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. If you know a trust exists but can’t find it, here’s how to look up a trust in California.

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. Our free Who Inherits in California tool shows how the default rules apply to your family.

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. Not sure which track fits? The free probate screener asks a handful of questions and tells you.

The deadlines that actually bite

Most of the after-death to-do list is flexible. These dates are not.

Deadline	What has to happen	Authority
30 days	Lodge the original will with the superior court clerk in the decedent’s home county	Prob. Code § 8200
40 days	Earliest day a small estate affidavit can be used to collect personal property	Prob. Code § 13100
60 days	Successor trustee serves the statutory notice on all beneficiaries and heirs	Prob. Code § 16061.7
120 days	Window to contest the trust closes, counted from service of the trustee’s notice	Prob. Code § 16061.8
150 days	Report a change in ownership of California real property to the county assessor	Rev. & Tax. Code § 480
4 months	In probate, creditors generally must file claims within four months after letters issue	Prob. Code § 9100
April 15	The decedent’s final income tax return is due on the normal tax deadline for the year of death	IRS / FTB

For a personalized version of this calendar keyed to your actual date of death, use the free Successor Trustee Timeline tool.

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. The full duties, in order, are on the trust administration page, and the free guides The First 30 Days and Your First 90 Days as Trustee walk the calendar step by step.

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 each path costs

The cost difference between the three paths is large, and it’s worth knowing before you commit to one.

• Trust administration. No court, no statutory percentage fee. Ridley Law handles trust administration on a flat or capped fee, quoted in writing before any work begins, and the trust, not the trustee personally, generally pays reasonable administration costs. On the same assets, it is a fraction of what probate would cost.
• Small estate procedures. The affidavit route has essentially no court costs. The primary-residence petition involves a court filing and a modest amount of attorney time.
• Formal probate. California sets attorney and executor fees by statute (Prob. Code § 10810), as a percentage of the gross estate: 4% of the first $100,000, 3% of the next $100,000, 2% of the next $800,000, and 1% of the next $9,000,000. On a $1,000,000 estate, that’s $23,000 for the attorney and another $23,000 for the executor, roughly $46,000 before court costs, plus filing fees and appraisal costs. The probate calculator runs the numbers for your estate.

Every engagement at Ridley Law starts the same way: a free 30-minute call where you’ll hear which path fits, what it will cost, and what you can safely handle yourself. Fees are published on the fees page.

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.

Medi-Cal recovery, and why it is narrower than you think

If the person who died received Medi-Cal, the state may seek recovery against the estate. Under SB 833, recovery reaches only assets that pass through probate. Assets that avoid probate are outside it.

Families routinely assume Medi-Cal will take the house. Often it cannot, because the house never enters probate in the first place. Worth confirming before anyone panics or sells something.

Proposition 19: the deadline nobody warns you about

This is the largest financial consequence of most administrations, and it is not an estate tax issue.

Proposition 19 sharply narrowed the parent-child exclusion from property tax reassessment. An inherited home that is not made the new owner’s principal residence within the required window is generally reassessed at current market value. For a house held for decades at a 1970s or 1980s assessed value, the annual increase can be enormous, and it dwarfs anything on the federal estate tax side, where the exemption is $15 million per person and almost no estate reaches it.

It has a deadline. If an inherited home is involved, raise this early rather than after the window closes.

Figures current as of July 25, 2026.

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.

What families in this situation say

“My sister died suddenly last year, with neither a Will nor a Trust. … I had a telephone consultation with Eric Ridley and he advised me of what I should do, and more importantly, what I should not do. After our telephone conversation, I felt relieved. Eric was caring and knowledgeable, but he did not waste any time getting to the crux of the matter.”

– Barb B., Google review

“Eric was very helpful navigating the probate system after the passing of my father. … Eric was always professional and calm, available to us when we had questions. … Eric is a real, down to earth person. No BS, which rates high in my book.”

– AR Dwyer, Google review

“Our consultation with Eric opened our eyes to the challenges we face with the administration of my mother’s trust. He was very knowledgeable and answered the questions/concerns we had. … Eric made us feel more comfortable about the actions needed going forward.”

– James Wright, Google review

More on the reviews page.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need to go to probate court in California?

Not necessarily. If the assets were held in a fully funded revocable living trust, the successor trustee can administer and distribute them without court involvement. If there’s no trust, the estate may qualify for California’s small estate procedures under new 2025 thresholds, or it may require formal probate.

What is California’s small estate threshold in 2025?

For deaths on or after April 1, 2025, California’s small estate affidavit covers personal property, such as bank accounts, vehicles, and belongings, up to $208,850, under AB 2016. The successor must wait at least 40 days after the death before using the affidavit.

Can I avoid probate on the family home?

California’s AB 2016 also created a simplified court petition for a decedent’s primary residence valued up to $750,000. It still requires filing with the Superior Court and includes a mandatory six-month wait, but it is a lighter process than full probate and applies only to the principal residence.

How long does probate take in California?

Formal probate in California generally takes a year or more from filing to final distribution.

Does California have an estate tax or inheritance tax?

No. California has no state estate tax and no inheritance tax. The federal estate tax applies only to estates above $15,000,000 per person as of 2026, which excludes the vast majority of families.

How do I get letters testamentary in California?

Letters testamentary are issued by the Superior Court after it admits the will to probate and appoints the executor. You file a Petition for Probate (form DE-111) in the county where the decedent lived, attend the hearing, and once appointed, the clerk issues the letters. Banks and title companies require them before they’ll deal with an executor. More detail: understanding letters testamentary.

Can I access my deceased parent’s bank account?

Not directly, unless you were a joint owner or a pay-on-death beneficiary. Otherwise the bank will require legal authority: a small estate affidavit (for qualifying estates, after the 40-day wait), letters testamentary from a probate case, or trust documents showing you as successor trustee. A power of attorney does not work; it ends at death.

What is an affidavit of death of trustee?

It’s the recorded document that transfers legal control of trust-held real estate from the deceased trustee to the successor trustee. It’s recorded with the county recorder along with a certified death certificate, and it’s usually the first concrete step in getting trust real estate ready to manage or sell.

Who inherits if there was no will?

California’s intestate succession rules decide, based on which relatives survive: a surviving spouse takes all community property and a share of separate property, with the rest divided among children, parents, or siblings in a fixed order. The free Who Inherits in California tool maps the rules to your family in about a minute.

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. Book the call online, or reach my office at (805) 244-5291. If you’d rather read first, start with the free guide The First 30 Days.

Related reading: Trust administration · Probate · The First 30 Days · Your First 90 Days as Trustee · How to look up a trust · 2026 California estate law changes

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.