Senate Bill 1264, by Senator Suzette Martinez Valladares, was signed on September 20, 2026 and chaptered as Chapter 427, Statutes of 2026. It amends a single section: Probate Code section 9202. It applies to estates for which letters are issued on or after January 1, 2027.12
Three changes land at once on the child-support notice duty.
- The trigger moves to actual knowledge.
- The act states expressly that there is no duty to investigate.
- The duty is extended to reach support obligations of an heir or beneficiary, not only of the decedent.
The local child support agency’s claim window is left intact.
Why it belongs in a sale conversation
Section 9202 is the notice section. Notice sits upstream of creditor claims, creditor claims sit upstream of priority, and priority is what determines whether there is anything left for the heirs when a sale closes.
Two of the three changes reduce what a personal representative has to do. The third quietly widens who is relevant. Before, the question was what the decedent owed. Now an heir’s own support arrears can be the thing that reaches into the estate.
That changes the intake conversation more than the paperwork. The people in the room are no longer only claimants on the estate; one of them can also be a reason a claim arrives.
Worth reading alongside AB 1521, which added a fourth required notice at issuance of letters to the same section. Within roughly a year, the catalogue of required notices got longer while the standard for one of them got narrower and aimed at a different person.
Statutory text should be read directly before it is relied on; the official chaptered text is at leginfo. Interpretation and application route to counsel.
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