Methodology and editorial review

SmallEstateMap is a reference, not a law firm. We document, for each of the 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia, the small-estate-affidavit (or equivalent simplified-administration) pathway that allows a modest estate to be settled without full probate. For each state we surface the dollar threshold, the waiting period if any, the court that takes the filing, the statute that governs, and a representative form.

The site does not offer legal advice. We do not represent clients, do not draft documents for individual estates, and do not respond to questions about specific cases.

Each state row is built from primary sources where reachable:

• The state legislature’s codified statutes, by section.
• The state judicial-branch forms, where there is a statewide form.
• The Cornell Legal Information Institute (LII), used as a stable mirror where the state’s own statute portal is unreliable.
• The Social Security Administration’s POMS section on state-specific small-estate procedures, as a cross-check.

Where a state legislature URL was unreachable on the verification date, we have used Cornell LII or a state-government court page; the record on each state page indicates the URL we used. The full bibliography is available on /sources.

We do not scrape. State statutes change a few times a year; a scraper would either go stale invisibly or break loudly without the editorial review that catches stale data on its way out. The verification-date convention below makes the data’s shelf life explicit.

Each row carries a last verified date, surfaced as a sage-tinted pill on the state page and on the home page header. The verification cycle has two layers:

• Quarterly delta check. Every three months we run a focused pass on every state, checking the legislative tracker for amendments to the cited statutes since the last verification date.
• Annual full re-read. Once a year, every state row is re-read against primary sources from scratch. The verification date is updated even where no substantive change was found.

The site-wide “as of” date in the home page’s editorial card is the most recent verification date across all rows. A state with a stale date relative to the rest of the site is the visible signal that a scheduled re-read is due.

Pending editorial review with a licensed probate attorney; the site is in a pre-launch state and is not currently presented as legally reviewed.

The plan is for each state row to be reviewed by a licensed probate attorney admitted in that state, with the attorney’s name, bar number, and state of admission appearing on the state page. Until the editorial-review engagement is in place, the site renders “Pending editorial review” in every position where a reviewer name would otherwise appear, and the site is not promoted as legally reviewed. This is a deliberate choice rather than an oversight: a placeholder reviewer name on a YMYL legal site would mislead the reader.

SmallEstateMap participates in the Trust & Will affiliate program, run through Impact.com. When a reader follows the Trust & Will link from this site and uses the service, we may earn a referral fee. The fee does not change the price the reader pays.

We surface the affiliate link in two places only:

• The pillar page When full probate is unavoidable, where the reader has reached the page that says the affidavit is not their tool.
• The threshold-exceeded result of the threshold finder, where the reader has just learned their estate is above the cap.

We do not place the affiliate link in the home hero, the state grid, the state pages, the navigation, or any pillar page where the affidavit pathway is being explained as available. We have written every page on the site the same way whether or not the reader clicks through.

Most of the people reading this site are doing so in the weeks after losing a relative. We try to write in a way that respects that situation without performing sympathy. We do not run pop-ups, countdown timers, urgency banners, or email-capture overlays. The threshold figures are factual; they are not framed as deadlines you might miss.

Nothing on this site is legal advice for your specific situation. Each state’s small-estate procedure has features and edge cases that the page summaries cannot fully capture; if your situation is not straightforward, consult a probate attorney admitted in your state. The full disclaimer is on /disclaimer.