In West Virginia, you qualify in person before County Commission rather than filing a petition — you bring the original will and the required intake forms to an appointment with the clerk. Clerk of the county commission issues Letters Testamentary or Letters of Administration when the representative qualifies.
Along with the application, West Virginia generally requires: Certified copy of the death certificate (W. Va. Code §44-1-30); Original will and any codicils, delivered to the clerk of the county commission within 30 days after the death is known to the custodian (W. Va. Code §41-5-1); Oath of executor (W. Va. Code §44-1-3) or oath of administrator (W. Va. Code §44-1-6), signed at qualification; Affidavit showing heirs, distributees, devisees, and legatees (W. Va. Code §44-1-13); Fiduciary bond unless waived (W. Va. Code §§ 44-1-6, 44-1-8); State Tax Department Appraisement (ET 6.01) and Nonprobate Inventory (ET 6.02), returned to the clerk of the county commission or the fiduciary supervisor within 90 days of the date of qualification (W. Va. Code §44-1-14).
Yes. West Virginia requires a bond by default before Letters issue. A will can waive it.
West Virginia permits self-represented filers to open an estate. The Self-File Probate Assessment compares self-filing and attorney costs for West Virginia.
Yes. A revocable living trust passes assets to beneficiaries without any court appointment in West Virginia — no petition, no Letters, no bond. A revocable trust built with SimplyTrust takes about 15 minutes.
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Getting Appointed in West VirginiaW. Va. Code §§ 44-1-1 to 44-1-14 (qualification, oath, bond, letters); § 44-1-31 (oath/bond may be taken before any officer authorized to administer oaths); §§ 41-5-1 et seq. (admission of wills to probate); § 44-1-4 (intestate administration & priority)Verified Aug 24, 2026View source
Personal Representative (executor if testate, administrator if intestate; "fiduciary" in ch. 44)
Where you file
County Commission (or the county clerk during recess) — probate is administered by the county, not a court
The form that opens the estate
No statewide fill-in form · County-issued form
What the court issues (with a will)
Letters Testamentaryissued by Clerk of the county commission
Letters are an output — they issue once you qualify, not something you fill in.
At a glance
UPC adoptedInformal trackE-filing (self-represented)Self-represented filingLocal/county forms
No statewide probate e-filing. The applicant completes the county's own application, affidavit, and oath, qualifies before the county clerk / fiduciary supervisor, and the clerk then issues Letters; counties ask that you schedule an appointment. Qualification is not always in person: the oath need not be sworn at the counter — W. Va. Code §44-1-31 allows any oath required by ch. 44 to be taken before any person authorized to administer oaths, and a bond to be executed before such a person "if not in person before the county clerk" — and several counties run an explicit remote track. Monongalia County publishes a "REMOTE PROBATE FORMS PACKET" with "INSTRUCTIONS FOR REMOTE FILING OF PROBATE FORMS", directing the filer to "Return all original, notarized documents, and fees by certified or overnight mail"; Berkeley County takes applicants "IN PERSON OR REMOTELY", noting only that "Qualifying remotely may result in further delays because our office must record the original probate documents on record." The nearest thing to an electronic channel is Monongalia's "We accept original, e-recorded probate documents. Please contact your attorney for information." — the recording office's e-recording submitter network, not a self-service portal. Pro se qualification is the norm ("While an attorney is not required..." — Jefferson County Clerk; "An attorney is not required..." — Berkeley County).
Probate runs through the 55 county commissions / fiduciary supervisors, not a statewide court. The county publishes the application, affidavit, and oath and its own ancillary documents, and no two counties publish the same set: Monongalia posts an "Application of Fiduciaries/Oath of Executor(s) Form" plus a Waiver of Executor/Executrix, an Affidavit of Decedent Signature, and a whole "REMOTE PROBATE FORMS PACKET"; Kanawha posts "Probate Check List With Will" / "Without Will", a Family Tree form, three Declination forms, attestation and holographic-will proofs, and three ancillary-administration affidavits; Jefferson posts "Appointment Checklist - Testate / Intestate" and testate/intestate small-estate affidavits; Berkeley posts "Probate Checklist With A Will" / "With No Will" carrying its own Estimate of Probate Estate and beneficiary schedule. The only numbered statewide form in the process is the State Tax Department Appraisement (ET 6.01) and Nonprobate Inventory (ET 6.02), filed AFTER qualification, within 90 days, not to obtain appointment. The fiduciary-supervisor office is itself county-optional — W. Va. Code §44-3A-1 lets a county commission elect the system after a public hearing, and §44-3A-2 provides that the office "shall not be construed to vest judicial power in the holder", existing "to aid and assist the county commission".
BondW. Va. Code §§ 44-1-6, 44-1-7, 44-1-8; § 44-1-31 (bond may be executed before any officer authorized to administer oaths if not executed in person before the county clerk)Verified Aug 24, 2026View source
Required before Letters
Yes
Waivable by will
Yes
Waivable by beneficiaries
No
What to file with the petition
Certified copy of the death certificate (W. Va. Code §44-1-30)
Original will and any codicils, delivered to the clerk of the county commission within 30 days after the death is known to the custodian (W. Va. Code §41-5-1)
Oath of executor (W. Va. Code §44-1-3) or oath of administrator (W. Va. Code §44-1-6), signed at qualification
Fiduciary bond unless waived (W. Va. Code §§ 44-1-6, 44-1-8)
State Tax Department Appraisement (ET 6.01) and Nonprobate Inventory (ET 6.02), returned to the clerk of the county commission or the fiduciary supervisor within 90 days of the date of qualification (W. Va. Code §44-1-14)
Small-estate alternative
Bypasses full Letters
Yes
Form name
Affidavit for Small Estate (statutory form, W. Va. Code §44-1A-2(e))
State-specific notes
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.
A revocable living trust passes assets to your family without this court appointment process — no petition, no Letters, no bond.
This tool provides general information about how a personal representative is appointed and is not legal advice. Consult a licensed attorney in your state for guidance specific to your situation.Data verified 2026-08-24
