Probate Court Statistics by State: What All 51 Judiciaries Actually Publish

Updated August 18, 2026. Quick answer: all 51 of 51 state judiciaries publish annual caseload statistics. Only 9 report a clearance rate on probate, only 6 publish any measure of how long probate takes, and only 4 release any of it in a machine-readable file. The scarcity is the finding — not that the courts count nothing, but that almost none of them counts the thing an executor, a legislator or a reporter would ask for.

This page is a census, not an estimate. Every one of the 51 rows below was read at the judiciary’s own publication — 51 official sources, zero aggregators — and each row links to the exact document it was read from, so you can check any cell yourself. Where a claim could not be established, the row says so rather than guessing.

The finding, free to quote

The version of this story that circulates is “only a handful of states publish probate statistics.” That is false, and it is worth saying plainly: every state judiciary publishes caseload statistics. The real gap is one level down.

Every state judiciary publishes caseload statistics. Nine publish a clearance rate on probate. Six publish any measure of how long probate takes. Four publish any of it in a machine-readable file.

Underneath that, the breakout tiers are: 38 of 51 break probate out by case type at all, of which 14 attach at least one case-processing measure; 3 publish only a probate court or department total; 6 were read and confirmed to contain no probate breakout; and for 4 the question could not be answered from anything reachable. Those four groups are mutually exclusive and sum to 51.

Only 3 jurisdictions publish both a clearance rate and a timeliness measure on probate — Montana, Ohio and Wisconsin — and Ohio’s two sit inside a dashboard with no document behind them. So 2 jurisdictions, Montana and Wisconsin, publish both in a file you can open and cite.

The scorecard: all 51 jurisdictions

Each jurisdiction name links to the document its row was read from. ᶠ marks a breakout recorded as a lower bound because the source could not be read in full. In the stamp column, ✓ means the probate claim was verified against the live document, ⚠ that it rests on an archived capture or a stale edition, and ✗ that it could not be established at all — never read an ✗ row as evidence about that state.

The six timeliness states do not publish the same thing

“6 states publish how long probate takes” is the shortest true sentence, but it flattens six genuinely different measures into one. They are not interchangeable and they must not be merged into a single national figure:

Only Wisconsin publishes a plain time-to-disposition figure on probate in a machine-readable file. Oregon reports how old its pending pile is, which is a different question from how long a closed case took. Montana reports the share of cases closed inside its own timeframes, not a duration. Washington reports performance against 8-, 18- and 36-month standards. A table that stacks these in one column would be wrong in a way no reader could see.

Five ways a keyword sweep gets this wrong

Searching court reports for the word probate produces errors in both directions, and every one of these was caught during the census rather than published:

1. False positive — Maine. The statewide report contains a row labelled “Probate,” and it is not a probate caseload: it counts appeals to the Law Court that originated in a Probate Court decision, 8 to 15 a year. It sits among the other appeal-origin rows. Maine’s report contains no decedent’s-estate row at all.
2. False positive — Maryland. The abstract contains the word “Guardianship” 15 times and not one is adult probate guardianship; they are juvenile Circuit Court rows sitting beside “Child in Need of Assistance.” The document contains zero instances of “probate” and zero of “estate.”
3. A court’s name is not its contents — Massachusetts. The Probate & Family Court is a combined department: divorce, custody and paternity file alongside estates, so the department total is not a probate figure.
4. Scope buried in a legend — New Jersey. The “Probate” row is contested probate only — the report’s own legend says so. Uncontested probate sits with the county Surrogate, outside judiciary reporting entirely.
5. Right word, wrong court — Rhode Island. The “Probate/Estate” figures are Superior Court civil matters. Rhode Island’s actual probate courts are municipal and report nowhere.

Each of these states scores as “publishes probate statistics” on an automated sweep. None of them does, in the sense a citing writer means.

Two kinds of “no,” and why they are never one number

Ten jurisdictions are recorded as a negative in this census, and it would be easy — and wrong — to publish that as a single figure. They are two different findings:

• Confirmed absent (6): Alabama, Illinois, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland and West Virginia. The report was read and there is no probate breakout in it. This is a fact about the state.
• Not established (4): Arizona, Idaho, New Hampshire and Tennessee. All four publish caseload statistics; all four put the probate detail behind a dashboard or a block that could not be read. This is a fact about our access, not about the state, and it is recorded as such.

Merging them would turn four access failures into an accusation. If you cite this census, keep the split.

Where these numbers are lower bounds

Eight rows — Georgia, Hawaii, Kansas, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio and South Carolina — carry a floor mark, meaning the recorded breakout may be finer than shown because the source could not be read in full. Most of them are floors for the same reason: a dashboard replaced a document. Any figure sourced to a dashboard is a lower bound on what the state collects and an upper bound on what an outside citer can reach.

A further four rows — Maryland, Massachusetts, Missouri and New York — rest on an archived capture or a stale edition rather than a live current document. They are marked ⚠ in the table and should be re-checked before being quoted as current.

Where probate is not the judiciary’s to count

In much of the country probate sits outside the unified judiciary altogether, so its absence from the state court report is a structural fact rather than a reporting failure. Maine runs 16 county Probate Courts; West Virginia routes it to county commissions; Maryland to a separately elected Orphans’ Court; Georgia to county Probate Courts; Delaware to the Register of Wills; New Mexico to 33 county probate courts; Virginia handles it clerk-side without judicial docketing; Rhode Island’s are municipal. Connecticut is the useful counter-example — its separate Probate Court system publishes its own biennial report, and this census cites that report rather than the judiciary’s.

The vocabulary shifts too, which is why the word alone is a poor search key: New York files it in Surrogate’s Court, Pennsylvania in the Orphans’ Court Division, Mississippi in Chancery Court, and Louisiana has no probate docket at all because a decedent’s estate is a succession.

What a multi-state probate table can honestly be built from

Twelve jurisdictions have a verified, non-floor probate breakout carrying at least one case-processing measure — pending, backlog, clearance or timeliness: Arkansas, California, District of Columbia, Florida, Montana, New Jersey, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Vermont, Washington and Wisconsin. That is the largest set from which a multi-state probate process table could be assembled today. Narrow it further before making any claim about throughput or duration: only the nine clearance-rate states support a throughput claim, and only the six timeliness states support a duration claim — and those two groups overlap in three places, not twelve.

A volume-only table can go wider: eighteen further jurisdictions publish verified, non-floor probate case-type counts with no processing measure attached. Before merging any of them into one column, apply the traps above — Rhode Island’s figures are the wrong court entirely, so that row does not belong in a national filings total. New Jersey carries the same warning inside the process set: its row is contested probate only, so it is not comparable with a state that counts every estate opened.

Texas is worth naming separately. It publishes unusually rich process data on guardianship, and its own report states in terms: “Data on probate and guardianship case dispositions are not collected.” That sentence — from the Texas judicial report itself — is the most candid line in the whole census, and it is why Texas belongs in a filings table and not a dispositions one.

How this was built, and what would falsify it

All 51 jurisdictions were censused on 11 August 2026 against the judiciary’s, administrative office’s, or separate probate system’s own publication. 51 of 51 rows rest on an official source and none on an aggregator. Each row carries two independent verification stamps — one for “does this judiciary publish caseload statistics,” one for “is the recorded probate breakout right” — plus the exact document read, the retrieval date, and a verbatim fragment from the probate row where one exists.

Before this page was published, 13 jurisdictions were re-derived from their live sources on an independent code path: eight verbatim probate rows re-matched exactly, two confirmed negatives were re-confirmed by counting probate-family terms in the cited document, and three further rows were re-read specifically to check the figures quoted on this page. Sixteen checks, zero mismatches.

What would falsify a row: the document at its link containing a probate breakout finer than the one recorded, or none where one is claimed. The link is in the table for exactly that reason. Court publication moves — several of these states replaced a readable document with a dashboard during the period this census covers — so treat every edition label as the edition that was read, not as a claim about what is current today.

Cite this census

Free to quote and reproduce with attribution. Suggested citation:

Clear Money Guide, “Probate Court Statistics by State: What All 51 Judiciaries Actually Publish” (August 18, 2026). Census of 51 state judiciary publications, retrieved 11 August 2026.

If you are here because you are dealing with an estate rather than writing about one, the practical companion to this page is our probate cost by state breakdown, which covers what probate actually costs under each state’s fee rules.