Probate Costs $525 Here and $33,000 There
Terrence and Yolanda kept a folder in the hall closet. Two wills, two powers of attorney, two personal directives, the life insurance policies, and a list of account numbers in Yolanda’s handwriting. They’d redone the whole set with a Calgary lawyer the year Terrence turned sixty. When they sold the house three years later and moved to a bungalow outside Halifax, the folder went into the moving truck along with everything else.
That felt like everything was great. The documents were current. Nothing about the family had changed. Their daughter was still named executor, the split between the three kids was still even, and the wills were signed and witnessed properly.
What nobody mentioned, because nobody knew to mention it, was that the cost of putting those wills through court had changed the day they changed their address. In Alberta, their estate would have paid a probate fee of $525. In Nova Scotia, on the same numbers, it’s closer to $16,000.
The will itself didn’t change. What changed is the cost of using it.
There isn’t one set of probate fees in Canada. There are thirteen.
Probate is the court process that confirms a will is valid and confirms the executor has authority to act on it. Banks, investment firms and land titles offices generally won’t release or transfer anything held in the deceased person’s name alone until they see that grant. The name for the court fee changes depending on where you are. Ontario calls the fee Estate Administration Tax. Most other provinces call it a probate fee. Quebec doesn’t use probate at all in the way the rest of the country does, and I’ll get to that.
Probate is set by each province and territory, not by Ottawa. There’s no federal estate tax in Canada and no inheritance tax. What there is, in most of the country, is a court fee that scales with the size of the estate, and thirteen different formulas for calculating it.
Broadly, those formulas fall into two camps.
Flat or capped fees. Alberta charges a set amount based on a value bracket, topping out at $525 for any estate above $250,000. Whether the estate is $300,000 or $30 million, it’s $525. Manitoba eliminated its probate fee entirely in November 2020, so the government charge there is nothing. Yukon, the Northwest Territories and Nunavut all use small fixed court tariffs, in the range of a few hundred dollars at most.
Percentage-based fees. Ontario charges nothing on the first $50,000 and $15 per $1,000 above that, which works out to 1.5 percent. British Columbia charges $6 per $1,000 between $25,000 and $50,000, then $14 per $1,000 above $50,000, plus a filing fee on estates over $25,000. Nova Scotia has the highest rate in the country, roughly $17 per $1,000 above $100,000. Saskatchewan charges $7 per $1,000 on the whole value. New Brunswick charges $5 per $1,000. Newfoundland and Labrador charges roughly 0.6 percent above the first $1,000. Prince Edward Island uses fixed brackets up to $100,000 and then $4 per $1,000 above that.
If your estate is modest, the difference between those two camps barely registers. If your estate includes a paid-off house, the difference is a car.
What it looks like on a real number
Here’s what a $1 million estate passing through a will would pay in court fees. This is the court fee only. It doesn’t include the income tax owing on the final return, the capital gains triggered on property that isn’t a principal residence, the mortgage or line of credit or credit card balances the estate has to clear before anyone inherits, or the legal fees, accounting fees and executor compensation that come out of the estate as well. Probate is the first bill, not the whole bill.
These are 2026 figures, rounded, and fee schedules do get amended, so treat them as the shape of the thing rather than a quote.
| Province or territory | Approximate fee on a $1 million estate |
|---|---|
| Manitoba | $0 |
| Quebec (notarial will) | $0 |
| Yukon | $140 |
| Nunavut | $400 |
| Northwest Territories | $435 |
| Alberta | $525 |
| Prince Edward Island | $4,000 |
| New Brunswick | $5,000 |
| Newfoundland and Labrador | $6,050 |
| Saskatchewan | $7,000 |
| British Columbia | $13,650 |
| Ontario | $14,250 |
| Nova Scotia | $16,250 |
Double the estate to $2 million and the flat-fee jurisdictions don’t move at all. Alberta is still $525. Manitoba is still nothing. Yukon is still $140. Ontario climbs to about $29,250, British Columbia to roughly $27,650, and Nova Scotia to about $33,200.
That’s the whole story in one line. In half the country, the size of your estate has nothing to do with what probate costs. In the other half, it’s the only thing that matters.
Quebec runs on a different system entirely
Quebec is civil law, not common law, and the vocabulary changes with it. The person who settles the estate is called a liquidator, not an executor. A will prepared by a Quebec notary is an authentic act, which means it doesn’t need to be verified by a court at all, and the great majority of Quebec residents use one. There’s no probate fee to pay because there’s no probate step to complete.
A handwritten will or a will signed in front of witnesses still needs court verification in Quebec, which carries a court fee in the low hundreds of dollars. Not a percentage. Not a number that grows with the estate.
So if Terrence and Yolanda had retired to Trois-Rivières instead of Halifax, the answer wouldn’t have been a smaller fee. The answer would have been a different process, with different documents and a different job title for their daughter. Their Alberta wills would still be valid in Quebec. They just wouldn’t be doing the same work there.
Two provinces can mean two probate applications
Moving isn’t the only way to end up in more than one fee schedule. Owning property in more than one province does it too, and plenty of people do that without thinking of it as an estate planning decision. A cottage in Muskoka, a condo in Kelowna kept for the winters, a quarter section back home that never got sold after a parent died.
Real property is generally probated where it is located. If the deceased owned land in two provinces in their own name, the executor may need a grant in each, and each one is priced under its own local rules.
When Solange died, her son opened two files instead of one
Solange lived in Winnipeg for the last twenty-two years of her life and kept the family cottage in northwestern Ontario, three hours from the city, in her own name. Her son had assumed the cottage was the simple part of the estate, since nobody was fighting over it and everyone wanted to keep it. What he hadn’t counted on was that Manitoba’s zero probate fee applied to his mother’s Winnipeg house and her accounts, and not one dollar of it applied to the cottage. The cottage was Ontario property, so it went through the Ontario process at Ontario’s rate. He ended up filing in two jurisdictions, waiting on two timelines, and paying a bill he’d been told, in a general way, didn’t exist where his mother lived.
The reverse happens too. People move into Alberta or Manitoba carrying planning structures that were built to dodge a fee they no longer pay, and they keep maintaining the structure, and the cost of maintaining it now exceeds the cost it was designed to avoid.
Before you go looking for a fix, check the plan against where you live now
Most of the people I talk to about this aren’t wrong about their estate plan. They just haven’t checked it against where they live now. The will was fine when it was signed. The move happened later, or the cottage was bought later, or the province changed a rule and nobody sent a letter.
If you’ve moved provinces, bought property in another one, or signed your documents more than a few years ago, the useful next step is to look at the whole plan against the rules where you live now. Estate Architect™ covers the full scope of estate planning at your own pace, section by section, with guidance specific to the province or territory you select at the start. It’s built to be used before you sit down with a lawyer, an accountant, a certified executor advisor or a financial advisor, so you arrive knowing what’s in place, what’s missing, and which questions are actually worth their hourly rate.
The fee is real, but it’s usually not the biggest number
There are legitimate ways to reduce what passes through probate, and they’re the same tools in every province, though how much they affect the probate cost depends entirely on which fee schedule you’re under.
Naming beneficiaries on RRSPs, RRIFs, TFSAs, pensions and life insurance keeps those assets out of the estate for probate purposes. That one costs nothing and is worth doing regardless of where you live, because it also gets money into people’s hands faster. Joint ownership with right of survivorship passes property directly to the surviving owner, which works cleanly between spouses and gets complicated fast when a parent adds an adult child to a title. That move can trigger capital gains, expose the property to the child’s creditors or a divorce, and start a fight among siblings about whether it was a gift or a convenience. Multiple wills, alter ego trusts and joint partner trusts all have their place, and they cost money to set up and maintain.
None of that is a reason to avoid them. It’s a reason to price them against what you’d actually save. Spending $6,000 on a structure to avoid a $525 fee is a bad trade.
And the probate fee, even at the Nova Scotia rate, usually isn’t the largest cost at death. The final tax return generally is. An RRSP or RRIF with no surviving spouse to roll it over to collapses into income in the year of death, and a cottage or rental property that’s gone up in value since it was bought triggers a capital gain. Those numbers routinely dwarf the court fee. A plan that fixates on probate and ignores the tax return has aimed at the smaller target.
Terrence and Yolanda didn’t do anything careless. They did more than most people do. They wrote the documents, they updated them, they told their daughter where the folder was. The only thing they didn’t do was ask, after the truck was unloaded, whether anything about the new address changed the answer.
That’s not a hard question. It just has to occur to someone.
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Disclaimer: This content is for general information only and is not legal, financial, medical, or tax advice.
