Updated September 4, 2026. Quick answer: Delaware has no percentage fee schedule for probate attorneys. 12 Del. C. §2305 punts the question entirely to Court of Chancery rule, and unlike most states it does not even separate the executor’s commission from the attorney’s fee: both are addressed in the same one-sentence statute, both left to the court to set as reasonable.
12 Del. C. section 2305: one statute, no percentages, for both roles
Delaware’s probate code does not give the attorney a percentage fee schedule, presumptive or elective. Title 12, Section 2305, Allowance of commissions and attorneys’ fees, states simply that commissions and attorneys’ fees shall be allowed as provided by rule of the Court of Chancery. That single sentence covers both the personal representative’s commission and the attorney’s fee, and it delegates the actual standard to court rule rather than fixing a number in the statute. Section 2305 also allows the Court of Chancery to reduce commissions and attorneys’ fees if the estate’s required accounts are not filed on time, and withholds commissions from an executor who has not complied with the tax-filing requirements of Title 30.
Who decides: the Court of Chancery, not a statutory table
Because Section 2305 sets no numbers, the working standard comes from the Court of Chancery’s own rules and practice, applying a reasonableness review rather than a percentage grid. In practice both the executor and the attorney submit their compensation for approval as part of the estate’s accounting, and the court, or the Register of Wills process for uncontested accountings, evaluates the request against factors such as time and labor, estate size and complexity, results obtained, and customary local charges for comparable work.
The Delaware-specific trap: commission and attorney fee share one sentence
The genuine Delaware nuance is not a hidden percentage statute, it is the opposite: Delaware collapses the personal-representative-commission question and the attorney-fee question into the same fifteen-word statutory sentence, with no separate numbered section for PR commissions the way many states structure their codes. Anyone citing a specific percentage for either the executor or the lawyer as Delaware law is citing county Register of Wills practice or private-attorney billing norms, not the Delaware Code.
The rest of the arithmetic: Delaware 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 Delaware probate filing fee.