The District of Columbia has no counties and one probate court. Every estate, will, trust and guardianship matter in the city is filed with the Probate Division of the DC Superior Court.
Jonathan Khorsandi on May 22, 2026
The District of Columbia has no counties and one probate court. Every estate, will, trust and guardianship matter in the city is filed with the Probate Division of the DC Superior Court, where the Office of the Register of Wills holds the record. One court, one docket, one set of forms, and no county-by-county variation to work around.
The Probate Division opened 2,697 new cases in calendar year 2025. Of those, 1,465 were formal decedent's estates and 503 were small estates, which is roughly 120 to 130 new formal filings a month and about 165 a month once small estates are counted. Those figures come from DC Courts' own CY2025 Statistical Summary at page 19.
The difficulty in DC is not finding the court. It is knowing which threshold and which track apply to the case in front of you, because the governing figures changed in March 2025 and the court's own pages have not all been updated to match.
Yes. Decedent's estate filings, wills admitted to probate, docket entries and most document images are public records of the DC Superior Court, and most of them can be viewed online anonymously without registering or signing in.
The court's case search page confirms that docket information and document images are available within minutes of being entered into the court record, which makes DC one of the faster jurisdictions in the country for spotting a new filing.
Four categories sit outside open public access: documents marked confidential, sealed cases, sealed documents inside otherwise open cases, and documents in cases involving incapacitated persons, which means adult guardianship and intervention proceedings. Those require registration and authentication rather than anonymous viewing. Note that the intervention docket is the second largest category the Division handles, at 513 new cases in 2025, so a meaningful share of the court's volume is not openly browsable.
With the Probate Division of the DC Superior Court, Court Building A, 515 Fifth Street NW, Room 314. There is no alternative venue inside the District and no county register of wills. Estate administration runs under Title 20 of the DC Official Code.
Someone who was domiciled in DC at death has their estate opened here. Someone who died elsewhere but owned DC property is handled as a foreign estate proceeding in the same Division, which was 175 new cases in 2025.
DC estate administration is often described as a choice between small estates and formal probate. That collapses two separate distinctions, and it misuses a DC term of art. The real structure is a size axis and a notice axis.
| Axis | Options | What decides it |
|---|---|---|
| Size | Small estate (case type SEB) or large estate (case type ADM) | Value of the property subject to administration in DC, measured against the § 20-351 threshold |
| Notice, within large estates | Abbreviated probate (§ 20-311) or standard probate (§§ 20-321, 20-323) | Whether prior notice is required before the estate is opened |
"Formal probate" in DC means the noticed variant, the opposite of abbreviated. It is not a synonym for large estate. DC Courts publishes separate form packets titled "Abbreviated Probate (ADM)" and "Standard Probate Case Initiation (ADM)" for each date-of-death band, and both open an ADM case.
There is also a third route that never becomes a court case. Under § 20-361, a small asset can be paid or delivered by affidavit, subject to a $40,000 cap and a requirement that 60 days have passed since death. Assets moved that way leave no probate docket, which is a real gap in any lead list built purely from court filings.
§ 20-351 now reads that property with a value of $80,000 or less may be administered as a small estate. D.C. Law 25-302, the Strengthening Probate Administration Amendment Act of 2024, raised it from $40,000 effective 21 March 2025. D.C. Law 26-164, effective 14 August 2026, confirms that the 25-302 changes apply to estates of decedents who died on or after 21 March 2025.
So the rule is date-of-death driven. Deaths on or after 21 March 2025 use $80,000. Earlier deaths keep $40,000. Given probate pendency, both cohorts are live on the docket right now.
One warning before you rely on a court page. The DC Courts Small Estates page, last updated 6 February 2026, still states $40,000 and still publishes a court-cost schedule that stops at $40,000. The Probate Division landing page and the statute both say $80,000. That is an internal inconsistency on dccourts.gov, not a defect in the code.
The widely repeated claim that DC small estates cover personal property only, and that real property always forces full probate, does not hold up against the statute or the court's own instructions.
The DC Courts Small Estates page requires the petitioner to list all real estate, including real estate outside the District, with the property tax assessed value for the year the decedent died, and it sets the publication trigger by the value of the estate's assets, real estate and personal property. § 20-351 speaks of "property," which § 20-101(l) defines as both real and personal property. Subchapter VI contains no real-property carve-out.
The other official position is on DC Courts' own case-type cards, which describe small estates as cases where the person who died did not own property, and large estates as cases where the person owned a house or had property valued over $80,000.
Both are official. The honest reconciliation is practical rather than legal: an estate holding a DC house almost always exceeds $80,000 and is administered as a large estate, which is why nearly every probate lead with a DC property does show up in the formal record. But the code contains no rule to that effect, and real estate is counted and listed in a small estate when one is filed.
Through the DC Superior Court Portal, which covers probate. Not through eAccess, which does not.
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Court | Probate Division, DC Superior Court |
| Clerk's Office | Court Building A, 515 Fifth Street NW, Room 314 (third floor), Washington, DC 20001 |
| Phone | (202) 879-9460 |
| Hours | Monday to Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. |
| Probate Self-Help Center | Room 318, same building, (202) 508-1681 |
| Online case search | DC Superior Court Portal, explained on the court's case search page |
| Register of Wills | Nicole Stevens |
(202) 879-1010 is the DC Courts main switchboard, not the Probate Division. Use (202) 879-9460 for probate.
| Access route | Covers probate | Cost | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| DC Superior Court Portal | Yes | Free | Civil, civil Tax, Auditor Master and Probate. Most viewing is anonymous, no sign-in |
| eAccess | No | Free | Criminal, criminal Tax and Domestic Violence only. Searching here for an estate returns nothing |
| Remote Public Access | Yes | Free | Returns the same docket information the clerk would mail you, without the $10 fee and without the delay |
| Mail-in search request | Yes | $10.00 per search | Case Information Search Request Form, check payable to "Register of Wills" |
| Room 314 file room | Yes | Free to inspect | Open cases, and open or closed cases no more than ten years old |
| Suitland Records Center / DC Archives | Yes | Free to inspect | Closed cases and jackets more than ten years old, retrieved on request |
On the Portal, use Smart Search by case number or party name. Probate cases carry a case-type code: ADM for a large estate, SEB for a small estate, FEP for a foreign estate, WIL for a will filing, INT for an intervention proceeding. There is no publicly documented Probate Division filter on the anonymous front end, so work from names, case numbers and those codes rather than expecting a division dropdown.
For archived files, submit the Case Information Archive Case Request Form. The Probate Division makes a courtesy call when the file arrives and generally holds it for a minimum of two weeks before returning it to storage, so a single trip can cover several archived cases if you request them together.
Free, if you stay online. The Portal and Remote Public Access both cost nothing and no registration is needed for ordinary probate viewing. Fees start when you want paper.
Those are the figures on DC Courts' Copy Request Form. The practical point is that the $10 mail search buys you nothing you cannot get free through Remote Public Access, unless you specifically need a clerk-certified confirmation for a transaction. Identify the case online, then order only the documents you actually need certified.
DC Courts publishes no headline duration for large estates. It does publish the milestones, and those are the dates worth working to.
| Stage | Statutory or published position |
|---|---|
| Small estate, notice to creditors and unknown heirs | Published once, 30 days to file claims (DC Courts, Small Estates) |
| Small estate, start to final order | Generally no more than 120 days (DC Courts, Small Estates) |
| Large estate, publication of notice of appointment | Once a week for 2 successive weeks, § 20-704 |
| Large estate, proofs of publication | Within 90 days of appointment (DC Courts, Large Estates) |
| Creditor claim bar | 6 months after first publication, § 20-903 |
Two weeks of publication is current law for deaths on or after 21 March 2025, changed from three weeks by D.C. Law 25-302. The court's Large Estates page still says three consecutive weeks, and it is also the only source that mentions the notice running concurrently in two publications chosen by the personal representative. Treat two weeks as the statutory position and the two-newspaper practice as the court's operating instruction.
D.C. Law 25-302 also reset the allowances: the homestead allowance is $30,000 under § 19-101.02, the family allowance is $15,000, the exempt property allowance is $20,000, and funeral expense reimbursement rose from $1,500 to $5,000.
For duration, the useful published number is the caseload itself. In CY2025 the Division cleared 89% of decedent's estate cases against 1,465 new filings, with 6,636 still pending at year end. A pending count more than four times annual new filings is consistent with multi-year administrations. ProbateData's own observation from working these dockets is that a formal DC estate commonly runs past a year, but that is our read of the pattern, not a published court figure.
The filing tells you an estate exists. Five more steps tell you whether it is worth your time.
1. Separate ADM from SEB before anything else. A large estate case is where a DC house almost always lands. Small estates still list real property, so do not discard them automatically, but the case-type code is the fastest first filter you have.
2. Check the date of death against 21 March 2025. It decides whether the $80,000 or the $40,000 threshold applied, which tells you how much estate value a small estate filing can imply. On a pre-2025 death, an SEB case caps out at $40,000 and is unlikely to hold a DC property.
3. Read the docket, not just the petition. Confirm letters have been issued, check whether the estate opened as abbreviated or standard probate, and look for the inventory. DC court records do not flag which estates include real property in any indexed field, so the inventory filing is usually where a parcel first becomes visible.
4. Cross-reference the DC Office of Tax and Revenue. Match the decedent's name and last known address to the parcel and its assessed value. This is also the step that catches estates where the house never appears in an early filing.
5. Identify who can actually sign. Under § 20-741, the personal representative may sell any real or personal property of the estate at public or private sale, except as limited by the will, by Title 20 or by court order. The personal representative, not the heirs, is your contact. Where an attorney of record appears, that attorney is usually the better first approach.
Timing is the part most people get wrong in both directions. The creditor bar at six months and the small-estate 120-day window are real dates you can work backwards from. Anything more precise about when heirs decide to sell is a practitioner heuristic, ours included, and should be treated as one. What holds up is cadence: a filing you contact once and never revisit is a filing you have effectively abandoned.
One thing DC does not give you is a route to filings that never happen. Assets transferred by affidavit under § 20-361 leave no docket at all, and there is no public workaround for that.
One, because there is only one. The Probate Division of the DC Superior Court, covering the entire District.
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 version of this is genuinely workable in DC, more so than in most states, because the Portal is free, anonymous and updated within minutes. What it is not is quick. Roughly 120 to 130 new formal filings a month, no indexed field telling you which of them hold real property, an Office of Tax and Revenue cross-reference on every candidate, and skip tracing after that. The research is legitimate. It is also the reason most single-operator pipelines here go cold in month three.
You can see the full coverage list at probatedata.com/counties, or start a 7-day trial for $1 and search the District directly.
For the wider method across every state, see the national guide to finding probate records by county.
Yes. Decedent's estate filings, wills admitted to probate, docket entries and most document images are public records of the DC Superior Court, and most can be viewed online anonymously without registering. Docket information and document images are available within minutes of being entered into the court record. The exceptions are documents marked confidential, sealed cases and documents, and documents in cases involving incapacitated persons, meaning guardianship and intervention proceedings, which require registration and authentication.
Through the DC Superior Court Portal, which covers Civil, civil Tax, Auditor Master and Probate cases. Use Smart Search by decedent name, personal representative name or case number, and read the case-type code: ADM is a large estate and SEB is a small estate. Do not use eAccess, which covers only criminal, criminal tax and domestic violence matters. Remote Public Access returns the same docket information the clerk would mail you, without the $10 search fee.
No. The District of Columbia has no counties. Every probate matter runs through the Probate Division of the DC Superior Court at Court Building A, 515 Fifth Street NW, Room 314, Washington, DC 20001, where the Office of the Register of Wills holds the record. There is no county register of wills and no variation in procedure across the city.
DC Code section 20-351 sets it at $80,000 or less. D.C. Law 25-302, effective 21 March 2025, raised it from $40,000, and D.C. Law 26-164, effective 14 August 2026, confirmed that the change applies to estates of decedents who died on or after 21 March 2025. Earlier deaths keep the $40,000 figure. DC Courts' own Small Estates page still shows $40,000 and has not been updated.
The statute and the court's instructions say real estate is counted. DC Code section 20-351 applies to property, which section 20-101(l) defines as both real and personal property, and the court's Small Estates page requires the petitioner to list all real estate with its property tax assessed value. DC Courts' plain-language case-type cards say the opposite, describing large estates as cases where the decedent owned a house or had property valued over $80,000. In practice an estate holding a DC house almost always exceeds $80,000 and is administered as a large estate.
The Probate Division opened 2,697 new cases in calendar year 2025 and 2,682 in 2024, per DC Courts' published Statistical Summaries. In 2025 that included 1,465 formal decedent's estates, 503 small estates, 513 intervention proceedings, 175 foreign proceedings, 35 minor guardianships and 6 trusts. Decedent's estates are roughly 120 to 130 new formal filings a month.
DC Courts publishes no headline duration for large estates, but it does publish the milestones. Small estates generally take no more than 120 days from petition to final order. For large estates, notice of appointment is published once a week for 2 successive weeks under section 20-704, proofs of publication are due within 90 days of appointment, and creditor claims are barred 6 months after first publication under section 20-903. The 89% CY2025 clearance rate against 6,636 pending cases is consistent with multi-year administrations.
Online searching through the DC Superior Court Portal and Remote Public Access is free. A mail-in search request costs $10.00 payable to the Register of Wills. Plain copies are $0.50 per page, certified copies $5.00 each plus $0.50 per page, a preliminary certificate $1.00, a final certificate $10.00, additional letters $1.00 each, and a triple seal $25.00 plus $0.50 per page.
