Arizona trust & estate planning
A lifetime of care. Please don't leave it to a courtroom. Keep it private. Keep it yours. Settled in weeks, not a year.
In Arizona, an estate without a plan goes through probate: $5,000 to $15,000 in costs, 6 to 12 months on a court calendar, all of it public record. Heirworth explains what that means for your home and savings, in plain language, and matches you with a fiduciary estate advisor when you want a human answer.
Eight questions, about two minutes. Free, and nothing to bring.
Why families do this
Skip the courts entirely. Weeks, not a year.
Why families do this
Nothing published. Your affairs stay private.
Why families do this
Your wishes execute exactly. A judge never decides.
Two Arizona estates.
Same seven figures. Different paperwork.
Family one
Never got around to it.
- The Scottsdale house, the brokerage account, the rental: inventoried by the court
- Eleven months on a judge's calendar, five figures to attorneys and appraisers
- Every account, every property, every heir: published in the public record
- Grown children flying in for hearings about money that was always theirs
Entered into public record
Family two
Spent one afternoon on it.
- A funded living trust, titles and designations aligned to it
- Nothing inventoried, nothing published, no court involved
- The estate transferred in weeks, privately, exactly as written
- The family's only meeting was with each other
What the public record shows
Exactly nothing. That is the point.
The difference was not wealth, and it was not luck. It came down to one thing and one thing only: what the paperwork said on the day it mattered. People who manage their money well fix this in an afternoon. Most just haven't been told it needs fixing.
Illustrative comparison based on the published cost and timeline ranges cited on the calculator page. Not a depiction of specific clients.
Live Arizona estate data
$516,500
Median listing price, Maricopa County. Realtor.com via FRED, June 2026.
$300,000
Arizona's real-estate cap for skipping probate. The median home alone is 1.7x over it.
$306
Maricopa County's fee just to open a probate file, per the Clerk's current schedule.
4 months
The creditor-claim window Arizona law sets before any estate can close.
$306
The court's fee just to open a file on everything you own. The professionals bill from there, and their fees grow with the size of the estate.
4 months
The statutory pause while creditors review your affairs. Nothing you left moves until it ends, whatever the estate is worth.
$1,500–$3,000
The one-time cost of doing it properly. Against the estate it protects, a rounding error.
What probate
actually is
When someone passes away with assets only in their own name, Arizona requires a court process called probate before anything reaches the family. The court appoints a representative. Creditors get four months to make claims. Everything gets inventoried, appraised, and published in the public record. And the attorneys are paid from the estate, before your family sees a dollar.
And the larger the estate, the heavier the process: more to inventory, more to appraise, more hours billed against it. Here is the part nobody tells you: probate is optional. Families who plan ahead route around it entirely, through living trusts, beneficiary deeds, and account designations that cost a fraction of what probate does. The courts get nothing. Your family gets everything, privately, in weeks instead of a year.
Every legal way around it →Start by understanding it
The guides families actually need. Written for Arizona.
Probate in Arizona
What the court process actually costs, how long it runs, and why every file becomes public record.
Read the probate guides →Avoiding probate
Beneficiary deeds, small-estate affidavits, and every other legal route around the courthouse.
Read the avoidance guides →The documents
Powers of attorney, living wills, and the papers that protect you while you are living, with Arizona's exact signing rules.
Read the document guides →When you want more than an article
We match you with a person. Not a pitch.
1
Answer eight questions
About two minutes. Where your home stands, who depends on you, what you have in place today. Nothing to upload, nothing to sign.
2
We match you
Your answers tell us which fiduciary estate advisor in our Arizona network fits your situation. Fiduciary means they are required to put your interests first.
3
Talk for 15 minutes
Your matched advisor calls you at the time you pick. You will know exactly where you stand, even if you never speak to us again.
What the courts don't advertise
Everything becomes searchable.
Probate is public record: the assets, the debts, the heirs, the disputes. Anyone can look. Solicitors and scammers do, and recently probated families are their favorite list.
The clock is not yours.
Creditors get 4 months by statute before anything closes, and contested estates commonly run past a year. Meanwhile the house needs insurance, taxes, and upkeep, paid from an estate nobody can access yet.
Remarried? Read this twice.
Without a will, under A.R.S. ยง 14-2102, a surviving spouse with stepchildren in the picture can receive half of the separate property and none of the deceased's share of the community property. The house they live in is not automatically theirs.
If everything is already in order, wonderful. Close the tab with our blessing.
If you are not certain, eight questions will tell you where you stand, and a fiduciary who has spent thirty years around estates like yours can walk you through the rest in fifteen minutes. If the call tells you nothing new, you lost fifteen minutes. If it finds a gap, your family never meets the probate court.