What to Do When Someone Dies in California

Someone you love has died, and now there’s a list forming in your head that keeps getting longer: call the mortuary, find the will, tell the bank, figure out what happens to the house. None of it has to happen today. This is a walk-through of what actually needs to happen in the weeks after a death in California, in the order it comes up, so you can stop guessing at the list and start working through it.

The first few days: secure things, don’t distribute things

In the first days, your job is narrow. Secure the property. Get death certificates started. And don’t give anything away yet, even to the people who are sure they’re entitled to it.

• Secure the home. Change or check the locks if the house will sit empty. Collect the mail. Arrange for pets, plants, and anything perishable. If the property will be vacant for more than a few days, call the homeowner’s insurance carrier; some policies limit coverage on an empty house.
• Order death certificates. The mortuary or funeral home handles this. Order more certified copies than you think you’ll need. Banks, life insurance companies, the DMV, and Social Security will each want their own certified copy, and going back for a second batch later costs you time you don’t have.
• Notify Social Security if your family member was receiving benefits. The funeral home often reports the death, but it’s worth confirming.
• Do not distribute anything yet. Not the jewelry, not the car, not “the thing Mom always said was mine.” Until you know whether there’s a trust, a will, or neither, you don’t know who actually has legal authority to give anything away, and undoing an early mistake is harder than waiting a few weeks to make the right one.

Find the estate plan before you do anything else

Everything that comes next turns on one question: did your family member leave a living trust, a will, or neither? Start with the obvious places: a fireproof safe or safe deposit box, a filing cabinet, a folder labeled “estate” or “important papers.” Look too for a business card or letter from an estate planning attorney; that attorney’s office may hold the original documents or a copy.

What you’re looking for, and what it means:

• A living trust. This is a document that already owns the house, the accounts, and other property, set up while your family member was alive. If everything was properly retitled into the trust’s name, the trust’s terms control what happens next, and no court is involved. The person named to take over, called the successor trustee, steps in and manages things directly.
• A will only, no trust. A will names who inherits and who is in charge, but it doesn’t own anything by itself. Anything held only in your family member’s individual name typically has to go through the court process described below before it can be transferred, even with a valid will.
• Neither. If there’s no trust and no will, California’s default rules decide who inherits, and the property still generally has to go through the court process to get there.

If you find a trust, look for a short backup will too. Estate plans built around a trust almost always include one; its job is to catch anything accidentally left outside the trust and route it back in.

One rule applies no matter what you find. If you’re holding the original will, you’re legally required to deliver it to the superior court in the county where your family member lived within 30 days of learning of the death (Prob. Code § 8200). That’s true even if you never open a probate case and even if everything was in a trust. Lodging the original will with the court is a separate obligation from starting any court proceeding.

The three paths a California estate can take

Depending on what you found and what the estate is worth, you’re looking at one of three tracks.

1. A fully funded trust: administration, no court

If your family member’s house and accounts were properly retitled into a revocable living trust before death, those assets skip probate entirely. The successor trustee administers the trust and eventually distributes it to the beneficiaries, all without going to court. This is the outcome a trust is built to produce, and it’s why people set them up in the first place.

2. A small estate: affidavit or simplified petition

California recently raised the dollar thresholds for handling a smaller estate without full probate, under a law called AB 2016. For deaths on or after April 1, 2025:

• Personal property up to $208,850 (bank accounts, vehicles, personal belongings, and similar assets) can often be collected with a small estate affidavit, a sworn statement rather than a court filing. You do have to wait at least 40 days after the death before you can use it (Prob. Code § 13100).
• A primary residence worth up to $750,000 can qualify for a new, simplified court petition built specifically for the family home. It still means filing with the Superior Court, and there’s a mandatory six-month wait before the petition can be granted, but it is a considerably lighter process than full probate. It applies only to the decedent’s principal residence.

3. Formal probate

If the estate exceeds these thresholds, or the assets don’t fit the small estate categories, you’re headed for formal probate: a Superior Court proceeding where a judge appoints someone (an executor, if there’s a will, or an administrator, if there isn’t) to gather the assets, pay debts, and distribute what’s left under court supervision. Formal probate in California generally takes a year or more from start to finish, and the court is involved at every major step.

What a successor trustee actually has to do

If you’ve been named successor trustee of a living trust, the job is real work, even with no courtroom involved. In broad strokes, here’s what a trustee is expected to do:

• Get certified death certificates and track down the trust document and any amendments.
• Serve the statutory notice on all of the trust’s beneficiaries and on the deceased settlor’s heirs within 60 days of the death (Prob. Code § 16061.7). That same notice starts a 120-day clock, the window during which someone can bring a court challenge to the trust. Getting this notice out correctly and on time is one of the most important things a new trustee does.
• Gather and list everything the trust owns: real property, accounts, investments, personal property.
• Open a trust bank account, pay the decedent’s final bills and the property’s ongoing expenses (mortgage, utilities, insurance), and keep trust money completely separate from your own.
• Deal with the decedent’s debts and any creditor claims against the trust. There are deadlines here, and paying the wrong people in the wrong order can create problems, so this is a step worth getting advice on.
• File the decedent’s final income tax return and any tax filings the trust itself owes.
• Eventually distribute the trust’s assets to the beneficiaries according to its terms, and close it out.

A trustee is a fiduciary, which means you’re legally required to act in the beneficiaries’ interest rather than your own, keep them reasonably informed, and account for what you’ve done with the money. Family members sometimes assume that being named trustee is mostly a formality. It isn’t. Get it wrong, even with good intentions, and you can end up personally liable to the very people you were supposed to be helping.

When court is unavoidable

A few situations tend to end up in court no matter what:

• There’s no trust, and the estate is above the small estate thresholds.
• There’s a will, but real property was never transferred into a trust before death.
• Someone is contesting the will, the trust, or how a trustee is handling things.
• A piece of real estate was left out of an otherwise fully funded trust and has to be brought in after death through a court petition.

What about taxes?

This is one place where families brace for bad news that usually isn’t coming. California has no state estate tax and no inheritance tax. The federal estate tax only applies to estates above $15,000,000 per person as of 2026, which puts the overwhelming majority of families outside it entirely. There is usually still a final personal income tax return to file for the year of death, and a trust or estate that earns income during administration may owe its own return. But the tax bill people fear, the one based on the size of the estate itself, is not something almost anyone reading this will face.

Where I fit into this

I practice estate planning, trust administration, and probate in California, and this is the point where I meet families more than any other: a few weeks after a death, holding a stack of paper, not sure which document matters and which deadline is real. Some of what I do is procedural, filing the right petition or preparing the right notice. A good amount of it is simpler than that: telling a new trustee what actually has to happen this month versus what can wait, and which mistakes are hard to undo versus which ones aren’t a big deal.

Where to start

If you’re sorting through this right now, I offer a no-cost 30-minute call, by phone or video, to help you figure out which of these paths fits your family’s situation and what your next step actually is. You can reach my office at (805) 244-5291.

Related reading: 2026 California estate law changes · Medi-Cal and your living trust: the 2026 rules · Estate planning after divorce · Estate planning in Santa Barbara County

This article is general information, not legal advice; every estate is different, and you should talk to a licensed California attorney about your specific situation.