Updated September 4, 2026. Quick answer: Arizona has no percentage fee schedule for the probate attorney or the personal representative. A.R.S. §14-3719 gives the PR reasonable compensation, and the attorney’s own fee is reviewed under the same standard through §14-3721, tested against Arizona’s mandatory statewide hourly-rate guidelines rather than any percentage of the estate.
Arizona’s probate code sets no percentage fee for the attorney
Arizona administers decedents’ estates under Title 14, its version of the Uniform Probate Code, and nowhere in that title does the legislature fix a percentage rate for the lawyer handling an estate. A.R.S. §14-3719 says only that a personal representative is entitled to reasonable compensation for his services, which governs the executor’s own pay, not the attorney’s. The provision most people mistake for a general attorney-fee statute, A.R.S. §14-3720, is actually narrower: it entitles a personal representative who defends or prosecutes a proceeding in good faith to recover necessary expenses and disbursements including reasonable attorneys’ fees incurred, a litigation-expense reimbursement rule.
How the attorney’s fee actually gets set and checked
In practice, an attorney billing an Arizona estate is paid at a negotiated hourly rate, subject to court oversight under A.R.S. §14-3721, which lets the court review the reasonableness of the compensation of any person employed by the personal representative, including counsel, and order a refund of anything excessive. Arizona backs that statute with Arizona Rule of Probate Procedure 33(F), which requires the superior court to apply the mandatory statewide fee guidelines in Arizona Code of Judicial Administration §3-303 when evaluating whether compensation is reasonable, weighing estate size, complexity, and customary local rates rather than any fixed percentage.
The Arizona-specific wrinkle: rate has to match the task
A genuinely Arizona-specific mechanic sits inside ACJA §3-303: an attorney working an estate cannot bill their attorney rate for everything they touch. The guideline requires billing at an attorney rate only for work that actually requires an attorney, a paralegal rate for paralegal-level work, and a fiduciary rate for fiduciary-level tasks, so a single invoice can carry three different hourly rates. That task-matched billing rule is a more granular check than most reasonable-compensation states impose, and is a common source of court-ordered fee reductions when attorneys bill everything at their top rate.
The rest of the arithmetic: Arizona 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 Arizona probate filing fee.