When you don't need full probate: Michigan's small-estate options

Michigan offers three ways around a full, notice-and-inventory probate, and they are genuinely different from one another: different statutes, different forms, different tests, and different consequences if you pick the wrong one. If the estate is modest in size — or if little is left once funeral expenses and secured debt come off — one of them may fit, and the savings in time and legal fees are real.

Route 1: assignment of property — MCL 700.3982, form PC 556

This is the route that can reach a house. On a showing that the funeral and burial expenses are paid — or by ordering them paid first — the court may order the property turned over to the surviving spouse, or if there is no spouse, to the heirs, provided the balance of the gross estate is at or under the statutory figure. Real property is not excluded here. Since 2024 the statute has expressly allowed you to deduct the indebtedness secured by real property, up to a capped amount, when you value it, which is what lets a mortgaged home fit under the threshold. You file a Petition and Order for Assignment (PC 556). There is no notice to creditors, no inventory, and no final accounting.

Route 2: transfer by sworn statement — MCL 700.3983, form PC 598

This route involves no court at all, and it is the one that carries the "no real property" test. Twenty-eight days after the death, a successor may present the death certificate and a sworn statement to whoever holds an asset — a bank, a brokerage, a transfer agent — and the holder must pay or deliver it. The sworn statement has to say that the estate includes no real property, that the entire estate wherever located, net of liens and encumbrances, is at or under the statutory figure, that 28 days have elapsed, that no personal representative has been appointed or applied for anywhere, and who else is entitled to a share. The State Court Administrative Office publishes the form as PC 598, Affidavit of Decedent's Successor. Swearing falsely to it is perjury.

Route 3: summary administration — MCL 700.3987

This one is not an alternative to opening probate; it is a way of ending one quickly. If the inventory and appraisal show that the estate, less liens and encumbrances, is worth no more than the costs and expenses of administration, reasonable funeral and burial expenses, the homestead and family allowances, exempt property, and the reasonable medical and hospital expenses of the last illness, the personal representative may distribute what there is without giving notice to creditors and close with a statement under MCL 700.3988. There is no dollar threshold — the test is a comparison, so an estate of any size can qualify if enough is owed against it.

When to default to full probate anyway

Even when the numbers say small estate, full probate is sometimes the safer choice — particularly when creditors may file claims, when family members are likely to dispute the will, or when the deceased owned business interests. The four-month notice window in a full probate is unfun, but it permanently extinguishes late creditor claims. Neither route 1 nor route 2 does that, and route 1 does the opposite: it hands the heirs a 63-day exposure instead.