Updated September 4, 2026. Quick answer: New Jersey does not have a statutory percentage schedule for the probate attorney’s fee, which is reviewed for reasonableness. What New Jersey does have, and is often confused with an attorney fee schedule, is a statutory commission for the executor or administrator, a separate charge with its own percentage brackets under N.J.S.A. 3B:18-14.
New Jersey prices the executor, not the estate’s lawyer
Commissions on all corpus received by the fiduciary may be taken as follows: 5% on the first $200,000 of all corpus received by the fiduciary; 3.5% on the excess over $200,000 up to $1,000,000; 2% on the excess over $1,000,000; and 1% of all corpus for each additional fiduciary provided that no one fiduciary shall be entitled to any greater commission than that which would be allowed if there were but one fiduciary involved.
Source: N.J.S.A. 3B:18-14
This percentage table is the executor’s or administrator’s own corpus commission, the fiduciary’s pay for running the estate. It is not what the estate’s attorney is paid. New Jersey’s well-known statutory schedule sits on the executor side, not the legal-fee side.
Income gets its own, separate commission
Alongside the corpus commission, the fiduciary is separately entitled to a commission on income the estate collects during administration, a different pot of money calculated under a different subsection and layered on top of the corpus commission above.
The lawyer’s fee: reasonable, not scheduled
No New Jersey statute sets a percentage or dollar-bracket table for the probate attorney’s own fee. Ordinary administration fees are paid as an estate expense and reviewed for reasonableness if challenged; in contested probate matters, a New Jersey Court Rule lets the court allocate a counsel-fee allowance out of the estate based on the reasonableness of the contest, a court-rule mechanism rather than a percentage-of-estate formula.
The executor’s commission is a different charge
New Jersey’s fiduciary or executor commission is the one with statutory percentages: 5% of the first $200,000, 3.5% of the amount up to $1,000,000, and 2% above that under N.J.S.A. 3B:18-14, plus a separate income commission under N.J.S.A. 3B:18-13. That is a distinct charge from the attorney’s fee, which carries no statutory schedule.
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 Jersey probate filing fee.