Updated September 4, 2026. Quick answer: Wyoming’s percentage fee schedule for the personal representative lives in W.S. 2-7-803 and never mentions the attorney, but the very next section, W.S. 2-7-804, is a separate statute that gives the estate’s attorney the identical mandatory percentage schedule for ordinary services, plus further reasonable fees for extraordinary work like tax matters or litigation.
Two adjacent statutes, one matching schedule
Wyoming does not fold the attorney into a single fee statute with the personal representative. W.S. 2-7-803, Fees of personal representative; schedule, is written entirely around the personal representative and provides that the court shall allow fees computed at 10% of the first $1,000 of the probate estate accounted for, 5% of the next $4,000, 3% of the next $15,000, and 2% of everything above $20,000, unless the personal representative waives the fee in writing. W.S. 2-7-804, Fees of attorney for estate; schedule, is a distinct section immediately following it that applies the identical bracket structure to the attorney for the estate, stating that the court shall allow the attorney fees for ordinary services computed on the same basis unless the attorney files a written waiver.
How it works in practice: court allowance, waiver, negotiation, and extraordinary fees
Neither fee is self-executing. W.S. 2-7-805(a) requires a written, verified application to the court before any fee is paid to either the personal representative or the attorney, and the court must be satisfied the fee can be allowed without detriment to the estate. W.S. 2-7-804(d) expressly lets the personal representative and the attorney negotiate a lower fee than the schedule produces, so the percentage functions as a default ceiling for ordinary services. Beyond that, W.S. 2-7-804(b) lets the court award the attorney further just and reasonable fees for extraordinary services, expressly including tax matters and litigation, mirroring the personal representative’s own extraordinary-fee provision.
A genuine Wyoming-specific wrinkle: one schedule fee per person, not two
W.S. 2-7-805(c) closes an obvious double-dipping loophole: where one person, or a partner or employee of the same professional corporation as that person, serves both as personal representative and as attorney for the estate, no fee is allowed for the personal representative’s ordinary services at all, only the attorney-fee schedule applies. This matters in Wyoming’s smaller, rural-county bar where the same lawyer commonly both drafts the will and later serves as executor and probate counsel for the same estate; that lawyer collects one percentage-based fee, not two stacked schedule fees for the same underlying estate value.
The rest of the arithmetic: Wyoming 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 Wyoming probate filing fee.