Updated September 4, 2026. Quick answer: New Hampshire has no statute setting either the personal representative’s or the attorney’s compensation. Probate Division Rule 88 requires both to be reasonable for the work, responsibility, and risk involved, and In re Estate of Rolfe (1992) supplies the factors courts actually use to test that.
No statute at all, just Probate Division Rule 88
New Hampshire has not enacted a percentage-based fee statute for either the personal representative or the attorney. The operative rule is Circuit Court Probate Division Rule 88, which provides that fees and expenses of fiduciaries and attorneys shall be subject to the approval of the court, and in all cases, fees and expenses shall be reasonable for the work, responsibility, and risk.
The Rolfe factors fill in what reasonable means
Because Rule 88 does not itself list what makes a fee reasonable, New Hampshire courts lean on In re Estate of Rolfe, 136 N.H. 294 (1992), which set out factors comparable to Rule of Professional Conduct 1.5(a), such as time and labor, novelty and difficulty of the questions, and customary fees for similar work, as the working test for both fiduciary and attorney compensation in an estate.
Same rule, same standard, for both roles
A genuine New Hampshire nuance is that the state does not even bother separating the personal representative’s compensation rule from the attorney’s: Rule 88 addresses fiduciary and attorney fees together in a single provision, and both are judged by the identical reasonableness language, so there is no separate PR percentage statute here for anyone to mistake for the lawyer’s fee.
The rest of the arithmetic: New Hampshire 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 New Hampshire probate filing fee.