Pennsylvania has 67 counties and a Register of Wills in every one of them. Estates are opened with that county officer, not with a judge, and there is no statewide probate search of any kind.
Jonathan Khorsandi on Sep 25, 2026
Pennsylvania has 67 counties and a Register of Wills in every one of them. Estates are opened with that county officer, not with a judge, and there is no statewide probate search of any kind. The portal that looks like one does not carry probate cases at all.
That last point is where most Pennsylvania research goes wrong. The Unified Judicial System web portal is the state's public case search, and its coverage is appellate courts, Common Pleas criminal, magisterial district courts and Philadelphia Municipal Court. Orphans' Court and Register of Wills filings are not in it. Searching an estate there returns nothing, and the nothing tells you nothing.
Access is county by county, and the four counties ProbateData covers behave very differently from each other. One requires a login before it will show you a docket. One shows you dockets freely but will not show you a single document image. Only one sells images at all.
Yes. A Pennsylvania estate file is a public record held by the county Register of Wills, who also serves as Clerk of the Orphans' Court in most counties. Anyone can inspect it without being an heir, an attorney, or a party.
The public file normally includes the petition for grant of letters, the letters testamentary or letters of administration naming the personal representative with an address, the estate inventory, the inheritance tax return, any accounts filed, and the Orphans' Court docket where the estate has been before a judge.
Two limits matter more in Pennsylvania than in most states. Public does not mean online, because there is no statewide index to search. And online does not mean readable: Delaware County publishes case data with no document images at all, and Allegheny County will not run a Wills and Orphans' Court search for you without an account.
In the county where the deceased was domiciled at death, with the Register of Wills for that county. 20 Pa.C.S. § 901 gives the register jurisdiction over probate of wills and the grant of letters within the county for which the register was elected.
Pennsylvania splits the work between two offices, and the split is why the records are scattered. The Register of Wills is the administrative gateway: it admits the will, issues letters, and handles the inheritance tax filings. The Orphans' Court Division of the Court of Common Pleas is the judicial side, and 20 Pa.C.S. § 711 gives it mandatory jurisdiction over the administration and distribution of decedents' estates. A routine estate may never reach a judge. A contested one, or one that needs an order to sell, will.
Case numbering is not standardised across the state. Counties assign estate numbers on their own systems, so do not assume a single format when you are searching or when you are matching a lead back to a docket.
Testate, meaning there is a will, produces a petition for grant of letters, a named executor, and letters testamentary. 20 Pa.C.S. § 3155 sets who is entitled to letters in each case.
Intestate, meaning no valid will, produces letters of administration and an administrator appointed by the register. These filings are frequently the more productive ones, because several heirs who never planned for the situation now jointly hold a house none of them lives in and none of them alone can sell.
The distinction also affects how fast a sale can happen, which is covered under the lead section below.
County by county, on that county's own system. Before anything else, one thing to rule out.
The Pennsylvania Unified Judicial System web portal is not a probate search. Its docket coverage is the Supreme, Superior and Commonwealth courts, Common Pleas criminal, magisterial district courts and Philadelphia Municipal Court. It does not include Orphans' Court or Register of Wills matters. Any guide that tells you to start an estate search there, including earlier versions of this one, is wrong.
The four counties below are the ones ProbateData covers. Contact details are given only where they were confirmed against an official source; where they were not, the county's Register of Wills page is the place to get them.
Pittsburgh and the western Pennsylvania metro. Older single-family stock, a large long-tenure homeowner base, and the highest filing volume of the four.
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Office | Department of Court Records, Wills and Orphans' Court Division |
| Address | 414 Grant Street, First Floor, Pittsburgh, PA 15219, per the department's own listing. A separate county page gives Allegheny County Courthouse, Room 114, 436 Grant Street. Confirm before travelling |
| Phone | 412-350-4180 |
| Online case search | Yes, but a login is required. There is no guest search in the Wills and Orphans' Court Division |
| Document images | Not available online |
| Probate fee | $194.75 at the lowest published tier |
Allegheny is the awkward one. The data is there, the volume is there, and you cannot see any of it until you have registered an account. Budget the setup time once rather than discovering it mid-search.
North-east of Philadelphia, a mix of suburban boroughs and rural townships, high median estate values.
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Office | Bucks County Register of Wills and Clerk of Orphans' Court, Doylestown |
| Address and phone | Not confirmed in this review. Take them from the county's Register of Wills page |
| Online case search | propublic.buckscountyonline.org, with e-filing and a public web viewer |
| Document images | Yes, downloadable for a fee. The only one of these four counties that sells images |
| Appointments | Recommended, not required. Probate itself is filed electronically and completed on a scheduled video call |
| Probate fee | $50 at the lowest tier |
Bucks is the only county of the four you can work end to end from a desk, index to document. If you are testing a Pennsylvania workflow before scaling it, test it here.
The close-in south-western Philadelphia suburbs. Dense row and twin housing, high homeownership among older residents, strong flip and rental demand.
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Office | Delaware County Register of Wills and Clerk of Orphans' Court, Media |
| Address and phone | Not confirmed in this review. Take them from the county's Register of Wills page |
| Online case search | Yes, with guest access and no login |
| Document images | None. The office states it is not offering document images at this time |
| Copies | Ordered from the office, allow 14 business days |
| Probate fee | $23 at the lowest tier |
Delaware is the easiest county to search and the slowest to read. You can confirm within minutes that an estate exists and who opened it, then wait three weeks for the paperwork that tells you what is in it. Plan the outreach off the index and order documents only on cases you intend to work.
Norristown and the north-western Philadelphia suburbs. Third most populous county in the state, high-value housing, consistent filing volume.
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Office | Montgomery County Register of Wills and Clerk of Orphans' Court, Norristown |
| Address and phone | Not confirmed in this review. Take them from the county's Register of Wills page |
| Online case search | Yes. Register of Wills probate cases appear in the county's online records search alongside civil dockets |
| Document images | Not available for download |
| Probate fee | Not confirmed in this review. Confirm with the office |
| County | Online case search | Login required | Document images |
|---|---|---|---|
| Allegheny | Yes | Yes | No |
| Bucks | Yes | No | Yes, purchasable |
| Delaware | Yes | No | No, copies take 14 business days |
| Montgomery | Yes | No | No |
All four have a case search, which is better than most states in this library. Only Bucks lets you finish the job online. In Allegheny you need an account first, and in Delaware and Montgomery the documents come from the office rather than the screen.
Pennsylvania does not set probate fees statewide. Each Register of Wills publishes a schedule that scales with the gross value of the estate, and the spread between counties is wide. At the lowest tier, probate costs $23 in Delaware County, $50 in Bucks County, and $194.75 in Allegheny County. Those are entry-tier figures, not what a $600,000 estate pays, so read the county's own schedule before you quote a number to anyone.
Copy charges sit on top and are set locally. The practical costs to plan around are the ones that are not money:
Small estates are handled under 20 Pa.C.S. § 3102, which lets the Orphans' Court settle an estate on petition where the property, excluding real estate, has a gross value of $50,000 or less. Note what that does and does not do. It is a court petition, not a counter form, and it does not clear title to real property. An estate holding a house will go through full administration regardless of how small the personal property is, because the personal representative needs letters to convey the house.
The statutory floor is a year, and the year does not start when you think it does.
| Stage | Statutory position |
|---|---|
| Advertise the grant of letters | Once a week for three successive weeks in a newspaper of general circulation and in the county legal journal, § 3162 |
| Creditor claim period | One year from the first complete advertisement of the grant of letters, § 3532 |
| Inventory | Filed no later than the personal representative's account or the inheritance tax return due date, whichever is earlier, § 3301 |
| Inheritance tax return (REV-1500) | Nine months from the date of death, with a 5% discount where tax is paid within three months |
The creditor year runs from the first complete advertisement, not from the date of death. Those two dates can be months apart, and on an estate that took a while to open they often are. The one-year period measured from death under § 3532 applies to a narrower thing: claims against real property the decedent already conveyed.
One correction worth carrying into your outreach. It is not true that a personal representative is frozen out of selling until the claim period ends. Section 3532(a) permits distribution and conveyance before the year is up; the representative simply does it at their own risk of personal liability. Plenty of estate houses sell in month four. Title insurers and estate counsel are the real gatekeepers here, not a statutory bar.
ProbateData's own guidance to subscribers is to plan on 12 to 24 months from grant of letters to final distribution, longer where the estate reaches Orphans' Court. The most productive contact window is 60 to 120 days after the grant of letters. Earlier and the representative is still advertising and assembling the inventory. Much later and the property is often listed.
The filing proves an estate exists. Five more steps tell you whether it is worth working.
1. Search the county of domicile, not the property county. Venue follows where the person lived. An estate opened in Montgomery can hold a house in Berks. Find the estate first, then follow the assets out of it.
2. Read the letters, not the petition. The letters testamentary or letters of administration name the personal representative with a mailing address, and that person is the only one with authority to sign. Heirs, however many of them are talking to you, cannot convey.
3. Check whether there is a power of sale. 20 Pa.C.S. § 3351 gives the personal representative power to sell real property that is not specifically devised, unless the will restricts it. Where that power is absent or unclear, § 3353 lets the Orphans' Court authorise the sale on petition. A docket showing a sale petition is a seller who has already decided.
4. Confirm the property is actually in the estate. Property held in joint tenancy with right of survivorship passes outside probate even though the decedent's name is on the deed. In Delaware and Montgomery you will often be working from index data with no document images, so cross-reference the county recorder and assessor before you spend time on the case.
5. Time the approach off the advertisement, not the death. The grant of letters and its first advertisement are the dates that start the estate's clock and the dates the representative is working to. They are also public, which the date of death frequently is not.
Follow-up is where Pennsylvania rewards patience. A representative who says no in month three is advertising, waiting on an inheritance tax return, and has not yet had the conversation with the other heirs about what happens to the house. The same call in month eight is a different call. A 90-day cadence across the four counties is the difference between working probate and collecting a list.
Four: Allegheny, Bucks, Delaware and Montgomery. That is the Pittsburgh metro plus three of the four suburban Philadelphia collar counties, which between them are the two highest-volume probate markets in the state.
Every lead is a verified court filing with a case number, not a death record or a pre-probate guess. Each one carries the property records matched to the estate with the most recent owner of record, 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 house has already listed.
Doing it manually across these four means a registered login in Allegheny, a 14-business-day wait for any document in Delaware, index-only research in Montgomery, and recorder cross-referencing on every case before you know whether there is even a house involved. The work is legitimate and it produces leads. It also produces about a week of research per month.
You can see the full coverage list at probatedata.com/counties, or start a 7-day trial for $1 and search the Pennsylvania counties directly.
For the wider method across every state, see the national guide to finding probate records by county.
Yes. A Pennsylvania estate file is a public record held by the county Register of Wills, who also serves as Clerk of the Orphans' Court in most counties, and anyone can inspect it without being an heir, an attorney or a party. Public does not mean online, though. There is no statewide index, Delaware County publishes no document images at all, and Allegheny County requires a registered login before it will run a Wills and Orphans' Court search.
County by county, using that county's own system. Identify the county where the deceased was domiciled at death, then search the Register of Wills or Orphans' Court records there. Of the four counties ProbateData covers, Bucks runs propublic.buckscountyonline.org with purchasable images, Delaware offers guest search with no images, Montgomery lists probate cases in the county records search, and Allegheny requires a login.
No. The Unified Judicial System web portal covers the appellate courts, Court of Common Pleas criminal cases, magisterial district courts and Philadelphia Municipal Court. Orphans' Court and Register of Wills filings are not in it. Searching for an estate there returns nothing whether or not the estate exists, so an empty result is not evidence that no estate was opened.
One year from the first complete advertisement of the grant of letters under 20 Pa.C.S. 3532, not one year from the date of death. Those two dates are often months apart. A separate one-year period measured from the date of death applies only to claims against real property the decedent had already conveyed.
Yes. Section 3532(a) of Title 20 permits the personal representative to distribute or convey estate property before the one-year claim period runs, at their own risk of personal liability. There is no statutory bar on the sale. In practice the constraints come from title insurers and estate counsel rather than the statute, and estate houses regularly sell well inside the year.
20 Pa.C.S. 3102 lets the Orphans' Court settle an estate on petition where the property, excluding real estate, has a gross value of $50,000 or less. It is a court petition rather than a counter form, and it cannot clear title to real property. An estate that holds a house therefore goes through full administration and the personal representative needs letters to convey it, however small the personal property is.
There is no statewide fee. Each Register of Wills publishes a schedule that scales with the gross value of the estate. At the lowest tier the probate fee is $23 in Delaware County, $50 in Bucks County and $194.75 in Allegheny County. Copy charges are set locally on top of that, so check the county's own published schedule before quoting a figure.
Two offices share it. The Register of Wills admits the will, issues letters testamentary or letters of administration, and handles the inheritance tax filings. The Orphans' Court Division of the Court of Common Pleas holds mandatory jurisdiction over the administration and distribution of decedents' estates under 20 Pa.C.S. 711, and hears contested matters, formal accountings and petitions to authorise a sale.
