Legal Question in Wills and Trusts in New Jersey

Trust fees are set by statute in NJ. The statute allows:

Income Commission

Trustees are entitled to a 6% fee on all income received by the trust annually.

Corpus Commission

Trustees are entitled to an annual commission on the corpus of the trust. This includes money that qualified as income in previous years, and has since been reinvested. The statutory fee for a trust corpus is .005% of the first $400,000 and .003% on the value of the corpus that exceeds $400,000.

So for example, the corpus commission with a value of $3.5 million would be:

$400,000 x .005% = $ 2,000

$3,100,000 x .003% = $ 9,300

Annual Corpus Commission = $ 11,300

Imagine a $10 million dollar corpus, invested with a 7% annual return. A trustee would be entitled to (assuming no distributions):

$400,000 x .005% = $ 2,000

$9,600,000 x .003% = $ 28,800 (Fee on Principal)

$10,000,000 x .07 x .06 = $ 42,000 (Fee on Income)

Annual Commission = $ 72,800

In addition to income and corpus commissions, when the trust is terminated, the trustee is entitled to a percentage-based termination fee. This fee depends on the value of the trust and amount of time they served as trustee prior to termination. Finally, the above fees and percentages change based on the number of trustees serving. The above assumes that only one trustee is serving. If more than one trustee is serving, a small percentage is added to the overall commission, to be divided among the serving trustees.

An additional fee is allowed if unusual circumstances exist, such as defending litigation by a beneficiary, and presuming the trustee were successful.