Illinois has 102 counties, and every decedent's estate is filed with the Circuit Court in the county where the decedent lived at death. There is no statewide probate database and no single search box.
Jonathan Khorsandi on Jun 26, 2026
Illinois has 102 counties, and every decedent's estate is filed with the Circuit Court in the county where the decedent lived at death. Each circuit clerk holds its own files, runs its own case search, and adopts its own fee schedule by county ordinance. There is no statewide probate database and no single search box.
A second structural fact matters more than the first, and most guides get it wrong. Illinois runs two administration tracks. Under supervised administration the representative files an inventory of estate assets with the court. Under independent administration, which is the ordinary route, the representative prepares the inventory and mails it to interested persons instead of filing it. The document that lists the house is therefore absent from the public file in most Illinois estates.
Agents who plan around that work Illinois probate well. Agents who plan a trip to the Daley Center to pull an inventory come back with a docket sheet and a day gone.
Yes. A decedent's estate case in an Illinois Circuit Court is a public court record. Anyone can look at the docket and order copies without being an heir, a beneficiary or an attorney.
What sits in the public file is the petition for letters, the will if the estate is testate, the order declaring heirship, the letters of office naming the personal representative, the published notice to creditors, claims filed against the estate, and any order authorising a sale of real property.
Two limits are worth knowing before you build a workflow on it.
Public does not mean complete. In an independent administration the inventory is mailed under 755 ILCS 5/28-6 rather than filed, so the estate's property schedule is not in the court file. If a docket does show an inventory entry, that is a useful signal in itself: the estate is probably being supervised.
Small estates leave no court record at all. The small estate affidavit is not a court filing. Cook County's Clerk states plainly that the office charges no fee for the form, does not maintain records of it and does not record it, because the public uses it directly with banks and other third parties. Estates settled that way are invisible to probate research, whatever the threshold.
In the Circuit Court of the county where the decedent resided at death, not where they died and not where the property sits. Administration runs under the Illinois Probate Act of 1975, 755 ILCS 5.
Illinois has one trial court of general jurisdiction, the Circuit Court, and probate is a division of it rather than a separate court. In Cook County that division is large enough to occupy its own floors of the Daley Center. In smaller counties probate is a docket the clerk keeps alongside everything else.
This distinction decides what you can actually read.
Independent administration is the common route. The representative can sell estate real property, pay claims and manage the estate without going back for prior court approval on each act. Fewer filings reach the docket, and the inventory is mailed to interested persons under 755 ILCS 5/28-6 rather than filed with the court.
Supervised administration is used in contested estates and where an interested person requests it. The court approves major acts, so the docket carries more. The inventory is filed with the court within 60 days of letters being issued under 755 ILCS 5/14-1.
For lead research, the practical consequence is that the estate's property is usually established from outside the court file, by matching the decedent's name and last address against recorded deeds and county property records, rather than from an inventory you can request at a counter.
Testate estates produce a will, a named executor and letters testamentary. Direction is usually settled from the start, and the executor often has express power of sale.
Intestate estates produce a petition for letters of administration, an order declaring heirship and a court-appointed administrator. These are frequently the more productive filings, because several heirs who never planned for the situation now jointly own a house none of them lives in.
County by county, through the circuit clerk. The statewide eFileIL system is the filing channel used across Illinois courts, including Cook County's Probate Division, but it is a filing platform for parties, not a public research tool. Case lookup happens on each clerk's own system.
ProbateData covers three counties in Illinois, all in the Chicago metro. Their access routes are not equivalent.
Second most populous county in the United States, and the state's highest-volume probate market.
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Clerk's office, filing | Probate Division, Clerk of the Circuit Court, Richard J. Daley Center, 50 West Washington St., Room 1202, Chicago, IL 60602 |
| Clerk's phone and hours | 312-603-6441, Monday to Friday 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. |
| Court, Probate Division | Circuit Court of Cook County Probate Division, Daley Center, 18th Floor |
| Court phone | (312) 603-5943 |
| Online case search | casesearch.cookcountyclerkofcourt.org, the clerk's primary case search |
| Secondary portal | CCC Portal, with a registration limit, see below |
| Filing fee | $479.00 to open an estate, testate or intestate |
Two things to know before you rely on the online search. The CCC Portal states that registration on the portal is for justice partners and Illinois-licensed attorneys only, so an agent or investor cannot register for the fuller document access. And the clerk's pages do not confirm that the free public search surfaces Probate Division cases specifically. Run a known decedent name through it before you build a routine on it.
Original wills can be filed three ways in Cook County: in person at Room 1202, by mail to the Daley Center address, or at any of the clerk's five district offices. The claim that Illinois requires original wills to be filed in person is wrong, at least here.
Directly west of Cook, covering Naperville, Wheaton and Downers Grove.
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Court | DuPage County Circuit Clerk |
| Address | 505 N. County Farm Road, Wheaton, IL 60187-0707 |
| Phone | Civil Department (630) 407-8700, per the clerk's contact page. No probate-specific line is published |
| Hours | 8:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Monday through Friday, except court holidays |
| Filing fee | Not published on the clerk's site. Confirm with the Civil Department before assuming an amount |
| E-filing | eFileIL, which DuPage filers commonly reach through the I2File service provider |
Two corrections to what circulates about DuPage. The old dupageco.org/CircuitClerk address returns a 404: the clerk moved to dupagecircuitclerk.gov, and any guide still pointing at the old domain has not been checked since the move. And I2File is not an alternative to eFileIL. It is an electronic filing service provider that submits into eFileIL, so treating them as two competing systems will confuse the filing route.
The probate room number and direct probate phone number that appear in most online guides for DuPage do not appear anywhere on the clerk's official site. ProbateData does not publish them for that reason. Call the Civil Department and ask where probate files are held.
Northeastern corner of the state, from Waukegan and North Chicago through Libertyville to the Lake Forest shoreline.
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Court | 19th Judicial Circuit, Lake County Circuit Clerk |
| Address | 18 N. County Street, Waukegan, IL 60085, the county address published by Lake County. The clerk's floor and suite are unconfirmed |
| Phone | Not published here. The clerk's number could not be confirmed against an official source |
| Online case search | Unconfirmed. The clerk's site did not respond during verification, so neither its address nor its probate coverage can be stated |
| Fees | Unconfirmed. No published Lake County probate fee schedule could be reached |
This is an honest gap rather than a finding. Lake County's official sites were unreachable at the time of writing, so every Lake-specific contact detail and fee is unverified, not disproven. Numbers you find for Lake County in other guides may well be right; they are simply not confirmable against the source. Call the circuit clerk and confirm before you rely on anything, including anything you read here.
| County | Case search | Usable from a desk |
|---|---|---|
| Cook | casesearch.cookcountyclerkofcourt.org, with CCC Portal as a restricted secondary | Partly. Probate coverage of the free search is unconfirmed, and portal registration is limited to attorneys and justice partners |
| DuPage | Circuit clerk site at dupagecircuitclerk.gov | Unconfirmed. The clerk publishes no probate case-search page that could be verified |
| Lake | Unconfirmed | No. Site unreachable during verification |
The realistic position across all three: docket-level lookup is possible in Cook, thinner elsewhere, and the document that matters most for property identification is not in the file in independent estates anyway. Illinois rewards cross-referencing more than portal work.
Filing and copy fees are set county by county rather than statewide, which is why the numbers below apply to Cook and cannot be assumed for its neighbours.
Cook County, from the Clerk's Probate Division page:
The certification fee is the one people forget. A 30-page certified file in Cook is $2.00 plus 24 pages at $0.50 plus 5 pages at $0.25, plus $2.00 to certify it.
For DuPage and Lake, no fee schedule could be retrieved from either clerk's official site. Do not budget from a figure quoted in a guide, including the figures that used to appear in this one. Call the clerk.
Nine to eighteen months is the working range for an uncontested estate. That is a ProbateData estimate drawn from typical case flow, not a court-published statistic, and it is worth treating as one.
The statutory deadlines below are fixed, and they are what keeps generating dated activity on an estate even when nothing else moves.
| Stage | Statutory position |
|---|---|
| Notice to creditors, publication | Once each week for 3 successive weeks, 755 ILCS 5/18-3 |
| Claims bar date | Not less than 6 months from first publication, or 3 months from the date of mailing or delivery, whichever is later, under 755 ILCS 5/18-3. A claim not filed by that date is barred |
| Inventory, supervised administration | Filed with the court within 60 days of letters, 755 ILCS 5/14-1 |
| Inventory, independent administration | Prepared and mailed to interested persons, 755 ILCS 5/28-6. Not filed |
| Illinois estate tax return, Form 700 | Within 9 months of the date of death, per the Illinois Attorney General. Extensions are available on Form 700-EXT |
Two points that guides routinely get wrong.
The claims period does not freeze the real estate. The six-month clock bars late creditor claims. It does not stop the estate selling a house. An independent representative can sell estate real property without prior court order, and those sales close inside the claims window regularly. What is normally deferred until claims close is distribution to heirs and legatees. Anyone timing outreach on the belief that nothing can move for six months will arrive after the listing.
The six months is a floor, not the date. Under 755 ILCS 5/18-3 the bar date is the later of six months from first publication or three months from mailing to a known creditor. Notice mailed late pushes the date past the six-month mark.
The Illinois estate tax exclusion is exactly $4,000,000, a fixed figure in the Attorney General's estate tax instructions that is not indexed to inflation. Estates above it file Form 700 with the Attorney General within nine months of death, which adds process on the higher-value DuPage and Lake estates.
The small estate affidavit threshold is $150,000 in personal property with no real estate, effective 1 January 2026 under Public Act 104-0346. The date matters: deaths before that took effect fell under the previous $100,000 figure. It is also irrelevant to property leads, because the affidavit route is only open when there is no real estate.
The filing tells you an estate exists. In Illinois it usually will not tell you what the estate owns, so the work is in the cross-reference.
1. Search the county of residence, not the property county. Venue follows where the decedent lived at death. An estate opened in Cook can hold a house in Will or in Wisconsin.
2. Read the docket for the administration type. Independent or supervised changes everything downstream. Supervised estates put more on the record, including the inventory and orders on sale. Independent estates put less on the record and move faster to a sale.
3. Do not wait for an inventory that will not come. In independent estates the inventory is mailed to interested persons, not filed. Establish the property from recorded deeds and county property records matched to the decedent's name and last known address instead.
4. Check the recording office, and check which one. Orders and deeds affecting estate real property get recorded. In Cook County the separate Recorder of Deeds was abolished in December 2020 and recording moved to the Cook County Clerk, so a guide sending you to the Cook Recorder is sending you to an office that no longer exists under that name. Confirm the current recording office in DuPage and Lake before assuming a name there too.
5. Identify who can sign. The personal representative named in the letters of office is the only person with authority to sell. Where an attorney is named on the petition, the attorney is usually the better first contact on a larger estate.
6. Work months 2 through 6, and keep working them. The claims period does not lock the property, so the sale decision can be made early. A representative who says no in month two is a different conversation in month seven, and Illinois estates run long enough that a 90-day cadence is the difference between closing probate deals and collecting lists.
Three: Cook, DuPage and Lake. Together they cover Chicago, the western suburbs and the North Shore corridor.
Every lead is a verified court filing with a case number, not a death record or a pre-probate prediction. Each one carries the property records matched to the estate, the personal representative skip traced with mailing address, phone and email where available, the attorney of record where one is named, and MLS tracking so you can see whether the property has already listed.
That matters more in Illinois than in most states, because of the inventory gap. The court file in an independent administration names the decedent and the representative and stops there. Matching the estate to a parcel is a separate research step on every single case, before skip tracing starts.
You can see the full coverage list at probatedata.com/counties, or start a 7-day trial for $1 and search Cook, DuPage and Lake directly.
For the wider method across every state, see the national guide to finding probate records by county.
Yes. A decedent's estate case in an Illinois Circuit Court is a public record, and anyone can view the docket and order copies without being an heir or an attorney. The public file holds the petition for letters, the will in a testate estate, the order declaring heirship, the letters of office, the published creditor notice and any order authorising a sale of real property. It does not hold the inventory in an independent administration, because that document is mailed to interested persons rather than filed.
County by county, through the circuit clerk. Illinois has no statewide probate search, and eFileIL is a filing platform for parties rather than a public research tool. In Cook County the clerk's primary case search is casesearch.cookcountyclerkofcourt.org, with the CCC Portal as a secondary option whose registration is limited to Illinois-licensed attorneys and justice partners. DuPage publishes no verifiable probate case search page, and Lake County's clerk site could not be reached to confirm one.
Only in supervised administration, where 755 ILCS 5/14-1 requires the representative to file the inventory with the court within 60 days of letters being issued. In independent administration, the ordinary route in Illinois, 755 ILCS 5/28-6 has the representative prepare the inventory and mail it to interested persons, so it never enters the public file. If an inventory does appear on a docket, that is a signal the estate is being supervised.
Yes. The six-month claims period under 755 ILCS 5/18-3 governs when creditor claims are barred, not whether the estate can sell real estate. An independent representative can sell estate real property without prior court order, and those sales close inside the claims window regularly. What is normally deferred until claims close is distribution to heirs and legatees.
Under 755 ILCS 5/18-3 the claim deadline stated in the published notice must be not less than six months from the date of first publication, or three months from the date of mailing or delivery to a known creditor, whichever is later. Publication runs once each week for three successive weeks. A claim not filed on or before that date is barred, so the six-month figure is a floor rather than the actual date.
The Clerk of the Circuit Court of Cook County charges $479.00 to open an estate, testate or intestate. Copies are $2.00 for the first page, $0.50 per page for pages 2 through 25, and $0.25 per page after 25 pages, with a separate $2.00 per certification fee on top. DuPage and Lake set their own fees by county ordinance and neither publishes a probate fee schedule that could be verified, so confirm with the clerk before budgeting.
It is $150,000 in personal property with no real estate, effective 1 January 2026 under Public Act 104-0346. The previous threshold was $100,000. The affidavit is not filed with the court at all: the Cook County Clerk charges no fee for it, does not maintain records of it and does not record it, because the public uses it directly with banks and other third parties. Estates settled that way generate no public filing to research.
Nine to eighteen months is the working range for an uncontested estate, and contested estates run longer. That is a practitioner estimate based on typical case flow rather than a court-published statistic. The fixed points are the creditor claims deadline under 755 ILCS 5/18-3, the 60-day inventory deadline in supervised estates, and the nine-month deadline for an Illinois estate tax return on estates above the $4,000,000 exclusion.
