Contributed by Dan Rose, a Senior Local Business Guide Specializing in Estate Planning Services in New York City

Being named executor in a will is usually taken as a compliment. It is also an appointment to an unpaid job with statutory deadlines, a filing obligation, and — in circumstances most people never hear about until it is too late — the possibility of paying some of the estate’s bill out of your own pocket.

None of that is a reason to decline. It is a reason to understand what starts running on the day of the death, because almost everything that goes badly wrong for a Brooklyn executor traces back to a date that passed while the family was still grieving.

Nine months, from the date of death

The New York estate tax return is Form ET-706, and the deadline falls nine months from the day the person died. Not from the day the will is admitted, not from the day you are appointed, and not from the day somebody finally gets the house valued.

Whether you have to file at all turns on a threshold: the state’s basic exclusion amount for the year of the death, measured against the gross estate together with certain gifts made in the three years before it. The 2026 figure is $7,350,000. It resets every January for inflation, which matters more than it sounds — an estate is tested against the number in force when the person died, not the number in force when the executor sits down to the paperwork. For 2025 it was $7,160,000; for 2024, $6,940,000.

Filing and owing are separate questions, and the first lands on your desk before the second has an answer. The state threshold also sits a long way below the federal one, and what New York does to an estate that crosses it is strange enough to deserve its own reading: this sets out how New York’s estate tax cliff works and why going over by a little costs so much.

There are two extensions, and people ask for the wrong one

An executor who realises in month eight that the appraisals are not done reaches for Form ET-133. What they usually do not notice is that the form covers two separate requests.

An extension of time to file cannot exceed six months, unless the executor is out of the country. An extension of time to pay cannot exceed twelve months from the due date, with narrow exceptions running to four years for reversionary or remainder interests and for cases of undue hardship. They are applied for separately.

And the sentence that catches people: an extension of time to file does not extend the time to pay, and an extension of time to pay does not extend the time to file. Interest is computed from the date nine months after the death through to the date of payment, whether or not an extension was granted. The clock on the money never stops; only the paperwork gets more time.

The lien nobody mentions until the closing

This is the one that costs Brooklyn families real money, and it has nothing to do with whether any tax is owed.

A New York estate tax lien attaches automatically at death to New York real property and to cooperative apartments. It exists whether or not the estate turns out to owe a dollar. It lasts up to fifteen years from the date of death unless it is formally released, and it is released by filing Form ET-117, which the Tax Department issues at no charge to an executor or administrator who holds letters. Where no one has been appointed yet, Form ET-85 does the equivalent job.

Here is why it matters. Title insurers will not insure around it and managing agents will not process a co-op transfer without it. In practice a closing does not happen until the release is in hand, and the release takes weeks, longer in busy periods.

So picture the sequence. A father dies on 15 January 2026. The family lists the house in Bay Ridge in the spring, accepts an offer, and signs a contract for a closing on 1 September. Nobody has applied for the release, because nobody knew there was a lien, because nothing about it arrives in the post. The title company raises it ten days before closing. The buyer has a rate lock and a moving date. The deal does not survive the delay.

That lien, left alone, sits on the property until January 2041. The form that clears it is free and the application could have gone in during February.

Paying the wrong people first

Now the part that reaches the executor personally.

Under the federal priority statute, 31 U.S.C. § 3713(b): “A representative of a person or an estate (except a trustee acting under title 11) paying any part of a debt of the person or estate before paying a claim of the Government is liable to the extent of the payment for unpaid claims of the Government.”

Read that slowly. It does not say the estate is liable. It says the representative is — personally, to the extent of what they paid out — where the estate is left unable to meet what it owes the United States.

A worked example

A father dies in January leaving a house in Bay Ridge worth $1,450,000 and $280,000 in bank accounts. The estate is nowhere near any estate tax threshold, so his son, appointed executor, reasonably concludes there is no tax problem.

In June the three siblings are impatient, so he distributes the $280,000 in cash equally — $93,333 each — and leaves the house to be sold later. In September the accountant finishes the final income tax returns and finds that the father had not filed for two years. The balance due, with interest, is $60,000.

The estate’s liquid money is gone. The house has not sold. Section 3713(b) makes the son liable for that $60,000 to the extent of the distribution he made, and he is now in the position of asking his brother and sister to return money he handed them four months ago. Whether they still have it is not the government’s problem.

Had he held the cash until the final returns were filed, the $60,000 would have come out of the estate, each sibling would have received $73,333 instead of $93,333, and nobody would have been personally exposed. The whole difference is sequence.

Where this goes wrong

Distributing before the final tax returns are filed

Covered above, and it is the single most common way a well-meaning executor ends up personally out of pocket. The decedent’s final personal income tax return, and any years that were missed, have to be settled before money leaves the estate. “The family needed it” is not a defence.

Treating the date of death as a starting gun rather than a measuring point

Every value in the estate is fixed at the date of death, not at the date somebody gets round to looking. If the house is appraised in November for a January death, the appraiser must give an opinion of value as at January. Executors routinely order the wrong thing and have to pay for it twice.

Selling the house before the release is in hand

The ET-117 application is free and ordinary. It is also not instant, and it is not something the attorney handling the contract will necessarily raise if nobody has told them there is an estate involved. Start it the month you are appointed, not the month you have a buyer.

Assuming no tax means no filing

The filing threshold is tied to the New York exclusion, which is well below the federal figure most people have heard. An estate can owe nothing federally and still have a New York return due in nine months.

Paying estate expenses from your own account to keep things moving

Understandable, and it creates a reimbursement claim you then have to prove, with receipts, to beneficiaries who were not consulted. Open the estate account first and run everything through it. An executor who cannot show where the money went is an executor whose accounting gets challenged.

What to do in the first month

Three things, in this order, and none of them require a decision about who gets what.

Write down the date of death and count nine months forward; that is your outside date for the return and the payment, whatever else happens. Second, if there is New York real property or a co-op, begin the lien release, because it is the longest-lead item and the only one controlled by somebody else’s queue. Third, find out what the decedent’s tax filing history actually was, before a single dollar is distributed to anybody.

Everything else — the appraisals, the account statements, the arguments about the furniture — can be done in parallel. Those three cannot be done late.

Frequently asked questions

Do I have to accept the job if I am named in the will?

No. An executor named in a will can decline before being appointed, and the appointment then passes to whoever the will names next or, failing that, to the people the statute puts in line. Declining at the start is straightforward. Resigning after you have been appointed and have handled money is considerably less so.

Is the lien a problem even if the estate owes no tax?

Yes. It attaches at death regardless, and it has to be released regardless. The release is free, and the Tax Department issues it whether or not any tax was due.

Can I pay myself for the work?

An executor is entitled to statutory commissions, calculated on the value of the estate and payable from it. They are taxable income to you, which beneficiaries who are also relatives often find surprising. Take them properly, through the accounting, not by quietly keeping a sum.

What if the estate does not have enough to pay everything?

Then the order in which claims are paid stops being a matter of judgement and becomes a matter of law, and this is the situation in which personal liability most often arises. An insolvent or doubtful estate is the point at which an executor should stop paying anyone and get advice.

How long does the whole thing take?

An uncomplicated estate with cooperative beneficiaries and no tax return commonly runs well under a year. One with real property to sell, a return to file, and a lien release in the queue should be planned around the nine-month date from the beginning rather than discovered in month seven.

If you have just been handed this job

Find the date of death and write it at the top of a page. Nearly every deadline that matters is counted from it, including the one that governs the money. Most of what goes wrong for executors in Brooklyn is not a hard legal question — it is a date that passed, or a payment made in the wrong order, by somebody who was doing their honest best at the worst possible time.

This article is general information about New York law and tax rules and is not legal or tax advice. Thresholds and exclusion amounts change annually and the figures here are for deaths occurring in 2026. Every estate turns on its own facts. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome.