How Do I File for Probate in West Virginia?

West Virginia offers a small-estate or summary procedure that can transfer property without a full grant of Letters when the estate qualifies. Statutory references to the "county court" mean the county commission (renamed by the 1974 Judicial Reorganization Amendment); it sits as the probate authority. Intestate administration priority (W. Va. Code §44-1-4(a), verbatim): "Administration shall be granted to the distributees who apply therefor, preferring first the husband or wife, and then such of the others entitled to distribution as the county commission or clerk shall see fit. If no distributee apply for administration within 30 days from the death of the intestate, the county commission or clerk may grant administration to one or more of the creditors of the decedent, or to any other person who shall be fit." Small Estate Act thresholds (W. Va. Code §44-1A-1(b)): a "small asset" is probate personal property with a date-of-death FMV of "not more than $50,000" and "does not include real estate or an interest in real property"; the definition of a "small estate" in §44-1A-1(b)(5)(B) additionally caps WV real estate at "$100,000" (real-estate FMV "presumed to be 167 percent of the current assessed value") — but that limb is an UNCONFORMED REMNANT and no longer governs: HB 2867 (2025 Reg. Sess., passed April 10, 2025, effective July 9, 2025) is "AN ACT to amend and reenact §44-1A-2 ... relating to precluding an estate with probate real property or with an interest in probate real property from being processed as a small estate", and amended §44-1A-2 ONLY, leaving the §44-1A-1(b)(5)(B) definition untouched. The operative rule is §44-1A-2(a): the affidavit path is open to a decedent "without owning any probate real property or without owning any interest in probate real property." Waiting period before the affidavit: 30 days if the successor is nominated as executor under the will, otherwise 60 days (§44-1A-2(b)(6)). §44-1-4(b)-(c) also carries a separate NONRESIDENT track — an interest holder may record an "AFFIDAVIT FOR ANCILLARY ADMINISTRATION OF WEST VIRGINIA REAL ESTATE WITHOUT APPOINTMENT" for a nonresident intestate decedent after 60 days, with no bond, security, or oath; that path issues no letters and is not modeled as the appointment artifact. Counties call the issued authority document a "Certificate of Qualification" as often as "Letters" — Jefferson County Clerk defines it as "the form that the personal representative receives from the clerk at the time of qualification ... it is sometimes referred to as Letters Testamentary"; the statutory names in §44-1-12 are what the terminology fields carry. The post-appointment path (appraisement, fiduciary commissioner referral, notice to creditors, final settlement) is handled in estate-settlement, not here. ET 6.01/6.02 are State Tax Department forms and both numbers were confirmed 2026-08-24 in the Tax Account Administration Division's own "West Virginia Estate Appraisement & Nonprobate Inventory — Forms and Instructions" booklet (Rev. 06/14). THE STATE TAX DIVISION DOES NOT PUBLISH THESE FORMS ONLINE — settled affirmatively 2026-08-25 by enumerating the whole tax.wv.gov corpus rather than by failing to find them, so this is a finding, not an open question. Method: the Tax Division's own forms search is a client-side call in https://tax.wv.gov/_catalogs/masterpage/scripts/search.min.js that POSTs to the WV eGov endpoint https://apps.wv.gov/Sharepoint/api/webpartquery/searchquery with siteurl=https://tax.wv.gov, listname=Documents, matching "substringof(query,SearchKeywords) or FormNumber eq query or substringof(query,Title)" — i.e. the SharePoint "Documents" library IS the official forms index. That library is anonymously enumerable via the site's open SharePoint REST API (https://tax.wv.gov/_api/web/lists/getbytitle('Documents')/items?$select=FileRef&$top=5000), which returned 3,757 items against the list's own ItemCount of 3,758; adding every other library on the root web and on each subweb (/Business, /Individuals, /Forms, /Resources, /TaxProfessionals, /About, /TaxpayerAdvocate, /CareerRecruiting, /Business/PropertyTax) gives 3,806 items, and all 46 published .aspx pages were fetched and scanned as well. ZERO filenames and ZERO page bodies match et6 / ET-6 / appraisement / nonprobate / probate / decedent / inheritance / "estate tax". Every "apprais*" filename is a property-tax mineral or managed-timberland appraisal report, and every "estate" hit is either an Administrative Notice on "Methods by which Residential Real Estate is Appraised Statewide" or an IT-141 fiduciary income tax form. The official search endpoint agrees, returning an empty result set (8-byte body, 0 entries) for each of "ET 6.01", "ET 6.02", "ET6.01", "6.01", "ET-6", "Nonprobate", "Probate", "Inventory", "Decedent", "Inheritance" and "Estate Tax" — positive-controlled, since "IT-141" returns 6 forms and "IT-140" returns 122. The site map's only estate-adjacent entry is "Electronic Filing for Fiduciary Income"; tax.wv.gov has no estate-tax section at all. Guessed asset paths were also exhausted (Documents/TaxForms/{et6.01,et601,ET-6.01}.pdf, Documents/ET/, Documents/Estate/ — all 404), and neither https://revenue.wv.gov/ nor the WV Judiciary's court-forms library carries them (courtswv.gov positive-controlled on GC32: its only estate-inventory forms are the guardianship/conservatorship GC30/GC32). Nor does the booklet itself point anywhere — it contains no URL of any kind. THE STATUTES EXPLAIN WHY: §44-1-14(f) routes "[t]he original appraisement form and two of its copies, together with the completed and notarized nonprobate inventory form" to "the clerk of the county commission by whom the personal representative was appointed or to the fiduciary supervisor", and §11-11-7(c) likewise directs the nonprobate inventory to the clerk or supervisor. The Tax Commissioner PRESCRIBES the forms (§44-1-14(b) "on the appraisement form prescribed by the Tax Commissioner"; §11-11-7(b) "a nonprobate inventory form prescribed by the Tax Commissioner") but neither section imposes any duty to publish, furnish, or distribute them — the words "furnish" and "supply" appear in neither. And §11-11-7(d) makes the ET 6.02 return itself non-public: "The nonprobate inventory form is confidential tax return information subject to the provisions of section five-d, article ten, chapter eleven of this code and may not be disclosed by the clerk of the county commission". So the county clerk is the statutory distribution channel, and the booklet is correctly cited as republished by county clerks (jeffersoncountywv.org, kanawha.us, woodcountywv.com, monongaliacountyclerk.com). No state-host URL exists to cite.

County Commission handles decedents' estates in West Virginia. Clerk of the county commission issues Letters Testamentary or Letters of Administration when the representative qualifies.

Letters Testamentary are issued when there is a will (to the executor); Letters of Administration are issued when there is no will (to an administrator). They give the personal representative authority to act for the estate.