Missouri has 114 counties plus the independent City of St. Louis, and probate is not a standalone court in any of them. It is a division of the circuit court. Missouri puts nearly all on one free statewide portal.
Jonathan Khorsandi on Aug 12, 2026
Missouri has 114 counties plus the independent City of St. Louis, and probate is not a standalone court in any of them. It is a division of the circuit court, so an estate is filed with the probate division of whichever circuit covers the place the decedent lived. Unlike most states, Missouri then puts nearly all of it on one free statewide portal.
That portal, Case.net, is run by the Office of State Courts Administrator and it does cover probate. What it does not do is cover every circuit from the same starting date, which is where most research goes wrong.
The three jurisdictions ProbateData covers sit in three different circuits: Jackson County in the 16th, St. Louis County in the 21st, and St. Louis City in the 22nd. St. Louis City and St. Louis County are not the same jurisdiction, do not share a courthouse, and do not share a docket. Searching one for an estate filed in the other returns nothing, and the empty result tells you nothing about whether the estate exists.
Yes. Court Operating Rule 2.02(a) states that records of all courts are presumed open to any member of the public for inspection or copying. You do not need to be an heir, an attorney, or a party to the case, and you do not need to file a formal request to read a file at the courthouse.
The rule carves out records that are confidential under statute, court rule or order, or other law, along with judicial work product, internal email, memoranda and drafts. In practice that carve-out is narrow for estate work. The 16th Circuit states that mental health and alcohol and drug related estates are confidential and not available for public viewing. Those are a small share of the probate docket, but they mean a clean name search is not proof that no case exists.
One more limit worth setting expectations on. Public does not mean the document is online. Case.net shows docket entries for every case within its coverage window, but the filed documents themselves are only viewable remotely for public case documents filed on or after July 1, 2023. Anything older is a courthouse terminal or a copy request.
In the probate division of the circuit court for the county where the decedent was domiciled, not where they died and not where the property sits.
Missouri folds probate into the circuit court structure rather than running it as a separate court, so the office you want is the probate division of a circuit, not a standalone probate clerk. Estate administration runs under Chapter 473 of the Revised Statutes of Missouri, and the sections that set the deadlines are linked further down.
The City of St. Louis is the structural quirk. It is an independent city with no county affiliation, and it runs its own 22nd Judicial Circuit. St. Louis County, which wraps around the city on three sides and contains Clayton, Kirkwood, Chesterfield, Florissant and Ladue, is the 21st Circuit. A decedent who lived in Kirkwood is a St. Louis County filing in Clayton. A decedent who lived inside the city limits is a 22nd Circuit filing downtown at 10 North Tucker.
Address alone will not always settle it. Plenty of unincorporated St. Louis County addresses are written "St. Louis, MO" with no suburb name, so a mailing address is a hint rather than an answer. Where the municipality is not obvious, run the name in both jurisdictions.
Testate means a will exists. It produces a petition to admit the will, a named executor, and letters testamentary. Direction is usually set from the start, and the executor often already knows whether the house is being sold.
Intestate means no valid will. It produces a petition for letters of administration and a court-appointed administrator, with Missouri's intestacy rules deciding who takes. These are frequently the more productive filings, because several heirs who never planned for the situation now jointly own a property none of them lives in.
Missouri also splits estates into supervised and independent administration, and that distinction matters more for timing than testate versus intestate does. Supervised estates need a court order to sell real property, which puts extra filings on the public docket.
Start with Case.net, the statewide portal. It is free, requires no account, and there are no fees beyond your own internet charges. The litigant name search is where probate research begins in all three jurisdictions.
Four things about how the search actually behaves, because the folklore around it is wrong:
Case.net also carries its own disclaimer that the information is provided as a service and is not considered an official court record. For anything you are going to act on, the docket is the lead and the courthouse file is the confirmation.
Coverage start dates are set per circuit, not statewide. That is the single most useful thing to know before searching, and it is the detail most guides get wrong.
Missouri's most populous county, covering Kansas City and Independence, with two probate division locations.
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Court | 16th Circuit Court, Probate Division |
| Kansas City address | 415 E. 12th Street, 9th Floor, Kansas City, MO 64106 |
| Independence address | 308 W. Kansas, Ste 304, Independence, MO 64050 |
| Phone | (816) 881-3755, the probate division line for both locations |
| Hours | Monday to Friday, 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM |
| Online search | Case.net, plus the county's own probate records portal |
| Copies | $0.30 per page, certification $4.00 (fee schedule) |
Jackson runs two systems and the boundary between them is a date. The 16th Circuit's own portal states that to view new cases and current case action information entered after May 16, 2005 you should use Case.net; the county portal is for what came before. Note that the Missouri Courts circuit 16 help page says public case information runs back to January 1, 1989, with probate judgments entered before February 15, 1989 excluded unless revived after January 1, 1989. Those two official sources disagree, so treat older Jackson probate cases as worth trying on Case.net before assuming the county portal is the only route. Case numbers run 16PR480021 for 1999 to 2005 filings and 0516-PR00001 after January 1, 2005.
The county portal carries a warning worth repeating: the information on it will not represent complete court records. It is a supplement to Case.net, not an independent system of record.
Suburban St. Louis, roughly a million residents, a deep base of established single-family stock in Clayton, Kirkwood, Webster Groves, Chesterfield and Florissant.
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Court | St. Louis County Probate Court |
| Address | 105 South Central Avenue, Clayton, MO 63105 |
| Phone | (314) 615-8029 |
| Hours | Monday to Friday, 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM |
| Online search | Case.net, filtered to St. Louis County |
| Copies | $1.00 per page, certified $1.50 plus $1.00 per page (fee schedule) |
Case.net probate coverage for St. Louis County began July 12, 2004. Cases filed between July 12, 2004 and May 1, 2009 sit under the "Probate St. Louis County" location; after May 1, 2009 they are under "St Louis County" with numbers in the format YYSL-PR400021. If a search comes back empty for a case you expect to find, check the location filter before concluding the case is not there. That July 2004 date is a St. Louis County figure specifically. It is not a statewide rule, and applying it to the other two circuits will cost you cases.
An independent city with no county, roughly 300,000 residents, and the oldest online probate coverage of the three.
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Court | 22nd Circuit Court, Probate Division |
| Address | 10 North Tucker Boulevard, 10th Floor, St. Louis, MO 63101 |
| Phone | (314) 622-4238 (fax 314-622-4498) |
| Circuit Clerk | (314) 622-4433 |
| Hours | Circuit Clerk's Office, Monday to Friday, 8:30 AM to 5:00 PM |
| Online search | Case.net, filtered to St. Louis City |
| Copies | No published per-page rate. The certified copies department quotes each request |
St. Louis City probate is available on Case.net for all public cases pending as of May 31, 2000 and thereafter, which is more than four years deeper than St. Louis County. Three case number formats are in circulation: the old CV401-0533P, the converted 22PR04010533, and the current 0122-PR00533.
For older city estate files, the 22nd Circuit points to the Missouri State Archives County and Municipal Records Database. Be clear on what that is: the court states those records are not searchable by name or subject and can only be browsed by county, office, record type and date. It is a browsing collection for chain-of-title work, not a lead source. The Archives research room is at 600 West Main Street, Jefferson City, MO 65101, (573) 751-3280.
| Jurisdiction | Circuit | Case.net probate coverage from | Online search |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jackson County | 16th | Entries after May 16, 2005 per the court, back to January 1, 1989 per Missouri Courts | Yes, plus the 16th Circuit portal for older cases |
| St. Louis County | 21st | July 12, 2004 | Yes |
| St. Louis City | 22nd | May 31, 2000 | Yes |
All three are genuinely workable from a desk, which puts Missouri ahead of most states in this library. The friction is not access, it is that each circuit starts at a different point in time and each uses different case number formats, so a process built around one jurisdiction quietly under-reports the other two.
Case.net searching is free. Copies are not, and the per-page rate is set locally rather than by statute, so the two counties covered here differ by more than three times.
| Item | Jackson County (16th) | St. Louis County (21st) | St. Louis City (22nd) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plain copy | $0.30 per page | $1.00 per page | Quoted per request |
| Certification | $4.00 | $1.50 plus $1.00 per page | Quoted per request |
| Decedent estate, testate | $190.50, or $155.50 if the will was previously admitted | $190.50, or $155.50 if the will was previously admitted | Not published |
| Decedent estate, intestate | $155.50 | $155.50 | Not published |
| Small estate affidavit | $55.50 | $75.50, or $110.50 with an application to admit the will | Not published |
| File will only, no other proceedings | $0.00 | Not published | Not published |
Sources: the 16th Circuit fee schedule and the 21st Circuit fee schedule. The 22nd Circuit publishes no per-page rate; it responds to a records request with an estimate, so budget by asking rather than by assuming.
The practical implication is straightforward. In St. Louis County a 40-page estate file is $40 in plain copies. Read the docket on Case.net first, decide which two or three documents you actually need, and order only those.
Missouri runs two claim clocks at once, and most guides only mention one of them.
| Stage | Statutory position |
|---|---|
| Small estate threshold | $40,000 or less after liens, debts and encumbrances, RSMo 473.097 |
| Inventory and appraisement | Within 30 days after letters are granted, unless the court allows longer, RSMo 473.233 |
| Creditor claim window | 6 months from first published notice of letters, or 2 months from actual notice, whichever is later, RSMo 473.360 |
| Absolute claim bar | 1 year from the date of death, regardless of whether an estate was opened, RSMo 473.444 |
| Will presentment | Generally within 1 year of death, but only 6 months from first publication of notice of letters where an estate has already been opened, RSMo 473.050 |
The second clock is the one that changes how you work the list. RSMo 473.444 bars all claims not filed within one year of death, with narrow exceptions for administration costs, exempt property, family and homestead allowances, and claims of the United States or a taxing authority. It runs from the death, not from the filing, and it runs whether or not anyone ever opens an estate. So a filing made ten months after death has a very different creditor picture from one made in week three, and that is visible from the docket before you make contact.
On overall duration, be careful with the numbers that circulate. Simple estates in the 6 to 12 month range and estates holding real property in the 12 to 18 month range are practitioner estimates, not published court timelines. No Missouri court publishes those figures. What is fixed is the floor: a 30-day inventory, a six-month claim window from first publication, and settlement after that. Nothing distributes quickly.
The productive outreach window is 30 to 90 days after letters are granted. Earlier and the personal representative is still dealing with qualification, publication and inventory. Much later and either the estate attorney has already made a referral or the property is listed.
The docket tells you an estate exists. Five more steps tell you whether it is worth your time.
1. Confirm the jurisdiction before anything else. In the St. Louis market this is the whole game. A Kirkwood decedent is Clayton, a city-limits decedent is Tucker Boulevard, and an unincorporated "St. Louis, MO" address could be either. Run both.
2. Read the docket, not just the case caption. Check whether letters have actually been issued, whether the administration is supervised or independent, whether the inventory has been filed, and whether the personal representative has been discharged. A discharged estate is closed. A supervised estate with no inventory on file at day 60 is behind, which usually means the family is not aligned.
3. Cross-reference the county assessor. Case.net gives you the decedent's name and the case, not the parcel. Matching the name and last known address against assessor records is what surfaces the property, its value and its tax status. Delinquent taxes on an open estate remains the clearest motivation signal in public data.
4. Identify who has authority to sign. The personal representative named in the letters is the only person who can sell. Where an attorney of record appears on the docket, the attorney is often the better first contact, because probate attorneys carry several clients who need to sell and refer the professionals they trust.
5. Understand the sale floor before you price anything. Under RSMo 473.500, an order for sale of real property must direct that a private sale not go below three-fourths of the appraised value. That floor applies to private sales only. Public sales under RSMo 473.507 and RSMo 473.510 carry no such limit. A supervised sale also needs a court order authorising it under RSMo 473.493 and a report of sale examined and approved under RSMo 473.513, so there are two filings on the public docket you can watch for, and both are useful timing signals.
Follow-up is where most of this falls apart. Missouri estates do not close in under six months by law, so a personal representative who says no in month two is a different conversation in month seven. A 90-day cadence across all three jurisdictions separates the agents who close probate deals from the ones who collect lists.
Three jurisdictions: Jackson County in the 16th Circuit, St. Louis County in the 21st, and St. Louis City in the 22nd. Between them they cover the Kansas City metro and both halves of the St. Louis market.
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.
Missouri is one of the easier states to research manually, and that is worth saying plainly. Case.net is free, it covers probate, and all three jurisdictions are online. The cost is not access, it is repetition: three circuits with three different coverage start dates and three case number formats, checked weekly, then assessor cross-referencing and skip tracing on every case that looks live. That is most of a working week each month, every month.
You can see the full coverage list at probatedata.com/counties, or start a 7-day trial for $1 and search the Missouri jurisdictions directly.
For the wider method across every state, see the national guide to finding probate records by county.
Yes. Court Operating Rule 2.02(a) presumes that records of all courts are open to any member of the public for inspection or copying, so you do not need to be an heir, an attorney, or a party to the case. The rule excludes records made confidential by statute, court rule or order. In Jackson County, for example, the 16th Circuit states that mental health and alcohol and drug related estates are confidential and not available for public viewing.
Through Case.net, the free statewide portal run by the Office of State Courts Administrator, which covers probate in every circuit including Jackson County, St. Louis County and St. Louis City. Use the litigant name search, which has separate last name, first name and middle initial fields, and filter by county or court location to narrow the results. Jackson County also maintains its own probate records portal for cases entered before 16 May 2005.
No. The official Case.net search help confirms the litigant name search uses separate fields for last name, first name and middle initial, and that the name fields are not case sensitive. The last name field needs at least 2 characters and accepts partial names. The real limit is that a search returning more than 1,000 results is refused outright, so common surnames have to be narrowed with county, case type, filing year or case status.
They are separate jurisdictions with separate courthouses and separate dockets. St. Louis County is the 21st Circuit, with its probate court at 105 South Central Avenue in Clayton. St. Louis City is an independent city with no county affiliation and runs the 22nd Circuit, with its probate division at 10 North Tucker Boulevard downtown. Because many unincorporated county addresses also read St. Louis, MO, run a name in both when the municipality is not obvious.
There is no published court timeline, and the 6 to 12 month and 12 to 18 month ranges that circulate are practitioner estimates rather than rules. What is fixed is the floor: an inventory and appraisement within 30 days of letters being granted under RSMo 473.233, and a creditor claim window of 6 months from the first published notice of letters or 2 months from actual notice, whichever is later, under RSMo 473.360. Missouri also runs an absolute bar under RSMo 473.444, which blocks claims not filed within one year of the date of death whether or not an estate was ever opened.
Copy fees are set locally rather than by statute, and they vary widely. Jackson County charges $0.30 per page with $4.00 certification. St. Louis County charges $1.00 per page, with certified copies at $1.50 plus $1.00 per page. St. Louis City publishes no per-page rate and instead responds to a records request with an estimate. Searching Case.net itself is free.
Yes. The court-appointed personal representative has authority to sell estate real property. In a supervised estate the court issues an order authorising the sale under RSMo 473.493 and later examines and approves a report of sale under RSMo 473.513. RSMo 473.500 requires that an order for a private sale direct that the property not be sold for less than three-fourths of the appraised value; that floor applies to private sales only, not to public sales under RSMo 473.507 and 473.510.
It depends on the circuit, and there is no statewide date. St. Louis County probate coverage begins 12 July 2004, with cases from then to 1 May 2009 sitting under a separate Probate St. Louis County location. St. Louis City probate is available for all public cases pending as of 31 May 2000 and thereafter. For Jackson County the 16th Circuit routes case action entered after 16 May 2005 to Case.net, while the Missouri Courts help page states public case information runs back to 1 January 1989, so older Jackson cases are worth trying on Case.net before falling back to the county portal.
