Travis County runs two statutory probate courts, Texas independent administration lets an executor sell without a court order, and a package of Estates Code amendments took effect September 1, 2025. Here is what Austin heirs and executors actually need to know before selling an inherited house.
Most Austin-area estates move through Travis County's two statutory probate courts using independent administration, a Texas procedure that lets an executor sell the decedent's house without asking a judge to approve each step. Heirs with a clean title picture can often skip full administration altogether through a muniment of title, a small estate affidavit, or a transfer on death deed recorded before the owner died. BuyHousesInCash works with Austin executors, administrators and heirs at every stage, including the estates where nobody filed the will inside the four-year window that Texas law imposes.
If you inherited a house in Austin, you will usually go through Travis County probate court. Texas independent administration is faster and cheaper than probate in most states, and once the court appoints you, you can normally sell the home without a separate court order for the sale.
Travis County is one of the handful of Texas counties with dedicated statutory probate courts, and since 2023 it has had two of them. Probate Court No. 1 sits on the second floor at 200 W. 8th Street in downtown Austin. Probate Court No. 2 was created by the Legislature in 2023 and sits two floors up in the same building; it also serves as the county's designated mental health court. The second bench was added for an unglamorous reason that matters to anyone holding an inherited house: the single court was carrying more filings than it could set quickly, and hearing dates were the bottleneck.
That two-court structure is an Austin advantage, and it does not extend across the metro. The Austin–Round Rock–San Marcos statistical area covers Travis, Williamson, Hays, Bastrop and Caldwell counties, but only Travis has statutory probate courts. An estate in Round Rock or Georgetown is heard by a Williamson County court at law; a San Marcos or Kyle estate goes to Hays County. The smaller counties route probate to a constitutional county court, where the county judge may not be a lawyer and the probate docket may run only certain days of the month.
Venue follows the decedent, not the dirt. Chapter 33 of the Texas Estates Code fixes venue in the county where the decedent resided, which is why a Travis County resident who owned a rental in Pflugerville and a lot in Bastrop still has one probate, in Austin. Heirs regularly get this backwards and open a file in the county where the house sits, which costs weeks.
Ask someone who has been through probate in California or New York and you will hear about court supervision, appraisals, confirmation hearings and overbids. Texas built a different system. Chapter 401 of the Estates Code lets a will name an independent executor, and it lets the beneficiaries of an estate agree to independent administration even when the will is silent or there is no will at all, provided everyone who inherits consents.
The practical consequence is large. An independent executor, once appointed and holding letters testamentary, generally administers the estate free of court supervision: no order approving the listing, no order approving the contract, no hearing to confirm the buyer. The executor signs the deed. For a family trying to close before the next tax bill or the next insurance renewal, that single difference is worth more than every other feature of Texas probate combined.
Dependent administration is the other track, and it is the one that produces the horror stories. If the heirs cannot agree, or a creditor or a court insists on supervision, the representative posts a bond and returns to court for permission at each step, including a court-ordered sale under Tex. Est. Code § 356.251. The same house that an independent executor sells in five weeks can take five months under dependent administration. When Austin heirs ask why their neighbor's probate was so much easier, the answer is almost always that one estate was independent and the other was not.
A large share of Austin inherited-property files never need a full administration at all. Four alternatives carry most of that volume, and choosing correctly at the outset is usually the difference between a sale that closes this quarter and one that does not.
Muniment of title. Texas is nearly alone in offering this. Under Tex. Est. Code § 257.001, if the decedent left a valid will and the estate owes no unpaid debts other than debts secured by real property, the court can admit the will purely as evidence of title. No executor is appointed and no administration is opened. The order itself becomes a link in the chain of title, recorded in the county deed records. For a surviving spouse or a single beneficiary inheriting a paid-off or mortgaged Austin house with no other creditors, this is frequently the whole job.
Small estate affidavit. Under Tex. Est. Code § 205.001 the distributees of someone who died without a will can collect the estate by affidavit if at least 30 days have passed, no administration is pending or granted, and the estate assets excluding the homestead and exempt property do not exceed $75,000. The homestead exclusion is what makes this useful in a market like Austin, where the house is worth far more than that threshold but is excluded from the count. The affidavit has real limits: it can pass the homestead to heirs, but it does not clear non-homestead real estate, and title companies apply it carefully.
Determination of heirship. When there is no will and the shortcuts do not fit, a Chapter 202 heirship proceeding asks the court to declare who the heirs are. An attorney ad litem is appointed to represent unknown heirs, which adds cost and time but produces a judgment that title underwriters trust. It is commonly paired with an independent administration by agreement of those same heirs.
Transfer on death deed. Chapter 114 of the Estates Code lets an owner record a deed during life that passes the property at death without probate. It is revocable, it does not affect the owner's rights while living, and it must be recorded before death to work. Austin heirs discover it either with relief or with regret, because a TODD that was signed but never recorded does nothing.
An affidavit of heirship, by contrast, is not a court proceeding at all. It is a sworn statement recorded in the deed records, typically from two disinterested witnesses who knew the family. Texas title companies accept them in some fact patterns and refuse them in others, usually wanting the affidavit to have been of record for a period of years before they will insure a sale on it alone.
The 89th Texas Legislature passed a package of Estates Code amendments that took effect September 1, 2025. None of them rewrote Texas probate, but several change what executors and heirs have to produce, and most published guidance online still describes the prior rules.
The most useful change for heirs is to the inventory requirement. Under the amendments to Tex. Est. Code §§ 309.051–309.052, if the decedent was unmarried there is no longer any need to classify assets as separate or community property. That classification was a recurring source of wasted attorney hours in single-decedent estates and it is simply gone.
Three other pieces matter in practice. Tex. Est. Code § 256.156 now provides that a copy of a self-proving affidavit is sufficient to make a copy of a will self-proved, which rescues estates where the original affidavit page was lost but the will is otherwise sound. Tex. Est. Code § 33.105 now requires physical delivery of the original will when a probate proceeding is transferred between counties, correcting a widespread assumption that e-filing the will was enough. And Tex. Est. Code § 354.001 no longer requires citation by posting for accountings in insolvent estates, which removes a delay that helped no one.
Alongside the statutory changes, HB 3421 requires statutory probate courts to deliver orders to parties through the state electronic filing system. In a two-court county like Travis, that is a quiet improvement to the single most frustrating part of the process for an out-of-state heir: finding out whether the order actually got signed.
One 2025 bill is worth knowing about precisely because it failed. SB 648 would have added requirements for recording real property instruments, including an affidavit of heirship, when the person recording was not an attorney, title company or escrow company. The governor vetoed it on June 22, 2025, and similar title-theft legislation was subsequently placed on a special session agenda.
The reason this matters to an Austin heir is that the affidavit of heirship is both a legitimate probate shortcut and the instrument most often abused in deed fraud. A vacant inherited house with a deceased owner of record and out-of-state heirs is close to the ideal target: nobody is collecting the mail, nobody is checking the deed records, and the tax bill goes to an address the family no longer uses. Heirs who will not deal with a property for a year or more should be pulling up the county deed records periodically rather than assuming the house is sitting quietly. Our guide to selling an inherited house covers the recording checks worth running before the estate closes.
The single most damaging mistake in Austin probate is not a bad filing. It is no filing. Under Tex. Est. Code § 256.003, a will may not be admitted to probate after the fourth anniversary of the testator's death unless the applicant proves they were not in default in failing to present it earlier. And even when a late will is admitted, letters testamentary generally cannot issue unless the application was filed within that four-year window.
Families miss it in a predictable way. Someone dies, one relative keeps paying the taxes and insurance, nobody wants to argue about the house, and four years pass without anyone opening a file. The will then may not control at all, and the estate falls back to intestate succession, which can divide the property among a wider and less cooperative group than the will named. What was a one-beneficiary muniment of title becomes a heirship proceeding with an ad litem and six cotenants.
If you are approaching that anniversary on an Austin property, the filing itself is the urgent item, not the sale. A house can be sold after the estate is open; a will cannot usually be revived after the deadline runs. Our probate timeline tool maps the sequence, and the probate sale checklist lists the documents a Texas title company will ask for.
Once the estate is open, the question becomes who has authority to convey. An independent executor holding letters testamentary signs the deed, and the title company will want the letters dated within a recent window, often 60 to 90 days, so executors frequently request fresh certified copies before closing. A dependent administrator needs a court order under Tex. Est. Code § 356.251 before the sale. Heirs taking under a muniment of title or an heirship judgment sign as owners, and every one of them signs, which is where multi-heir estates stall.
Disclosure is the detail that surprises fiduciaries. Tex. Prop. Code § 5.008(e) exempts a court-appointed executor or administrator selling in the course of administration from delivering the standard Seller's Disclosure Notice. That exemption is narrower than people assume. It does not extend to heirs who have already taken title and are selling in their own names, and it never licenses concealment: a fiduciary who actually knows about a foundation problem or a past flood still has to say so. Claiming the exemption while sitting on known defects is how estate sales end up in litigation after closing.
Two more items belong on the pre-listing list. Confirm whether the homestead exemption and any over-65 tax ceiling survived the owner's death, because losing them changes the carrying cost materially in Travis County. And get a payoff statement early if there is a mortgage, since a servicer dealing with a deceased borrower routinely takes longer to produce one. The mortgage payoff calculator and the net proceeds comparator are the fastest way to see whether a sale actually nets the heirs anything after the estate's debts.
Austin's in-migration over the last decade has a mirror image in its probate docket: a meaningful share of inherited Austin houses are now owned, on paper, by people who live somewhere else. That geography drives the two recurring problems. The first is logistical, and it is mostly solved by remote notarization and certified mail. The second is structural.
When several heirs inherit a house, they hold it as cotenants, and any one of them can generally force a partition. Because a single-family house cannot be divided in kind, a partition action ends in a court-ordered sale, typically at a worse price and with legal fees taken off the top. The threat of partition is what eventually moves a stalemate, but it is a poor outcome compared with a negotiated buyout. If one heir wants to keep the house and the others want cash, the workable structure is usually a buyout funded by a refinance, priced off a real appraisal rather than a tax-assessed value.
On taxes, Texas is straightforward and getting more so. There is no state estate or inheritance tax, and on November 4, 2025, Texas voters approved Proposition 8, a constitutional amendment prohibiting taxes on a decedent's property or the transfer of an estate, by roughly 72 percent. Federally, IRC § 1014 gives inherited property a basis stepped up to fair market value at the date of death, which is why heirs who sell reasonably soon after death often owe little or no capital gains tax on the sale. Heirs who hold an Austin house for several years before selling are the ones who should be talking to a CPA about the gain that accrued after the step-up.
The inherited houses that reach us in Travis and Williamson counties cluster into a few recognizable types. Mid-century homes in the older east and north-central Austin neighborhoods, held by original owners for decades, deferred on roof and HVAC and frequently still on original plumbing. Suburban homes in Round Rock, Cedar Park and Pflugerville from the 1990s and 2000s build-out, generally in better condition but often occupied by a relative whose status nobody has defined. And rural-edge acreage where the value is in the land and the improvements are effectively a liability.
Condition is the through line. A house that has not been updated in thirty years, has been vacant through a Central Texas summer, and carries an insurance policy that a carrier is reluctant to renew on a vacant dwelling will not compete with new construction on the open market without work the estate usually cannot fund. That is the honest case for a cash sale in probate: not that it produces the highest gross price, but that it converts an asset the estate cannot maintain into a number the heirs can divide, without repair escrows, financing contingencies or a buyer walking at the inspection. It is worth running against a traditional listing rather than assumed — our comparison with a realtor sale lays out where each one wins.
Specific values vary enormously by neighborhood, condition and clarity of title, and any number quoted without seeing the property and the letters is a guess. What is consistent is the sequence: get the estate open, confirm who signs, confirm whether the disclosure exemption applies, and only then price the house.
Whether the estate is open or you are still deciding which route to file, a no-obligation cash offer takes minutes to request and gives the heirs a real number to weigh against a repaired listing, a buyout, or simply holding. There is no cost and no obligation to accept.
An uncontested independent administration in Travis County commonly runs about four to eight months from filing to closing the estate, with the first hearing often set within a few weeks. A muniment of title can finish in weeks. Dependent administration, contested estates and heirship proceedings with an attorney ad litem take substantially longer.
Usually yes. You do not need the estate closed, you need authority to convey. Once an independent executor holds letters testamentary, they can normally sign a deed without a court order. A dependent administrator needs a court order under Tex. Est. Code section 356.251 first. Selling before anyone has authority is what causes failed closings.
It is a Texas procedure under Tex. Est. Code section 257.001 where the court admits a valid will purely as evidence of title, appointing no executor and opening no administration. It requires that the estate owe no unpaid debts other than debts secured by real property, which makes it a common fit for a house passing to one beneficiary.
Not always. If the owner recorded a transfer on death deed under Chapter 114 before dying, the property passes outside probate. A surviving spouse may already hold the property through community property survivorship. Otherwise some proceeding is generally needed, because a title company will not insure a sale from a deceased owner of record.
Tex. Est. Code section 256.003 bars admitting a will after the fourth anniversary of death unless the applicant proves they were not in default, and letters testamentary generally cannot issue on an application filed after that date. The estate typically falls back to intestate succession, which may distribute the house to a different and larger group than the will named.
Tex. Prop. Code section 5.008(e) exempts a court-appointed executor or administrator selling during administration from the standard Seller's Disclosure Notice. The exemption does not cover heirs who already took title and sell in their own names, and it never permits concealing defects the seller actually knows about.
Texas has no state estate or inheritance tax, and voters approved Proposition 8 in November 2025 barring such taxes constitutionally. Federally, IRC section 1014 steps the property's basis up to date-of-death value, so heirs selling soon after death often report little or no gain. Ask a CPA about appreciation after the step-up.
This article is general information about Texas probate procedure, not legal, tax or financial advice. Statutes, local rules and county practices change. Confirm current requirements with the Travis County Clerk's probate division and consult a licensed Texas attorney about your specific estate. Written by John Quigley — about the author.