How Do I Contest a Will in Washington?

You found out at the funeral, or a week after, that the will leaves almost everything to one sibling, or to a caregiver nobody had met, or to a second spouse who arrived eighteen months ago. The document does not sound like the person you knew. And someone has already filed it with the court.

For related help, see estate-planning help, power-of-attorney guide, and Washington probate guide.

If that is where you are, the first thing to understand is that the clock is short and already running.

How long do I have to contest a will in Washington?

Four months. RCW 11.24.010 gives any person interested in a will four months immediately following the probate or rejection of that will to file a petition contesting its validity. That period runs from the date the court admits the will to probate, not from the date of death, not from the date you found out, and not from the date you finally got a copy.

The statute also tells you exactly how the deadline is met. A contest is commenced, for tolling purposes, when the petition is filed with the court, not when it is served. Filing alone is not enough to keep it alive, though. The same section requires you to personally serve the personal representative within ninety days after filing, and if you do not, the action is treated as never having been commenced for purposes of tolling the statute of limitations. In practice the four months lapses and the contest dies. RCW 11.24.020 then requires notice to the executor or administrator, to the legatees named in the will, and to all persons interested in the matter as TEDRA defines that phrase.

When nobody files and serves within that window, RCW 11.24.010 says the probate or rejection of the will is binding and final. That is not soft language. It closes the door.

What if nobody told me the will had been filed?

This is the question I get most often, and the honest answer is uncomfortable. RCW 11.24.010 contains no exception for a person who was never notified. There is no separate, longer deadline written into the statute for someone who was left in the dark.

There is a related duty on the other side. RCW 11.28.237 requires the personal representative, within twenty days after appointment, to serve written notice of the appointment and the pending probate on each heir, legatee, and devisee, and on each beneficiary or transferee of a nonprobate asset, whose names and addresses are reasonably ascertainable, with proof of mailing filed in the case. If you were an obvious heir and no notice ever went out, document that and raise it with a lawyer now rather than after four months has run. What it is not is a safe assumption that your deadline was extended.

Either way, the practical step is the same: if you suspect a probate has been opened, find the case and the date the will was admitted before you spend another week wondering.

Who has standing to contest a will?

RCW 11.24.010 limits the right to file to a "person interested in" the will, meaning someone whose own financial position would change if the will were thrown out or altered. Two groups usually qualify.

The first is anyone who would inherit under Washington's intestacy rules if there were no valid will at all: typically a surviving spouse or registered domestic partner, children, and, where there are no children, parents and siblings.

The second is anyone who was a beneficiary under an earlier will and got cut out or cut down in the newer one. If the 2019 will gave you a third of the estate and the 2024 will gives you nothing, you have a concrete stake in whether the 2024 document is valid.

Being hurt, or convinced the decedent would have wanted something different, is not standing. Neither is being a close friend, an unadopted and unnamed stepchild, or a relative who gave years of unpaid care without any written promise. Those situations sometimes support other claims, but they do not by themselves get you into a will contest.

What are the grounds for contesting a will?

RCW 11.24.010 frames the issues the court will try: the competency of the deceased to make a will, execution under restraint or undue influence or fraudulent representations, and any other cause affecting the validity of the will or part of it. In practice that breaks into five recognized grounds, and the evidence that matters is very different for each.

Lack of testamentary capacity. The question is whether the person understood, at the moment of signing, the nature of the act, the general extent of what they owned, and who their natural beneficiaries were. Note the timing. A dementia diagnosis two years earlier does not decide the case, and neither does a bad afternoon three months later. What moves this claim is contemporaneous evidence: medical records and cognitive testing from the weeks around execution, the drafting attorney's notes and file, medication lists, and testimony from people who saw the person that same week. Family recollections of confusion are common and rarely carry a case alone.

Undue influence. The most frequently pled ground and the hardest to prove directly, because influence happens privately. Washington law does not require a confession. Under Dean v. Jordan, 194 Wash. 661, 79 P.2d 331 (1938), certain suspicious circumstances raise a presumption of undue influence, and the court called three most important: that the beneficiary occupied a fiduciary or confidential relation to the testator, that the beneficiary actively participated in preparing or procuring the will, and that the beneficiary received an unusually or unnaturally large part of the estate. Courts also weigh the testator's age, health, and mental condition, the closeness of the relationship, the opportunity to exert influence, and whether the terms are natural. The evidence that matters is largely documentary: who scheduled the attorney appointment, who drove, who sat in the room, who paid the fee, bank records showing that same person was already moving money, and a pattern of isolating the decedent from other family.

Fraud. Someone lied to the testator and the lie caused the disposition: a daughter tells her father the other children have been stealing from him, or tells him a document is a power of attorney when it is a will. Fraud requires proof of the specific misrepresentation, so it lives or dies on emails, texts, recordings, and witnesses who heard it said.

Duress. Threats or coercion overrode the person's free choice. Rare, and usually pled alongside undue influence.

Improper execution. The least emotional ground and often the most winnable. RCW 11.12.020 requires a will to be in writing and signed by the testator, or by someone else at the testator's direction and in the testator's presence or electronic presence, and attested by two or more competent witnesses who either subscribe their names to it or sign an affidavit complying with RCW 11.20.020(2), in the testator's presence or electronic presence and at the testator's request. One witness instead of two, a witness who signed days later with nobody else present, or a document never actually signed can defeat a will no matter how fair its terms are.

Understand what you are pushing against. Under RCW 11.20.020 the court hears the proofs and enters a formal order establishing or refusing the will, and that order is conclusive except in the event of a contest. The same section lets attesting witnesses submit sworn affidavits the court accepts as if the testimony had been given in open court. The will enters the fight already admitted, on paper, with sworn statements behind it, and you are the one who has to unwind that.

How does TEDRA fit into a will contest?

Nearly every estate and trust dispute in Washington runs through the Trust and Estate Dispute Resolution Act, chapter 11.96A RCW. TEDRA is the procedural chassis: it defines what counts as a "matter," defines who is a "party," and supplies the notice and hearing machinery a contest travels on. What most people do not expect is that TEDRA is built to push cases out of the courtroom. Under RCW 11.96A.300, any party to a matter may request mediation by serving written notice on the other parties. Another party may object, but the court is directed to order that mediation proceed except for good cause shown, and that decision is not subject to appeal or revision. A well-timed mediation request is therefore close to self-executing. Many will contests settle in a day of mediation before anyone takes a deposition, and given what estate litigation costs, that is usually a good outcome rather than a disappointing one.

What does an estate contest actually cost, and what is the risk?

This is where I try to be blunt, because optimism is expensive here. Estate litigation is document-heavy and witness-heavy. Medical records get subpoenaed and reviewed, the drafting attorney's file has to be obtained, and depositions of family members, caregivers, and sometimes a treating physician or a retained capacity expert are common. A contested case that runs through discovery and trial can consume a meaningful percentage of a modest estate, and that money comes out before anyone inherits anything.

Fees are unpredictable in both directions. RCW 11.96A.150 gives the court broad discretion in Title 11 proceedings to award costs, including reasonable attorney fees, to any party, payable by another party, from the assets of the estate or trust, or from nonprobate assets that are the subject of the proceeding, in whatever amount and manner the court determines is equitable. The court may consider whether the litigation benefits the estate, but it is not required to. That cuts both ways: a successful contestant may recover fees, and a contestant who loses can be ordered to pay the other side's.

Then there is the no-contest clause. Many wills disinherit anyone who challenges them. Washington has no statute on these clauses; the rule comes from case law. Courts here generally enforce them, but not against a challenge brought in good faith and with probable cause. See In re Estate of Chappell, 127 Wash. 638, 221 P. 336 (1923), adopting the probable cause rule, and In re Estate of Kubick, 9 Wn. App. 413, 513 P.2d 76 (1973), recognizing that fully and fairly laying the facts before an attorney and relying on that advice can establish good faith and probable cause. The burden of showing the exception falls on the challenger. A no-contest clause is not an absolute bar, then, but it turns a weak, poorly investigated contest into a claim that can cost you the inheritance you already had.

Before filing, I want to know three things: what the estate is worth net of debts and taxes, what you stand to gain if you win, and whether there is documentary evidence or only family conviction. If the honest answers are "modest," "not much more than you have now," and "mostly conviction," the right advice is often not to file.

If you are on the other side of this and worried about your own documents holding up, I have written about that separately in how to protect your will from being contested.

Where to start

A will contest is brought in the superior court where the probate is pending, which for most of my clients is the Snohomish County Superior Court in Everett. Pull that file first. It holds the date the will was admitted, which sets your four months, the affidavit of mailing under RCW 11.28.237, and the affidavits of the attesting witnesses.

If you believe a will was signed by someone who no longer understood what they were doing, or was pushed into it by a person who stood to gain, do not wait to see whether the family sorts it out. Four months goes fast, and the evidence that decides these cases gets harder to reach every month. I handle estate disputes for families in Snohomish and King Counties from my office in Bothell. Call the Law Office of Chad Foster at 425.785.8679 and I will go through the probate file and the calendar with you.