Probate and Inheritance in Texas

Two facts decide what happens to a person's property in Texas, and only one of them is the will. Whether a will exists comes first, because if none does, the Legislature has already written a distribution and the family never chose it. How much of a court's machinery the property actually needs to move is a separate question with its own answer. A will does not by itself keep an estate away from a judge, and an estate without one does not automatically need a full administration.

Those two questions produce three routes, and the guides below take one apiece.

With no will, the statute supplies the plan

Chapter 201 of the Estates Code is a scheme of fractions that runs on categories a household never uses about itself. The first is the line between community property and separate property. Where a spouse survives, those two pieces of an estate are governed by different sections of the chapter on descent and distribution, they reach different results, and land held as separate property is treated differently again from everything else in that half.

The second is whose children survive. Whether every surviving child of the person who died is also a child of the surviving spouse changes where the community share lands. A child from an earlier relationship sends it somewhere else entirely.

Neither variable is one anybody tracks while they are alive. The distance between how a household thinks about what it owns and how the statute sorts it is where the shock comes from, and it arrives at a point when nobody has the appetite for a surprise. The fractions themselves, the order of takers when no spouse survives, and the rules that decide who counts as an heir at all are worked through in the guide to intestate succession.

The court route, and the reputation attached to it

A will accomplishes nothing sitting in a drawer. Chapter 256 makes admission to probate the step that lets a will prove title to what it gives away, which is what a bank, a buyer, or a title company is waiting on. There is a limit on how long that step can wait. A four-year period measured from the date of death governs both the admission of the document and the separate application to have someone appointed to act, in two different chapters carrying two different sets of exceptions.

Why Texas probate is lighter than the picture of it

The image of probate as years of hearings and judicial permission slips belongs to a supervised administration, which the Estates Code treats as the fallback rather than the ordinary case. Independent administration is the reason. Chapter 402 supplies it. Except where the title specifically provides otherwise, whatever a supervised representative may do with or without an order, an independent executor may do with none. That footing takes hold once the appointment order is entered and the inventory, appraisement, and list of claims has been filed and approved by the court, or an affidavit standing in for it has been filed. Judicial involvement in settling the estate largely ends there.

Chapter 401 opens two ways into that arrangement. A testator can build it into the will. Where the will is silent, or where there is no will at all, the people who inherit can agree to it among themselves, though an intestate estate carries a gate the others do not: the court may not appoint an independent administrator there unless and until a proceeding to declare heirship under chapter 202 has fixed the people seeking that appointment as the decedent's complete set of heirs.

The order of the steps, what has to be proved to the court, and the notice duties that survive the end of supervision are set out in the walkthrough of a Texas probate case.

The short route, and where it stops

Some estates need no representative at all. A small estate affidavit is a sworn filing, examined by a judge and approved or not, after which the people entitled to the property collect it directly. Nobody is appointed and nothing is administered.

The narrowness is the whole design, and it catches readers who hear only the phrase. Chapter 205 is written for a person who died without a will. It carries a ceiling on value, measured on the date of the affidavit rather than the date of death, with certain property left out of the count. And it barely reaches land at all: the chapter does not transfer title to real property except in a single configuration involving a homestead. An estate holding a rent house, a second lot, or inherited acreage falls outside that exception, and no amount of drafting brings it back in.

The affidavit guide takes the conditions in the order the chapter imposes them, the value limit and the homestead exception included.

Planning ahead: wills and powers of attorney

Every route above depends on papers signed, or not signed, while the person was alive. A Texas will must be in writing, signed, and attested by two witnesses who are at least 14 years old under section 251.051, unless it is written wholly in the maker's own handwriting. No notary is required for the will itself. The guide to what makes a will valid in Texas covers those formalities and the optional self-proving affidavit that spares witnesses a trip to court.

A durable power of attorney works during life rather than after it. It lets an agent handle property and finances if the principal cannot, it must be signed before a notary under section 751.0021, and its authority ends at death, where the will and probate take over. The guide to powers of attorney in Texas explains the statutory form, the agent's duties, and the separate medical power of attorney.

Which of the three an estate is on

The one thing no guide here can answer is the question a reader arrives with, since it turns on documents and family facts nobody else holds. The method is steady even when the answer is not. Find out whether a will exists and read the whole of it, including anything it says about how the estate is to be settled, because that language decides how much supervision follows. With no will, chapter 201 is the governing text and the starting point. With a will, the next question is whether there is anything left that needs administering, or whether the property can move without it. Then read the chapter that governs the route the answer points to, section by section, which is what each guide in this section does and what the rest of the full guide library does for every other Texas subject it covers.