Probate reaches only property held in the deceased's sole name with no beneficiary attached, and the cost of guessing wrong runs in both directions.
Before you call anyone, write down each asset and next to it write whose name is on the title. That single column, not the size of the estate, decides how much court there is going to be. A person can die owning a paid-off house, two bank accounts, a car, a life insurance policy and a retirement account, and depending on how those six things were titled, the probate file might be thick, thin, or never opened at all. The work of the first week is mostly reading paperwork carefully enough to tell which case you are in.
Title decides it, not value
Probate governs property that was held in the deceased's sole name with no surviving co-owner and no beneficiary designation attached to it. That is the whole test. A checking account with a quarter of a million dollars in it and no payable-on-death form passes through probate; a house worth three times that, deeded to a living trust years earlier, does not. Executors tend to assume the courthouse scales with the estate, and it does not. It scales with how many accounts and deeds were left sitting in one name, unclaimed by any other document.
This is why two families with nearly identical net worth can have wildly different experiences. One parent spent an afternoon at the credit union filling out beneficiary cards and re-titling the deed; the other meant to and never did. The first estate closes with a few phone calls and death certificates. The second opens a case file, gets a case number, and stays open for months while notice runs and creditors are given their window. Same money. Different paperwork, and a very different bill.
The four ways property skips the courthouse
Joint ownership with right of survivorship is the first: the account or deed already names a living co-owner, and the institution transfers it on presentation of a death certificate. Second is the beneficiary designation, which covers payable-on-death bank accounts, transfer-on-death securities registrations and, in many states, transfer-on-death deeds for real estate. Third is contract: life insurance pays the named beneficiary because the policy says so, and a 401(k) or IRA does the same. Fourth is trust property, which is owned by the trust rather than by the person, and passes under the trust's own terms.
Two things go wrong here often enough to check for. A beneficiary who died before the account holder, and was never replaced, usually sends that asset back into the probate estate by default. And a designation that names "my estate" does the same thing on purpose. Retirement accounts and life insurance carry income and estate tax consequences of their own, and the Internal Revenue Service is the authority responsible for how estates and their beneficiaries report those receipts, which is a separate question from whether the probate court ever sees the money.
When something still has to be filed
If everything transferred by survivorship, designation or trust, and nothing is left in the sole name, there may be nothing to open. Practically, though, one loose end usually forces a filing: an old savings account nobody re-titled, a final paycheck, a tax refund, a car, or a house deed that never got changed. Real estate is the common trigger, because a buyer's title company will not accept a chain of title that runs through a dead person without a court record showing who had authority to sign the deed.
Most states offer a lighter path for small estates, usually an affidavit or a summary administration with a dollar ceiling that varies considerably state to state. Those procedures exist precisely for the estate that is one stray account short of clean. Ask the clerk what the local threshold is and whether real property can be included, because in many places it cannot, and that answer alone can decide whether you are filing a two-page affidavit or opening a full administration with letters, notice and an inventory.
What each path actually costs
Opening a case costs a filing fee, often a publication charge for notice to creditors, sometimes a bond premium if the will does not waive it, and certified copies at a few dollars apiece that you will buy more of than you expect. Legal help is priced by the hour, by a flat fee for the uncontested administration, or in a handful of states by statutory percentage. A one-hour consultation with a Probate Attorney to review the titling column you wrote in week one is the cheapest money in the whole matter, because it prices the rest of the job before you commit to it.
The cost of guessing runs both ways. Open an administration that was never needed and you pay the fees, the notice, and months of waiting for a creditor period that protected nobody. Skip one that was needed and the problem surfaces later, usually at a closing table, when the title company finds an unprobated interest and the sale stops until an estate is opened years after the fact, with the same fees plus the cost of urgency. Both errors are avoidable in an afternoon of reading account statements and the deed.
Sort the assets by title first, then ask what is genuinely left over. That leftover column is the estate the court cares about, and its length, not the total on the balance sheet, is what you are actually buying help with.