trusteeship but 2% to 5% of the one-time gross estate plus 5% of gross income to act as executor. Bank & Trust Company separates a one-time tiered executor schedule from a recurring income-plus-principal trustee fee. Commerce Trust prices trust settlement at death at 1% to 1.5% with a $15,000 minimum against an ongoing 0.65%. The Baptist Foundation prices executor work at the full California statutory rate and trust administration at 75% of it.
The distinction matters because they are different jobs. Settling an estate is finite work on a fixed pot, and it is priced as a percentage of that pot. Being trustee is open-ended, and it is priced as a recurring rate. Comparing one to the other on the headline number is comparing a one-off to an annuity.
The statutory alternative
Some states set executor commissions by statute rather than leaving them to contract, so there is a published answer that owes nothing to any institution’s schedule.
| New York — N.Y. SCPA 2307 | Rate |
|---|---|
| first $100,000 | 5% |
| next $200,000 | 4% |
| next $700,000 | 3% |
| next $4,000,000 | 2.5% |
| above $5,000,000 | 2% |
Computed separately, at half these rates each, for receiving and for paying out funds.
| California — Cal. Probate Code 10800 | Rate |
|---|---|
| first $100,000 | 4% |
| next $100,000 | 3% |
| next $800,000 | 2% |
| next $9,000,000 | 1% |
| next $15,000,000 | 0.5% |
| above $25,000,000 | a reasonable amount determined by the court |
One institution in the table prices its executor work at exactly the California statutory rate and its trust administration at 75% of that same schedule — a documented discount for the work that does not go through probate.
These schedules are archived as a citable open dataset: DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21782057 (CC BY 4.0). Every row carries the document title, the URL fetched and the effective date printed on it — and the README lists the nine institutions attempted and excluded.
What we could not get
Nine institutions were attempted and not included: Charles Schwab Trust Company – bot-blocked; South Dakota Trust Company – only the state’s own supervisory-fee rule was retrievable, not a client schedule; UMB Bank – JavaScript shell; Northern Trust – no personal trustee schedule located; BOK Financial – none located; Busey Bank – none located; Glenmede – a schedule surfaced on a host of unconfirmed ownership and was NOT used because attribution could not be verified; U.S. Bank – the PDF is image-only with no extractable text and no OCR was available; Wilmington Trust – none located.
One of those is worth spelling out. A schedule surfaced on a host whose ownership we could not confirm, and we did not use it. An unattributable fee table is worse than no fee table, because it looks like data.
The individual alternative · where an institution fits among the options.
General information drawn from IRS, Medicare, HUD and state statute and regulation, not legal, tax or financial advice. Continuing-care law is state law and differs materially between states; every figure here is year-labelled and every source named. Fiduciary licensing, executor compensation and intestacy are STATE law and differ materially between states. Fee figures are quoted from published schedules on the dates stated and change without notice; nothing here is a substitute for advice on your own facts.
How these figures were gathered
Fee figures on this page are read from institutions’ own published fee schedules, and each is attributed where it appears. We do not publish a median corporate-trustee fee, and that is a deliberate refusal rather than an omission: when we built the benchmark, only three of the schedules we could obtain were priced on a commensurable basis — the others quote on income, on asset class, or not publicly at all. Three is too thin to publish a median from, so we did not publish one. Reporting a market figure computed from whatever happened to be reachable would turn a research limitation into a finding.
Cite this page
Suggested citation: “Bank as executor or trustee: what the fees actually are,” Clear Money Guide, 2026, clearmoneyguide.com/bank-as-executor-or-trustee-fees/.
Individual fee schedules should be cited to the institution that publishes them. This page’s framing is free to reuse with attribution under CC BY 4.0.