Reviewed by Rozsa Gyene, California attorney. Last reviewed October 2026.
The courthouse on Magnolia Avenue does not hear probate. A Long Beach estate goes to the Stanley Mosk Courthouse in downtown Los Angeles, where statutory attorney and executor fees on a typical $850,917 Long Beach home come to $40,036.68. An attorney-prepared living trust is $400 for one person or $500 for a couple.
Put a Long Beach house in a revocable living trust, record a deed transferring it to the trust with the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder, and it will not go through probate. If it stays in your name, a house at Zillow's August 2026 typical value for Long Beach, $850,917, would be probated downtown at the Stanley Mosk Courthouse, and Probate Code §10810 and §10800 set the attorney and executor fees at $40,036.68 combined. Our trust is $400 for an individual and $500 for a married couple.
Downtown Long Beach has the Governor George Deukmejian Courthouse at 275 Magnolia Avenue, but probate is not one of the case types it hears. Under Los Angeles Superior Court Local Rule 2.3, probate, trust, guardianship and conservatorship matters belong to the Central District, which means nearly all probate in the county is heard at the Stanley Mosk Courthouse on North Hill Street, roughly 20 miles north of Long Beach in downtown Los Angeles.
Until recently Long Beach did have one probate courtroom. The court's probate long-cause trial courtroom, Department S09, sat in the Deukmejian Courthouse. In a news release dated September 11, 2025, the court moved that courtroom to Department 64 of the Metropolitan Courthouse, 1945 South Hill Street in Los Angeles, effective September 15, 2025, and set every matter calendared in S09 there. So a will contest or a fight among siblings over a Long Beach house is now tried downtown as well. If you read older material that says Long Beach probate trials are heard on Magnolia Avenue, it is out of date.
When a parent in Bixby Knolls or Los Altos dies with the house in their own name, the steps are: a petition for letters, a notice published in a newspaper, an inventory and appraisal by a probate referee the court appoints, at least four months for creditor claims, and finally a petition for distribution. The first petition alone costs $435 under the statewide fee schedule effective January 1, 2026, and every paper filed is open to the public.
With a funded trust none of that happens. Your successor trustee steps in, pays final bills, sends the notices the Probate Code calls for, and deeds the Long Beach house to your beneficiaries; no petition is filed and no judge is involved. For more on the downtown probate courtrooms, see our article on Los Angeles County probate judges and departments.
There is no recorder counter in Long Beach. The county's headquarters in Norwalk, at Imperial Highway and Volunteer Avenue, is the closest office to the city that records documents, and the county asks that all mail go to Norwalk rather than to its district offices.
Signing the trust does not put your house in it. Title moves only when a deed records, from you as the owner to you as trustee, identifying the Long Beach lot by legal description and Assessor's Parcel Number. A Preliminary Change of Ownership Report goes in with it, and on that form you mark the exclusion for a transfer into a revocable trust. Because Revenue and Taxation Code §62(d) treats that transfer as no change in ownership, the Assessor leaves your Proposition 13 base year value alone and sends no supplemental tax bill. The rule is explained in our living trust property tax guide.
The $75 SB 2 charge under Government Code §27388.1 is the one that surprises people. A deed moving the house you live in into your own trust is usually not charged, because our deeds state the owner-occupier exemption of §27388.1(a)(2) on their face. A rental, a vacation property or a vacant lot gets no such exemption and pays $75, with $225 the most charged on one transaction. In a city where renters outnumber owners, and an owner may also hold a duplex or a small apartment building, budget for the fee on each rental deed. Transfer tax is another matter: none is owed, $0.00, on a deed into your own revocable trust, since there is no sale, and the deed recites the exemption under Revenue and Taxation Code §11930. The county requires the reason for paying no tax to be printed on the face of the document.
We draft the trust transfer deed and the PCOR for $100 per parcel; the recording itself is done by you, over the counter in Norwalk or by mail. Expect the numbers to change at the start of 2027. AB 2224 (Stats. 2026, ch. 292) lifts the statutory base under Government Code §27361(a) from $10 to $15.00 for page one and from $3 to $4.00 for every page after it, effective January 1, 2027, with the county's own add-on charges still stacked on top. Los Angeles County's Registrar-Recorder announced on September 24, 2026 that documents it receives from January 1, 2027 will be charged the new base, pending Board approval and notice, and that it will drop its penalty print, nonconforming page, referencing and indexing charges. Read our trust transfer deed guide for how the form itself is filled out.
For the math below we use Zillow's Home Value Index for the City of Long Beach, which put the typical home at $850,917 as of August 31, 2026. Treat it as a midpoint only: a canal-front house in Naples and a downtown condominium near Pine Avenue sit far from it on either side. The attorney's statutory fee under Probate Code §10810 is a sliding percentage of the gross estate, meaning nothing is deducted for the loan on the house: 4% on the first $100,000, 3% on the next $100,000, 2% on the next $800,000, then 1% on the next $9 million. Under Probate Code §10800 the executor is entitled to a matching amount.
Run your own numbers in the probate cost calculator
Two simplified procedures exist, and neither fits a typical Long Beach house. A small estate affidavit under Probate Code §13100 is limited to $208,850 for deaths on or after April 1, 2025. The §13151 petition for a primary residence tops out at $750,000. At $850,917 the citywide typical value clears both limits. Some condominiums fall below $750,000 (Zillow's typical value for the Downtown neighborhood was $471,032 on August 31, 2026), yet §13151 is itself a court petition in Los Angeles County Superior Court. At higher values the scale keeps going: for a Naples or Park Estates house well above the citywide figure, the 2% bracket runs to $1 million and 1% applies after that. Compare any of those numbers with $400 for a single person's trust or $500 for a couple's. The California probate fees guide breaks down each cost.
Long Beach was incorporated in 1897 and counted 466,742 residents in the 2020 Census. It covers about 50.7 square miles of land in the southern part of Los Angeles County. A large share of its housing is rented: the 2020 Census counted 170,711 occupied homes, 101,899 of them (about 60%) rented and 68,812 (about 40%) owner-occupied. If you own a rental as well as your own house, each parcel needs its own deed into the trust, each rental deed pays the $75 SB 2 fee, and the leases, security deposits and rent records should be transferred to you as trustee so a successor trustee can step in without a gap. Our rental property and living trust guide covers those details.
Naples is built on three islands in Alamitos Bay, divided by canals that open into the bay. Construction began in 1905, with concrete seawalls and dredged fill raising the islands to a uniform height, and the seawall was rebuilt in 1938 after the 1933 earthquake. Belmont Shore sits beside it on Alamitos Bay. Homes here are among the highest valued in the city: Zillow put the typical home value at $2,011,196 for Naples and $1,341,583 for Belmont Shore on August 31, 2026, which is exactly where the statutory fee scale bites hardest. A waterfront house brings a few practical points. The deed moves the land and the house on it; a boat is titled and registered separately and passes by its own transfer or by the assignment of personal property in your trust package, so list it in the questionnaire. If the property shares a seawall, a dock or a common area with neighbors under recorded agreements or an association, those rights run with the land and follow the deed into the trust, and the association should be sent the recorded deed or the certification of trust.
When Jotham Bixby died in 1916, the remaining 3,500 acres of Rancho Los Cerritos were subdivided into Bixby Knolls, California Heights, Los Cerritos, North Long Beach and part of Signal Hill. California Heights has been a historic district under city ordinance since 1990, with roughly 1,500 homes, mostly Spanish Colonial Revival with Craftsman and Tudor Revival houses mixed in, and any exterior change to a house in the district needs a Certificate of Appropriateness from the City before work starts, even when no building permit is required. The City lists 18 designated historic districts, plus individual landmarks.
Owners of homes in a historic district, homes designated as a landmark, and homes eligible for landmark status can apply for a Mills Act contract with the City. The City's Mills Act ordinance dates from 1993. In exchange for a commitment to restore and maintain the house, the contract lowers the assessed value: the Assessor values the restricted house by the income method of Revenue and Taxation Code §439.2, and the City's guide says the tax bill uses the lowest of that Mills Act value, the Proposition 13 value and current market value; it runs for an initial ten years and renews each year, and the City says Mills Act contracts transfer to the new owners if the property is sold. Special district assessments are not reduced. If the contract is cancelled for breach (Government Code §50284), the owner pays a cancellation fee of 12.5% of the current fair market value, as the county assessor values the property free of the contract (Government Code §50286). For a trust, two things follow. A deed into your own revocable trust is not a change in ownership under Revenue and Taxation Code §62(d), and the contract stays with the house, so your successor trustee, and then your beneficiaries, inherit the maintenance plan and the annual reporting. And if you have an application in process, the City's guide says the applicant must keep ownership until the contract is recorded or the contract is nullified, so talk to the Planning Bureau at (562) 570-6194 before recording a trust deed during that window.
Oil was found on Signal Hill in 1921, and the hill incorporated as its own city on April 22, 1924. Today Signal Hill has 11,848 residents (2020 Census) on about 2.2 square miles and is surrounded on every side by Long Beach. It is easy to assume a house on the hill is in Long Beach. For a living trust the city line does not change much: the county records the deed, the county Assessor keeps the roll, and the same court would hear a probate. What matters is that the deed uses the legal description and Assessor's Parcel Number from your current deed, not the street address. The Los Angeles County Assessor's Signal Hill office, 1401 E. Willow Street, (562) 256-1701, open 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. on weekdays, is the nearest Assessor office for questions about your PCOR, a homeowners' exemption or a Proposition 19 claim.
The discovery of the Long Beach Oil Field made the city a major oil producer in the 1920s, and the larger Wilmington Oil Field, mostly within Long Beach, was developed from 1932. If your family still holds a mineral or royalty interest, remember that an oil and gas interest is a separate asset from the house and usually needs its own recorded document to move into the trust, so list any royalty statements you receive. The city also sits on the Newport-Inglewood Fault. The 1933 Long Beach earthquake killed 115 to 120 people, most of the damage falling on unreinforced masonry buildings, and the City's seismic program now encourages retrofits of soft-story apartment buildings; a February 2023 City memo put the number of soft, weak or open-front buildings that may need upgrading at more than 1,000. A trust does not change your insurance, but it decides who can act on it. After the deed records, ask your insurer to list the trust, or you as trustee, on the homeowner's or landlord's policy, and keep the declarations page and any retrofit permits with your trust binder.
The Port of Long Beach is one of the busiest container ports in the country, the Long Beach Naval Shipyard operated from 1943 to 1997, and the city is home to California State University, Long Beach and Long Beach City College. For people who work at the port, the university, the school district or City Hall, the largest assets can be a pension, a 403(b), 457 or 401(k) account and group life insurance, and a trust controls none of them. Each goes to whoever is named on its beneficiary form. When you set up the trust, pull those forms and check that they fit the plan, contingent beneficiary included; that second line is the one people forget.
Inheritance is where Proposition 19 comes in, and a trust does nothing to change it. Your children keep your Proposition 13 assessment on the family house only when one of them moves in as a primary residence and files a homeowners' exemption claim within a year. Even then, the benefit stops at your taxable value plus $1,044,586 (the figure for transfers between February 16, 2025 and February 15, 2027), and anything above that is added to the assessed value. The claim form is BOE-19-P, filed with the Los Angeles County Assessor within three years. In Naples, Belmont Shore and Bixby Knolls, where a parent may have bought decades ago, the spread between taxable value and market value can be larger than that cap even when a child moves in. If the children rent the house out or sell it, the county reassesses at market or the buyer starts a new base year. What a trust can do is say which child may keep the house and how the siblings are evened out. Our Prop 19 inheritance guide goes further.
The fee is $400 for a single person and $500 for a married couple, and each deed, whether for your Long Beach home or a rental, is $100 more. The attorney takes calls directly at (818) 337-4071. Our office is in Burbank, but you never have to come in; you sign in front of a California notary wherever is convenient. For how our price compares with other options, read what a California living trust costs.
No. Probate is not heard at the Governor George Deukmejian Courthouse, 275 Magnolia Avenue. Los Angeles Superior Court Local Rule 2.3 places probate, trust, guardianship and conservatorship filings in the Central District, and nearly every county probate case is heard at the Stanley Mosk Courthouse, 111 N. Hill Street, Los Angeles. Even the probate long-cause trial courtroom that sat in Long Beach, Department S09, was moved on September 15, 2025 to Department 64 of the Metropolitan Courthouse at 1945 S. Hill Street.
Zillow's August 31, 2026 figure for the typical Long Beach home is $850,917. Probate Code §10810 sets the attorney's statutory fee on that gross value at $20,018.34, and §10800 lets the executor take an equal amount, $40,036.68 in all, with no deduction for the mortgage. Add the $435 filing fee for the first petition and roughly $851 for the probate referee. A living trust costs $400 for one person, $500 for a married couple.
Usually not. The affidavit under Probate Code §13100 is capped at $208,850 for deaths on or after April 1, 2025. The §13151 petition is limited to the decedent's primary residence valued at $750,000 or less, also for deaths on or after April 1, 2025, and the typical Long Beach value of $850,917 exceeds it. Some downtown condominiums may fit under the cap, but §13151 still means a court petition in Los Angeles County Superior Court, notice to heirs and a hearing.
Through the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk; Long Beach has no recorder office. The main office at 12400 Imperial Highway in Norwalk is the closest counter that records documents, and the LAX/Courthouse office (11701 S. La Cienega Boulevard), Van Nuys and Lancaster also record. By mail, send the deed to the Document Analysis and Recording Section, P.O. Box 1250, Norwalk, CA 90651.
No. The Registrar-Recorder names only five cities in the county that add their own rate to the county's: Culver City, Los Angeles, Pomona, Redondo Beach and Santa Monica. Long Beach is not among them. On a sale the county charges $0.55 per $500 of value. Moving your house into your own revocable trust is not a sale, so the deed shows $0.00 in documentary transfer tax and cites the exemption in Revenue and Taxation Code §11930.
Signal Hill is a separate city, incorporated in 1924, that Long Beach surrounds on every side. For a living trust the steps are the same, because the county records the deed and keeps the tax roll and the same court would hear a probate. Use the legal description and Assessor's Parcel Number from your grant deed, not the mailing address. The Los Angeles County Assessor's Signal Hill office is at 1401 E. Willow Street.
Yes. Revenue and Taxation Code §62(d) treats a transfer into a trust you can revoke as no change in ownership, and the City of Long Beach says Mills Act contracts transfer to new owners when a property is sold. The contract obligations stay with the house, so your successor trustee takes on the maintenance and reporting duties. If you have an application pending, the City requires the applicant to keep ownership until the contract is recorded, so ask the Planning Bureau before you record a deed in that window.
A trust keeps the house out of probate but does not prevent reassessment. Proposition 19 lets a child keep the parent's assessment only if at least one inheriting child moves in as a primary residence and claims the homeowners' exemption within one year. For transfers from February 16, 2025 to February 15, 2027 that protection stops at the parent's taxable value plus $1,044,586, and any value above it is added to the roll. The BOE-19-P claim is due to the Los Angeles County Assessor within three years.
Checked October 6, 2026. Fees and addresses change; confirm with the office before you file or record.
Answer the questionnaire from home, sign with a local notary, and record one deed with the county.
Law Offices of Rozsa Gyene, 3500 W. Olive Ave., Suite 300, Burbank, CA 91505. California State Bar #208356.
Legal Review By
California State Bar #208356 | Licensed Since 2000
25+ years estate planning experience in California