Definition
Money paid out by a fiduciary or a litigant in the course of performing a legal duty or pursuing legal proceedings. The term carries two distinct but related meanings depending on context:
1. Fiduciary disbursements. Expenditures made by an executor, administrator, guardian, or trustee on behalf of an estate, ward, or trust. These are payments made from the assets under the fiduciary's control — or sometimes advanced by the fiduciary personally — in the course of administering the estate or trust. Examples include payments to creditors, costs of maintaining estate property, taxes, and professional fees. Proper disbursements reduce the account balance and are typically subject to court approval or beneficiary review during a formal accounting.
2. Litigation disbursements. In civil procedure, the out-of-pocket expenditures a party necessarily incurs in the course of an action, distinguished from statutory court costs and officer fees. These are recoverable items taxed against the losing party alongside costs — or, in some jurisdictions, as a component of costs. Common examples include filing fees paid to third parties, process server fees, deposition transcript costs, witness fees, and document reproduction expenses. The distinction between disbursements and costs proper varies by jurisdiction and procedural code.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Plural of disbursement; payments of money from a fund or account.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The act of disbursing; money paid out; expenditure.
The common meaning is close to the legal meaning, but the gap lies in accountability and procedural consequence. In ordinary usage, a disbursement is any payment made from a fund. In legal usage, disbursements are subject to formal scrutiny — whether in a fiduciary accounting reviewed by a court or beneficiaries, or as a taxable item recoverable by the prevailing party in litigation. The legal term implies both a record-keeping obligation and a potential right of reimbursement or approval that everyday usage does not carry.
Common Confusion
Disbursements are frequently conflated with costs in litigation contexts. Costs, strictly speaking, refers to the statutory fees established by rule or statute — court filing fees, clerk charges, and similar amounts fixed by law. Disbursements are the out-of-pocket expenditures paid to third parties in connection with the litigation. Many procedural codes now use costs as an umbrella term encompassing both, which blurs the distinction in modern practice. In fiduciary contexts, disbursements are sometimes confused with distributions: a distribution is money paid to a beneficiary from the estate or trust; a disbursement is money paid to a third party to administer it.
Why It Matters in Research
The dual usage of this term creates navigational complexity. A researcher encountering disbursements in a probate or trust document is in different legal territory than one reading it in a civil procedure code or a court cost statute. Treat the surrounding context as a threshold signal before applying either definition.
In fiduciary law research, disbursements appear in formal accounting documents filed with probate courts. Historical records will often use disbursements alongside receipts as the two sides of a fiduciary account. The law governing what qualifies as a proper disbursement — and who bears the burden of proving propriety — has evolved considerably, and older materials may not reflect the duty of loyalty and prudent investor standards now applied under modern trust codes.
In litigation research, be alert to the fact that codes of civil procedure have treated disbursements inconsistently. Some older codes listed disbursements as a separate recoverable category alongside costs; many modern rules have collapsed the distinction. If researching cost-shifting or fee recovery, check whether the operative rule separately itemizes disbursements or subsumes them within costs. The result can affect what a prevailing party actually recovers.
The term also appears in attorney-client fee contexts — as expenses advanced by counsel on behalf of clients — where the analysis of what may be charged, and how it must be disclosed, is governed by professional responsibility rules rather than procedural cost statutes. These three contexts (fiduciary, litigation, and attorney billing) can overlap in a single case file, and the applicable standards differ.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's first and second editions present substantially identical definitions, reflecting that the core doctrinal framework was stable from early in the dictionary's history. Both editions identify the fiduciary context first — executor, guardian, trustee — and then note the civil procedure usage as a secondary application. The civil procedure sense is defined in contrast to officer fees and court costs proper, with disbursements allowed eo nomine (by that very name) alongside costs. This phrasing signals that in the procedural codes of that era, disbursements were a recognized independent line item, not merely absorbed into a general costs category.
What the historical entries do not address is the attorney-client billing context, which has grown significantly in practical importance and is now heavily regulated by bar rules and retainer agreement law. Researchers relying solely on these historical definitions will miss that dimension entirely. The entries also do not engage with the standards governing whether a fiduciary disbursement is proper or recoverable — questions that depend on trust law and fiduciary duty doctrine developed well beyond what a dictionary definition captures.
Jurisdictional Note
The recoverability and definition of litigation disbursements varies meaningfully across jurisdictions. Federal courts and many state courts now treat disbursements as a subset of taxable costs governed by specific rules; other jurisdictions maintain a distinct disbursements category. In civil law systems and some Canadian provinces, the term disbursements carries a more formal procedural status with its own tariff schedule. Fiduciary disbursement rules track state trust and probate codes, which differ on what expenses qualify, what approval is required, and what documentation is necessary.