Washington's Probate Court Filings by County, 2025

Washington's 2025 statewide Probate filings totaled 18,192, led by Pierce, Snohomish and Spokane counties, but the count excludes King County entirely.

Every year, Washington's superior courts open thousands of new probate cases: decedent's-estate and related matters that require a court's involvement whether or not anyone disputes anything. The Washington State Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC) publishes county-level filing counts for this case type in its "Caseloads of the Courts of Washington" reporting, where Probate sits alongside three other case families the same report tracks together: Guardianship, Mental Illness, and Alcohol. This page uses only the Probate column of the AOC's 2025 Annual Report, its most recently completed full-year edition, and does not use any figure from the other three case types.

Washington's superior courts recorded 18,192 Probate case filings statewide in 2025. Washington has 39 counties, and each one has its own row in this report, but one of them, King County, reads zero in every column, and not because King County Superior Court had no probate activity that year.

Why King County reads zero

The AOC's own coverage note, published alongside this report, explains the gap: "King County Superior Court (KCCO) transitioned to a locally implemented and maintained case management system." As a result, the note continues, "KCCO court data is not included in the HTML and PDF reports, but data is in the Excel report." This page cites the HTML version, the one whose text can be checked directly against what it actually says; the AOC's Excel supplement, which does carry King County's real figures, is a spreadsheet this page does not open, transcribe or estimate from.

That leaves the 18,192 statewide total, and every county figure below, short of Washington's true 2025 Probate filing volume by an amount this report does not state anywhere in its HTML or PDF editions. Nothing below should be read as a ranking of all 39 of the state's counties by probate activity; it's a ranking of the counties this report actually counts figures for.

Filings by county, 2025

County	2025 Probate filings
Pierce	2,453
Snohomish	2,176
Spokane	2,118
Clark	1,534
Kitsap	1,213
Whatcom	1,139
Thurston	971
King	0 (excluded from this report; see above)
Statewide total	18,192

Figures are the AOC's own "Probate" column from its Probate, Guardianship, Mental Illness, and Alcohol case-filing report; the other three case types are not shown here. King County's row and the statewide total both carry the gap described above.

Pierce, Snohomish and Spokane lead the counties this report counts, each filing over 2,000 Probate cases in 2025. Clark, Kitsap, Whatcom and Thurston follow, each filing over 900. Read alongside the section above, the more useful comparison isn't which county leads, it's that King County, a Puget Sound county surrounded by others filing well over 1,000 cases each, is entered as zero rather than left off the table entirely, which is what would make the gap obvious at a glance.

What this data does not show

This is a count of case filings, not a count of disputes. Opening a probate case is the routine first step for any estate that has to pass through court, whether or not anyone involved disagrees about anything. The AOC's report does not separate contested matters from uncontested ones, and this page does not estimate what share of these filings became a will contest or any other kind of litigation.

Figures above are Probate case-filing counts from the Washington State Administrative Office of the Courts' own published 2025 Annual Report; the coverage note describing the King County gap was last published 03/11/2026. For how a will contest and a trust dispute differ procedurally, see will disputes and trust disputes differ.

Source: Washington State Administrative Office of the Courts, Caseloads of the Courts of Washington, Probate Cases Filed by Type of Case, 2025 Annual Report