April 2026 St. Louis County Estate Filings

Bottom line: St. Louis County opened 364 estate cases in April 2026, as tracked so far. About half involve a house, and a smaller share is a house the estate itself owned, per county ownership records — both shares keep climbing as records catch up.

This is the Monthly Market Pulse: a plain count of estate activity in the county, updated every month from court records. Counts for a given month rise between updates as CaseNet indexing catches up — treat each month's figure as current-as-of-publish, not final.

How many estates opened in April?

364 decedent-estate cases, as of 2026-07-11. That count covers probate cases, small-estate affidavits, and a few related filings — the cases that follow a death. It leaves out guardianships, conservatorships, and trusts, which are not estates.

The monthly count has stayed in a steady range since we began tracking in January 2026, though every month's count keeps rising after the fact as CaseNet indexing catches up — see the current figures below. December 2025 is a partial month — that is just when we started.

Month	Estate filings (as of 2026-07-11)
January 2026	336
February 2026	374
March 2026	432
April 2026	364

The steady line is the point. Estate filings arrive at a roughly constant rate, so reading one high or low month as a trend is a mistake.

How many involve real property?

As of 2026-07-11, 50.5% of April's cases — 184 of 364 — have matched to a property record so far. A property match is not the same as the estate owning that property: the matched address can belong to a landlord, if the decedent rented rather than owned.

Of April's 184 matches, 101 have a clear ownership result so far. Among those: 48 cases (13% of all April filings) still carry the decedent's or the family's name on title — the estate-owned figure, and the one that actually indicates a house is available — and 53 (15%) turn out to be a confirmed prior owner (the decedent rented, not owned). The other 83 matches are unmeasured, not evidence either way: 30 await an ownership check, and 53 matched an address but not yet a specific parcel.

That 50.5% match rate is a floor, not a final figure. We match cases to property after they open, so the most recent months keep rising. February 2026, which has had more time to settle, already sits at 57.8%. April's match rate will drift toward that as records catch up; the estate-owned figure moves separately, since it depends on when the ownership check last ran, not on how old the filing is.

What this is, and what it isn't

These numbers come from Missouri CaseNet, added up by county and month. No case is named, and none will be. The Market Pulse shows the shape of the month — how many estates, and how many own property — never any single estate. For where these cases sit on the map, see where filings cluster.

Correction (2026-07-11): earlier versions of this page reported this figure as the share of filings with "confirmed real property" and stopped there. Matching an address to a parcel does not confirm the estate owns it — a matched address can belong to a landlord. This page now reports the match rate and the estate-owned rate separately.

Next month's Pulse covers May, plus the first look at June.