Oregon has 36 counties, and probate jurisdiction is split between two court systems: circuit courts hold it in 30 counties, and county courts hold it in six rural eastern ones.
Jonathan Khorsandi on Aug 24, 2026
Oregon has 36 counties, and probate jurisdiction is split between two court systems: circuit courts hold it in 30 counties, and county courts hold it in six rural eastern ones. Estates are filed in the county where the deceased was domiciled at death, and the records sit with that court, not with any state office.
There is one statewide free search, and it returns case information only. Documents are a separate question, gated behind a paid subscription with an approval step or a trip to the counter.
That gap between "the case is findable online" and "the file is readable online" is the whole practical problem in Oregon. It is also why the agents who work these counties properly find estate property before it reaches the MLS.
Yes. Probate filings in Oregon circuit courts are public records, and under the Oregon Public Records Law you do not need to be an heir, an attorney, or a party to the case to look at one.
What is public includes the decedent's name, the petition for probate, the letters testamentary or letters of administration naming the personal representative, the inventory, creditor claims, the final account, and the full register of actions.
Two limits matter before you plan around online access. Public does not mean the documents are online: the free statewide search returns what the Oregon Judicial Department calls limited case information, and the portal itself warns that results are not an official court register. And the paid tier that does carry documents only holds material filed on or after each circuit court's own eCourt implementation date, which ran from December 2012 to July 2016. Anything older is a courthouse or archive request regardless of what you pay.
In the county where the deceased was domiciled at death, with the court that holds probate jurisdiction there.
ORS 111.075 vests probate jurisdiction in the county courts of Gilliam, Grant, Harney, Malheur, Sherman and Wheeler, and in the circuit court for every other county. That is the 30 and six split. Portland metro work is entirely circuit court. Estate administration runs under ORS Chapters 111 through 117, with initiation in Chapter 113, administration in Chapter 114, claims in Chapter 115, and accounting and distribution in Chapter 116.
Testate, meaning there is a will, produces a petition to probate, a named executor, and letters testamentary. Direction is usually settled from day one.
Intestate, meaning no valid will, produces a petition for letters of administration and a court-appointed personal representative. These are often the more productive filings, because several heirs who never planned for the situation now jointly own a house none of them lives in.
Oregon's small-estate route is now called a simple estate affidavit. The thresholds are in ORS 114.510(1), not in the filing section: not more than $75,000 of fair market value attributable to personal property other than manufactured homes, and not more than $200,000 attributable to the combined value of real property and manufactured homes. The commonly quoted $275,000 is the sum of the two maxima, not a figure any statute states, and the two sublimits apply separately.
The manufactured-home point matters for a real estate audience. A manufactured home counts against the $200,000 real property bucket, not the $75,000 personal one. Valuation is as of the date of death, or, where death was more than a year before filing, as of a date within 45 days before filing.
Simple estates are filed under ORS 114.515 and generate a fraction of the filings a full probate does. The actionable leads come from full probate cases.
Through one statewide portal for case information, then either a subscription or the counter for documents.
Free case search. Go directly to the OJD case record search portal. No sign-in or registration is required. Smart Search is the default landing tool, and Advanced Search Options let you narrow by court location and case type. Search by decedent name or case number, filter to the county and to probate or estate case types, and read the register of actions from the results. You get party names, filing dates, case events, hearing dates and status. You do not get document images.
Paid document access, OJCIN OnLine. The Oregon Judicial Case Information Network is not cheap and does not include documents by default. Per the current OJCIN fee schedule, general access costs a one-time nonrefundable $170 setup fee, then $36 per month plus $17 per month per user profile. Document access is a further $81 per month and requires approval, and the OECI document access rules scope it to designated governmental users, Oregon State Bar members, and business subscribers with a specific statutory need. A one-person real estate business should budget roughly $170 up front and about $134 a month if the document add-on is approved, and should not assume it will be.
In person. Courthouses maintain public access terminals that provide free access to case information during business hours, and counter staff can tell you which document copies can be requested and at what cost. If you need a specific document, calling the records counter first is faster than driving in on an assumption.
Do not use publicaccess.courts.oregon.gov for case records. On the current OJD records page that is the circuit and tax court calendars tool, not the record search, and a probate search there returns nothing useful.
Portland, Oregon's most populous county and its highest-volume probate market. The Multnomah County Circuit Court handles probate for decedents domiciled in the county, and it sits in the Multnomah County Courthouse, 1200 SW 1st Ave, Portland, OR 97204, which replaced the old 1021 SW 4th Avenue building in October 2020. Court operations, probate included, are no longer at the 4th Avenue address, and any directory still listing it is out of date.
Department phone numbers, the probate and records email addresses, and the court's restricted phone-answering windows are covered in the Multnomah County probate records guide, which owns those details and is kept current there. Everything else on this page, the statewide fee schedule, the search routes, the statutory deadlines, applies to Multnomah unchanged.
Immediately west of Portland, covering Hillsboro, Beaverton and the wider Silicon Forest corridor. One of Oregon's fastest-growing counties, with a large base of longtime homeowners in established suburbs.
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Court | Washington County Circuit Court, Probate Department |
| Probate Department | Justice Services Building, First Floor, 150 N 1st Avenue, Hillsboro, OR 97124 |
| Main courthouse | Washington County Courthouse, 145 NE 2nd Avenue, Hillsboro, OR 97124 |
| Mailing address | Washington County Circuit Court, 150 N 1st Avenue MS37, Hillsboro, OR 97124 |
| Phone | 503-846-8888, option 3, then 2, then 2 for Probate |
| Hours | Monday to Friday, 8:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. and 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m., closed over lunch and on legal holidays |
| Online estate search | Statewide OJD portal only. No county-specific probate search |
The Probate Department and the main courthouse are two different buildings. Go to 150 N 1st Avenue for probate, and use the MS37 mail stop if you are mailing a records request.
One current notice, worth reading correctly rather than skipping: the court's home page states "Effective July 14th, 2026: New Probate Visitor Fees in Protective Proceedings." Protective proceedings are guardianships and conservatorships for living protected persons. They are not decedent estate administration, so this notice does not add a cost or a barrier to estate filings or to probate record access.
| County | Case search | Document images online |
|---|---|---|
| Multnomah | Statewide OJD portal, free, no registration | Only via OJCIN document access, $81/month with approval |
| Washington | Statewide OJD portal, free, no registration | Only via OJCIN document access, $81/month with approval |
Neither county runs its own probate portal, and neither needs to: the OJD portal covers both. The honest answer on documents is that no free online route exists in Oregon. It is a subscription with an approval gate, a counter visit, or a mailed request.
The Oregon State Archives at 800 Summer Street NE in Salem holds historical probate records for all 36 counties, much of it on microfilm from the territorial period into the mid-20th century. The Archives is open by appointment; reach the reference desk on 503-373-0701, option 1, or at [email protected]. For anything filed in the last decade, the OJD portal is the right tool.
Filing fees are statutory and identical in every Oregon circuit court. They are set by ORS 21.170 and published in the OJD Circuit Court Fee Schedule effective 1 January 2026. There is no Washington County rate and no Multnomah County rate.
| Estate value | Filing fee | Authority |
|---|---|---|
| Simple estate affidavit | $124 | ORS 21.145(4), ORS 114.515(5) |
| Under $50,000 | $278 | ORS 21.170(1)(a) |
| $50,000 to under $1,000,000 | $591 | ORS 21.170(1)(b) |
| $1,000,000 to under $10,000,000 | $882 | ORS 21.170(1)(c) |
| $10,000,000 or more | $1,176 | ORS 21.170(1)(d) |
The $591 tier is the one to watch. It covers estates from $50,000 to just under $1 million, which is where nearly all residential estate property in the Portland metro lands, so the fee on the docket is a rough first filter on estate size.
Copy fees are also statewide:
Certification is $5.00 plus the per-page charge, not a flat $5.00. On a 40-page inventory that is the difference between $5.00 and $15.00.
Oregon publishes no expected duration, so the useful answer is the statutory floor rather than a typical value. Adding up the fixed deadlines gives a practical minimum of roughly five to six months for an uncontested estate. Six to nine months is ProbateData's own working estimate for a straightforward administration, not a court figure; contested estates run considerably longer.
The deadlines themselves are firm, and they are what keeps generating public filings even on estates that stall.
| Stage | Statutory position |
|---|---|
| Publish notice to interested persons | Once, after appointment, ORS 113.155 |
| Late-discovered assets | Publication must commence within 30 days of filing an inventory that first shows assets, ORS 113.155(5)(b) |
| Creditor claim period | 4 months from the date of publication, ORS 115.005(2)(a) |
| File inventory and appraisal | Within 90 days of appointment unless the court grants longer, ORS 113.165 |
| Final account | Generally not settled until the claim period has run, ORS Chapter 116 |
| Notice of final account and petition for distribution | Not less than 20 days before the hearing, ORS 116.093 |
Two corrections worth carrying, because outdated versions circulate widely. Notice is published once, not for three consecutive weeks; the three-week rule was repealed and ORS 113.155 was last amended in 2023. And the inventory deadline is a single hard 90 days from appointment. There is no 60-day trigger anywhere in ORS 113.165.
Everything outside that table, how many weeks appointment actually takes or when distribution lands, is practice rather than statute. Treat the deadlines above as the fixed points and estimate around them.
The filing tells you an estate exists. Four more steps tell you whether it is worth your time.
1. Search the county of domicile, not the property county. An estate filed in Washington County can hold a house in Clackamas or on the coast. Find the case where the person lived, then follow the assets.
2. Read the register of actions, not just the petition. The free portal gives you this. Check whether letters have actually been issued, whether the inventory has been filed, whether creditor claims are stacking up, and whether a final account has been submitted. An estate with a filed final account is nearly closed.
3. Work the 90-day inventory as your clock. The inventory is where real property and appraised values appear, and ORS 113.165 puts it within 90 days of appointment. If the docket shows an appointment date and no inventory yet, you know roughly when the asset picture becomes public.
4. Identify who can actually sign. Only the personal representative named in the letters has authority to sell. Where an attorney of record appears in the petition, they are often the better first contact on larger estates, and probate attorneys carry several clients who need to sell.
Be honest about what the free search does not give you. It returns case names, dates and events, not property addresses. Confirming that an estate holds real property means opening the inventory, which means the subscription with the document add-on and its approval step, or a counter request. That is the actual cost of doing this manually in Oregon, and it is why most people stop after a handful of cases.
On timing, the productive outreach window is typically the middle of the case: after appointment and after the initial administrative pressure has settled, but before the estate moves toward distribution. The four-month creditor claim period under ORS 115.005 sets the floor, so there is more room than agents usually assume. Follow-up is where this falls down. A personal representative who says no in month two is a different conversation in month seven.
Multnomah and Washington, the two counties that make up the core of the Portland metro.
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.
The manual alternative in Oregon is specific and it is not cheap: a free portal that stops at case information, a $170 setup plus roughly $134 a month for document access that has to be approved first, or repeat trips to Hillsboro and Portland to read inventories at the counter. The research is legitimate and it works. It is also most of a working week each month.
You can see the full coverage list at probatedata.com/counties, or start a 7-day trial for $1 and search the Oregon counties directly.
For the wider method across every state, see the national guide to finding probate records by county.
