Best Canadian Executor Guides in 2026
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Settling an estate? Looking for information? Overwhelmed with information and looking for clarity?
Whether you're a first-time executor or an experienced probate lawyer, we'll help you bypass the confusing array of websites competing for your attention, and go straight to the best guide for your situation and preferences. In fact, here's a quick answer, with plenty of detail to follow.
| Category | Winner | Summary |
|---|---|---|
| Overall | EstateExec | The "Goldilocks" of guides, easy to understand, plenty of detail |
| Specific Questions | All About Estates | Extensive collection of articles on specific estate topics |
| Legal Details | CanLII | Every statute for every province, but no overlaying guidance |
| Book Lovers | Jennifer Greenan | Classic 452-page softcover book |
Background
Whenever someone passes away, his or her estate must be settled, usually by a family member who has never done it before.
In days gone by, this family member would seek out a local probate lawyer, pay thousands or tens of thousands of dollars for legal assistance ...and still put in hundreds of hours on his or her own. Today, there are other approaches to estate settlement available, but regardless of the approach, being able to understand the overall process and dig into particular details can be very helpful, prevent costly mistakes, and grant peace of mind to the stressed-out executor.
Actually, while most people understand the term "executor" to mean the person settling the estate, the correct terminology can vary by jurisdiction, whether the estate will go through probate, whether there is will, and even sex. To keep things simple, we'll just use the term "executor" to cover all those roles.
The executor role can require significant effort, and involve many different kinds of activities. On average, it takes 570 hours of work over a period of 16-18 months to settle an estate... but these numbers vary significantly by estate. Whatever the specific numbers, you can see why executors would be interested something to help guide them through the process, preferably even saving a little time and money along the way.
The Explosion of Helpful(?) Websites
When you do an Internet search for an executor guide, you will likely see thousands of results. That's because many, many people and organizations think that if they post some things online, the resultant Internet traffic will get them more business: law firms, financial advisors, will-making companies, personal finance gurus, you name it.
But wrapping up all the affairs of a human being at the end of his or her life is by its nature somewhat complex, and covers a broad range of activities: interactions with the court, financial management of assets, debt statutes of limitation, notification of various government agencies, taxes, interacting with concerned heirs, and more. To make matters even more complex, while the general process is roughly similar throughout the country, the details vary tremendously from province to province.
There's not just one straightforward set of steps to follow: the steps vary according to numerous factors, and just as each person's life differs from another, so, too, do the estate settlements. It's hard to cover all that in a simple blog post... let alone random Reddit posts.
Because of this inherent variability and complexity, most of these so-called "guides" are woefully inadequate and barely scratch the surface... not to mention frequently providing incorrect or outdated information. On the flip side, there are several legal sites available that provide access to all of the underlying statutes and legal procedures... but are incomprehensible to the average person.
The Best Executor Guides
So which guides are the best? Here's a summary, and there's more in sections that follow...
Best Overall – EstateExec
According to our reviewers, the best overall executor guide for Canadian estates is EstateExec. It provides a clear organizational structure to the settlement process, focuses in on your particular province without cluttering things up with irrelevant jurisdictions, provides very detailed information where desired (even down to the statute level), includes timeline information, and is generally quite up to date.
Best for Specific Questions – All About Estates
All About Estates has been writing articles about estates since 2010, with authors ranging from lawyers to tax accountants to social workers. While the structure doesn't lend itself to easily understanding the overall process, if you're interested in a particular topic, you can quickly search for it and learn all about it.
Best for Legal Details – CanLII
The Canadian Legal Information Institute (CanLII) provides access to the individual estate-related (and other) statutes for each province. It doesn't provide any commentary or explain how to actually settle an estate – it just tells you what the laws are.
Best for Book Lovers – Jennifer Greenan
Face it, some of us just prefer real books, with dog-eared pages. Jennifer Greenan's time-honored classic, "The Executor's Handbook", has been around for decades, and it's a great, well-organized resource. Of course, unlike the other winners, it's not free, and it doesn't include hyperlinks or text search, so you really have to use it in an old-school way.
Province-Specific Honorable Mentions
Some provinces have gone to considerable effort to help their citizens understand the estate settlement process, and while none of these guides surpass our winners, they deserve an honorable mention, and can often be helpful in tandem with the winners, especially when it comes to dealing with particular aspects of interacting with local government agencies.
- British Columbia Guide
- Manitoba Government Guide
- Ontario Government Guide.
- Prince Edward Island Guide
- Saskatchewan Government Guide
- Yukon Government Guide
The Contenders
In alphabetical order, here are our review summaries for the main contenders:
All About Estates – Winner for Specific Questions
All About Estates provides numerous articles, contributed by legal, accounting, and other professionals, on virtually any estate topic you can imagine. The articles are well-written, and often contain extensive footnotes to underlying statutes or other relevant information.
On the other hand, there's no clear step-by-step guidance: you're pretty much on your own to find topics you think may be relevant to your situation and learn more about them. Also, some of the articles are pretty dated, and some of the aspects may have changed in the intervening years (this is a key difference between a well-maintained structured guide and a collection of articles).
CanLII – Winner for Legal Details
The Canadian Legal Information Institute (CanLII) provides access to the individual estate-related (and other) statutes for each province. It doesn't provide much in the way of commentary on these topiccs, or explain how to actually settle an estate – it just tells you what the laws are.
To be frank, CanLII isn't always the easiest website to use. In many of the provinces, it provides only an unwieldly PDF-like interface which is slow to load, and difficult to navigate. It can be challenging to find statutes relevant to a particular topic, since you may not know what the Act is called, or even if there are Acts that address the topic. Because of this, you might want to use Google to find a particular statute in the first place... but once there, you will be able to review the entire Act, which can be important since an individual statute rarely stands on its own, and it can be very helpful to understand it in context.
Erassure
Errasure, a provider of executor liability insurance, publishes a list for many of the steps that an executor must take. Unfortunately, the list is not province-specific, so it doesn't really get into the nitty gritty, but it's still a good high-level checklist, with 23 major task categories, each containing multiple checklist items.
This guide has been around for a while, and it's a little dated: for example, many/most of its executor resource links no longer function. That said, the overall guide is at a high-enough level that the basic principles haven't changed, even though many provinces have changed specifics as to processes, financial limits, and so forth.
EstateExec – Overall Winner
EstateExec is our overall winner, and it's easy to see why. It nicely organizes the entire estate settlement process into a hierarchical series of topics which you can navigate using an expandable table of contents on the left. Each topic covers the basics, with the ability to learn more via various links and subtopics (including links to underlying provincial statutes and other helpful resources that can help you actually get things done).
If you have a question about something in particular, it has an intelligent chatbot which will search EstateExec's libraries and summarize its findings, providing links back to the original sources so you can check things yourself, and learn more if you want.
EstateExec also offers a companion app which will automatically construct step-by-step instructions for your particular estate, so you don't have to read the entire guide and figure things out yourself. The companion app isn't free, but for many executors it's well worth it, as it will do things like automatically import transactions from the estate account, print required accounting reports, and more.
Heritage Trust
Heritage Trust, a provider of professional fiduciary services, publishes a very nice guide to managing an estate, with helpful commentary and a good level of detail.
Unfortunately, it's not province-specific, so you usually won't find links to specific forms you might need, and its summarizations can sometimes be misleading (for example, when dealing with executor compensation calculations). Nevertheless, there's a lot of good information here, presented in an easy-to-understand way, and addressing topics you may not easily find elsewhere.
Jennifer Greenan – Winner for Book Lovers
Jennifer Greenan's The Executor's Handbook, published by LexisNexis, has been around for decades, with regular updates over the years. This 452-page tome presents the process in a well-organized manner with plenty of detail, and somehow, an old-fashioned book just feels good.
On the other hand, the very nature of a hardcopy book is that there are no hyperlinks, there is no search capability, and there are no interactive tools. In addition, the last update to this book was in 2019, and a lot has changed since then. Finally, at $295 it's a little expensive, especially compared to the other free options reviewed here.
RLB
RLB provides a high-level probate guide that introduces the concepts involved in estate administration, without province-specific information. It's geared towards people who like to handwrite lists, and takes a somewhat superficial approach to the process. Nevertheless, it's a nice introduction to estate settlement.
Limitations
Of course, self-help guides are not a substitute for professional legal help, and you may find it helpful to supplement your use of the above information with a lawyer (or vice versa... many people use these guides to avoid pestering their expensive probate lawyers, or to offload some of the work). A guide also doesn't actually do any of the work, and you may have to read and understand everything in order to know which sections apply to your particular estate – so you may also want to take a look at Basic Approaches to Estate Settlement to understand how to best use these guides within the overall settlement process.
See also What is an Executor, and see Other Resources for other helpful executor resources.