Opening a probate in California has always come with homework that has nothing to do with the family: a set of notices to government agencies, due within 90 days of the court issuing letters. For decades there were three. For estates whose letters are first issued on or after January 1, 2026, there are four.
The fourth notice goes to the Department of Child Support Services, and it was added to Probate Code section 9202 by AB 1521, the Legislature’s 2025 judiciary omnibus bill. It is a small change with a specific job, and, true to form for this corner of the law, it is already being described incorrectly in summaries online. The most common error is worth correcting up front: the notice is about the decedent’s child support obligation, not the heirs’.
The three notices every personal representative already owed
Section 9202 has long required the personal representative or the estate attorney to send three notices, each within 90 days after letters are first issued.
The first goes to the Department of Health Care Services when the representative knows or has reason to believe the decedent, or the decedent’s surviving spouse, received Medi-Cal benefits; the director then has four months to file a claim against the estate. The second goes to the California Victim Compensation Board when the representative knows that an heir or beneficiary has been confined in state prison or a local correctional facility, so the board can pursue unpaid restitution. The third goes to the Franchise Tax Board for every estate with letters issued on or after July 1, 2008, full stop, no knowledge trigger at all.
Those three form the opening checklist of a California administration. The statute’s text is on the Legislature’s site at section 9202.
What AB 1521 added
The new subdivision (e) follows the same architecture. Within 90 days after letters are first issued, the personal representative or estate attorney must give notice of the decedent’s death to the Director of the California Department of Child Support Services if either of them knows, or has reason to believe, that the decedent had a child support obligation under a court order. The notice can be delivered in the manner section 1215 prescribes or submitted electronically through the department’s website.
Once notice is given, a local child support agency has four months to assert a claim against the estate, the same claim window the statute gives the other agencies. And the effective-date rule is precise: subdivision (e) applies to estates for which letters are first issued on or after January 1, 2026. The same bill also modernized the oldest notice on the list, expressly allowing the Medi-Cal notice to DHCS to be filed electronically through the department’s online notice-of-death form.
Whose child support? The decedent’s
Here is the misconception this post exists to correct. Summaries are already circulating that describe the new duty as notifying the state when an heir or beneficiary owes back child support. That is not what the statute says. The trigger in subdivision (e) is a child support obligation of the decedent, under an order issued by a court.
The confusion has an understandable source. Section 9202 already contains one notice that is triggered by an heir’s status rather than the decedent’s: the Victim Compensation Board notice fires when an heir or beneficiary has been incarcerated. Someone skimming the statute can blur the two. But the difference is not academic. A representative who audits the beneficiaries’ finances looking for child support arrears is doing work the statute does not ask for; one who ignores what they know about the decedent’s support order is skipping work the statute now requires. The standard is knowledge or reason to believe, not an investigation duty.
Why the Legislature added it
Child support arrears do not die with the parent who owed them. They are enforceable against the estate like other debts, and the local child support agencies that collect them had no reserved seat at the probate table. Practically, that meant a known category of public claim could surface late, after the representative had planned distributions, or not surface at all.
The new notice fixes the timing. Like the Medi-Cal and restitution notices before it, it forces the question early: the agency learns of the death within 90 days of letters, gets its four-month window, and either claims or does not. The estate gets certainty in exchange for a stamp. It is the first addition to this list since the Franchise Tax Board notice took effect for estates with letters issued from mid-2008, which tells you how rarely the Legislature touches this machinery.
What this means at the counter
For anyone serving as a personal representative in 2026, the practical change is one more line on the day-one calendar. When letters issue, the notice clock starts on all four items at once, and the fourth one begins with a factual question: is there anything in the decedent’s papers, court files, or family history suggesting a child support order existed? Divorce judgments, wage assignments, and county case records are the usual places that answer lives.
Then the discipline is the ordinary kind: send the notices, keep proof of when and how each went out, and calendar the four-month claim windows before planning any distribution. A representative who skips a mandatory statutory notice hands any unhappy party an easy objection at the final accounting, and hands themselves months of avoidable delay. This is exactly the sort of procedural bookkeeping I wrote about around the $750,000 primary-residence petition: the rules are workable, and they are unforgiving of improvisation.
Where a professional fiduciary fits
Notices, claim windows, and proof of service are the desk work of estate administration, and they are a core part of what a professional fiduciary does when serving as personal representative. The legal questions around a contested support claim, or whether a particular order was still enforceable at death, belong with a California probate attorney. The administration around those questions, calendars kept, notices documented, creditors handled in the right order, is the fiduciary’s job.
If you are stepping into an administration and want to understand the role before you take it on, the guides on what an executor actually does in California and how long a California probate takes are a grounded place to begin, and a conversation with the practice is available when a family would rather hand the checklist to someone who runs it for a living.