Florida runs probate through the Circuit Court in all 67 counties, grouped into 20 judicial circuits, and the county Clerk of Court holds every filing. An estate opens in the county where the decedent lived at death.
Jonathan Khorsandi on May 27, 2026
Florida runs probate through the Circuit Court in all 67 counties, grouped into 20 judicial circuits, and the county Clerk of Court holds every filing. An estate opens in the county where the decedent lived at death. If the decedent lived elsewhere but owned Florida property, the case opens in the county where that property sits.
Statewide probate filings reached 71,282 in 2023, up from 57,997 in 2019, a 22.9% rise reported by The Florida Bar News from the state courts' probate workgroup data. The series peaked at 77,344 in FY 2021-22. A law-firm analysis of the Office of the State Courts Administrator's FY 2023-24 Probate Statistical Reference Guide puts probate at more than one in five of all circuit court filings in the state.
That volume is why Florida looks like the easiest probate market in the country. It is not, and the reason is a statute most guides skip: the estate inventory is confidential. You can see that an estate exists, and you can usually see its docket, but you cannot read what it is worth off the court file.
Mostly, with two carve-outs that matter more in Florida than in almost any other state.
Public: the petition for administration, the order admitting the will, letters of administration naming the personal representative, court orders, and the docket history. Anyone can look these up. There is no requirement to be an heir or a party.
Confidential by statute: the inventory. Fla. Stat. § 733.604(1)(b) makes an inventory filed with the clerk confidential and exempt from s. 119.07(1) and Art. I, s. 24(a) of the state constitution. The custodian may release it only to the personal representative, the personal representative's attorney, an interested person as that term is defined in Fla. Stat. § 731.201, or by court order on a showing of good cause. Accountings sit in the same class.
Two consequences follow, and both are operational rather than academic. First, estate value is not discoverable from a Florida probate file. Anyone quoting you an estate's worth from Florida court records is not getting it from the inventory, because they cannot legally have it. Second, your valuation work has to run through a different source entirely: the county property appraiser and the county's official records, matched to the decedent by name and last known address.
Restricted online: document images. Fla. Stat. § 28.2221(5)(a) bars a county recorder from placing on a publicly available internet website, for general public display, any image or copy of a court file, record or paper relating to matters governed by the Florida Probate Rules. That provision binds the recorder's Official Records site rather than the clerk's case-search system, which is governed separately under Fla. R. Jud. Admin. 2.420 and the Supreme Court's access standards. The practical result is the same either way, and every clerk in this article confirms it in their own words: index and docket online, documents by request or in person.
In the Circuit Court of the county where the decedent was living at death. Probate is exclusively a Circuit Court matter in Florida; there is no separate probate court and no county court alternative. Where a nonresident died owning Florida real property, venue is the county where that property is located, which is the case an out-of-state investor most often runs into.
The 67 counties are organized into 20 judicial circuits. The five highest-volume markets are Miami-Dade (11th Circuit), Broward (17th), Palm Beach (15th), Orange (9th) and Hillsborough (13th). The Florida Court Clerks and Comptrollers association runs a county-by-county clerk finder that links to all 67 offices, which is the fastest way to reach a county not covered below.
Testate, meaning there is a will, produces a petition for administration, an order admitting the will, and letters naming a personal representative. Florida uses "personal representative" where other states say executor or administrator.
Intestate, meaning no valid will, produces a petition for letters of administration and a court-appointed personal representative under Florida's intestacy rules. These filings are frequently the more productive ones, because several heirs who never planned for the situation now jointly hold a house none of them lives in.
| Track | When it applies | Typical timeline | What it generates |
|---|---|---|---|
| Formal administration | Estates over $150,000, or any estate where a personal representative has to be appointed | 6 to 18 months | Petition, letters, notice to creditors, inventory (confidential), accountings, orders |
| Summary administration | Under Fla. Stat. § 735.201: the entire estate subject to administration in Florida, less the value of property exempt from the claims of creditors, does not exceed $150,000; or the decedent has been dead more than 2 years. Not available in a testate estate whose will directs administration under chapter 733 | Weeks to a few months | Petition and order of distribution |
The $150,000 figure is recent and it is the single most commonly wrong fact in Florida probate guidance. Section 7 of chapter 2026-57, Laws of Florida, enacted as CS/HB 1337, doubled the threshold from $75,000 with effect from 1 July 2026. Anything still quoting $75,000 predates that. Two points of precision: the statute reads "does not exceed," so an estate valued at exactly $150,000 qualifies, and the deduction is property exempt from the claims of creditors specifically, not exempt property generally.
For your purposes the split matters because formal administration leaves a longer paper trail and a longer working window. Summary administration cases still hit the docket and still involve real property, they just move faster and give you less to read.
County by county, through that clerk's own case search. There is no statewide probate database and no shared filing system. Every county below has a working online search that covers probate, so the question is never whether the case is findable; it is how much of the file you can see once you find it.
The state's highest-volume probate market at 13,344 cases filed in FY 2023-24, per the analysis of the OSCA statistical guide cited above.
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Clerk | Miami-Dade Clerk of the Court and Comptroller |
| Online case search | Online Case Search (OCS), covering civil, family and probate cases |
| Registration | Optional for standard search; login only avoids the Captcha. Advanced Search requires a notarized Registered Access Request form under Supreme Court order |
| Phone | 305-275-1155 (main clerk line) |
| Records counter | Confirm the current probate records location with the clerk before travelling |
We are deliberately not printing a courthouse address for Miami-Dade probate. The building most often cited for this in other guides, the Richard E. Gerstein Justice Building, handles traffic and misdemeanour matters and is not the probate records location. Call the main line and confirm the counter before you drive anywhere.
10,499 cases filed in FY 2023-24, and 3,499 cases per judge.
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Clerk | Broward County Clerk of Courts |
| Address | 201 SE 6th Street, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33301 |
| Phone | (954) 831-6565 |
| Online case search | Broward Web2 case search, with Probate as an explicit court-type option and full sub-categories |
| Registration | None. Public search runs at anonymous access level |
Broward is the most open of the five for initial research: no registration, probate broken out properly in the search filters. The clerk's own site cautions that not every docket has documents viewable online, which is the § 28.2221 pattern showing up in practice.
8,838 cases filed in FY 2023-24, and 4,419 cases per judge, the heaviest per-judge probate caseload in Florida.
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Clerk | Palm Beach County Clerk and Comptroller |
| Mailing address | P.O. Box 4667, West Palm Beach, FL 33402 |
| Phone | (561) 355-2986 (probate), Self-Service Center 561-355-7048 |
| [email protected] | |
| Online case search | Court Records Search |
| Document access | Restricted, see below |
Palm Beach is the county where the access rule is stated most plainly, so treat it as the template for the rest of the state. As a guest you can see case details and document names. Viewing documents requires registration, and the clerk's probate page states that documents filed in probate cases are not viewable online except by the parties to the case or the attorney of record. Non-parties request records in person or by mail. Note also that the clerk's record-search landing page describes Court Records as civil, criminal and traffic case information without naming probate, which sends a fair number of researchers away thinking probate is not there. It is.
Orlando metro, ninth circuit, and the most straightforward remote search of the five.
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Clerk | Orange County Clerk of Courts |
| Online case search | MyeClerk records search, which lists Probate Case Records among its searchable case types |
| Registration | Anonymous public searching permitted. Credentials are needed only for confidential or non-public information |
Older guides send readers to clerk.org, a legacy Orange County Clerk domain. Use myorangeclerk.com for the clerk and the myeclerk subdomain for the search itself; a link that depends on a legacy redirect is a link that breaks without warning.
Tampa metro, sustained population growth, consistent new filings.
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Clerk | Hillsborough County Clerk of Court |
| Online case search | HOVER, the clerk's public records search, which covers probate |
| Registration and fees | Not published in a form we could verify. Confirm access terms with the clerk before planning around them |
HOVER exists and it does cover probate; the clerk's own homepage confirms both. What the terms of access are, whether registration is needed and whether probate documents are viewable, we could not establish from an official page, so we are not going to tell you. Assume the Palm Beach pattern until the clerk tells you otherwise.
| County | Circuit | Search system | Docket search online | Documents online |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Miami-Dade | 11th | Online Case Search | Yes | No. In person or by records request |
| Broward | 17th | Web2, no registration | Yes, probate as a court type | Partial. Not every docket has viewable documents |
| Palm Beach | 15th | Court Records Search | Yes. Guests see case details and document names | No. Parties and attorney of record only |
| Orange | 9th | MyeClerk | Yes, anonymous | Confidential and non-public material requires credentials |
| Hillsborough | 13th | HOVER | Yes | Access terms not published. Confirm with the clerk |
Read that table as one finding rather than five. Every county in Florida's highest-volume markets will tell you an estate exists and give you the case number, the parties and the docket. None of them will hand you the file. Plan the workflow around a searchable index plus a records request, not around a portal that shows you documents.
Searching a docket costs nothing in all five counties above. The charges start when you want paper.
Clerk service charges for copies and certification are set by Fla. Stat. § 28.24, and the probate-specific service charges by Fla. Stat. § 28.2401. Those statutes fix the framework; each clerk publishes the current amounts on its own fee schedule, and several counties add local charges on top. Both statutes have been amended more than once in recent sessions, so confirm the current figure against the clerk's published schedule before ordering a batch rather than working from a number in an article, including this one.
The cost that actually bites in Florida is not the per-page charge. It is that documents are not online, which converts research into either a courthouse trip or a mail request with a turnaround. Palm Beach, for example, takes non-party record requests by mail at P.O. Box 4667, West Palm Beach, FL 33402. Budget the days, not the dollars.
Formal administration typically runs 6 to 18 months from filing to distribution, and contested estates run longer. Summary administration can close in weeks. Florida sets no outer deadline for completing an administration, but it does impose fixed interim deadlines, and those are what keep generating public filings on estates that stall.
| Stage | Statutory position |
|---|---|
| Creditor claim window | 3 months from first publication of the notice to creditors, or 30 days after service of the notice on a known creditor, § 733.702 |
| Absolute bar on claims | 2 years after the decedent's death, regardless of notice, § 733.710 |
| Objections to the will, venue or jurisdiction | 3 months after service of the notice of administration, § 733.212 |
| Summary administration by lapse of time | Available once the decedent has been dead more than 2 years, § 735.201 |
| Inventory | Filed with the clerk and confidential, § 733.604(1)(b) |
The three-month creditor window is the interval to work. Before it closes, the personal representative usually cannot distribute or clear a sale, and is occupied with notice and claims. After it closes, decisions about the property get made, often quickly, because carrying costs on a Florida house with insurance at current levels are not something an out-of-state heir wants to hold.
The two-year rule cuts both ways for a researcher. It opens summary administration on old deaths, which means filings appear on the docket years after the death, and those cases involve property that has often sat empty the entire time.
The filing tells you an estate exists and who is running it. Everything about the property comes from somewhere else, which is the specific thing Florida research gets wrong.
1. Search the county of residence, not the property county. An estate filed in Broward can hold a house in Lee. The exception is the nonresident decedent, where venue follows the Florida property.
2. Pull the docket, not just the petition. Check whether letters have issued, who was appointed, whether an attorney is on the case, whether the notice to creditors has published, and whether the estate has already been closed. A closed estate is a closed estate.
3. Get the property from the property appraiser, not the court file. The inventory is confidential under § 733.604(1)(b), so the file will not tell you what the estate owns or what it is worth. Match the decedent's name and last known address against the county property appraiser and the official records to identify the parcel, the last recorded owner, and the tax status. Delinquency on an open estate is the clearest motivation signal in Florida public data.
4. Identify who can sign. The personal representative named in the letters is the only person with authority to sell. Where an attorney of record appears on the docket, that attorney is usually the better first contact on a formal administration, and probate attorneys carry several files at once.
5. Time the approach to the creditor window. Contact in the first few weeks lands while notice and claims are still live. Contact after the three-month window has run lands when the decision about the house is actually being made. Both work; the follow-up between them is what most people skip.
6. Request the documents you actually need. Given that no county in this article puts probate documents online for non-parties, decide which cases justify a records request before you make any. Filtering on the free index is the cheap step. Requesting files is the expensive one.
33 counties: Alachua, Bay, Brevard, Broward, Charlotte, Citrus, Clay, Collier, Duval, Escambia, Hernando, Hillsborough, Indian River, Lake, Lee, Leon, Manatee, Marion, Martin, Miami-Dade, Okaloosa, Orange, Osceola, Palm Beach, Pinellas, Polk, Santa Rosa, Sarasota, Seminole, St. Johns, St. Lucie, Sumter and Volusia.
That covers Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Palm Beach, Orlando, Tampa, Jacksonville, Fort Myers, Sarasota and the Space Coast, plus secondary markets including St. Johns and Sumter, where The Villages sits.
Every lead is a verified court filing with a case number, not a death record or a pre-probate prediction. Each carries the property records matched to the estate, the personal representative skip traced with mailing address, phone and email where available, the attorney of record where one is named, and MLS tracking so you can see whether the property has already listed. The most recent owner of record comes with it. Tax assessment history, comparable sales and prior ownership chains do not, and we are not going to imply they do in a state where the inventory itself is sealed.
The demographic case for Florida is strong without being overstated. Roughly 5.3 million Florida residents are 65 or older, about 22.8% of a population of 23.5 million. That is the second-highest share of any state after Maine at 24.6%, and the second-largest such population after California at roughly 6.9 million. Second on both measures, in a state where filings rose 22.9% in four years, is a durable pipeline. It is not the largest in the country, and you should be suspicious of any source that tells you it is.
Working this manually across even five counties means five different search systems, records requests on every case you want to read, property appraiser cross-referencing because the court file will not give you value, and skip tracing after that. The research is legitimate and it works. It is also most of a working week each month.
You can see the full coverage list at probatedata.com/counties, or start a 7-day trial for $1 and search the Florida counties directly.
For the wider method across every state, see the national guide to finding probate records by county.
Mostly. Petitions, orders admitting a will, letters of administration, court orders and the docket are public, and anyone can look them up without being an heir or a party. Two carve-outs matter: the estate inventory and accountings are confidential under Florida Statutes section 733.604(1)(b), releasable only to the personal representative, that person's attorney, an interested person as defined in section 731.201, or by court order. Section 28.2221(5)(a) also bars posting probate document images on a publicly available website for general display.
County by county, through the Clerk of Court's own case search, because Florida has no statewide probate database. Miami-Dade uses Online Case Search, Broward uses its Web2 search with probate as an explicit court type, Palm Beach uses Court Records Search, Orange uses MyeClerk, and Hillsborough uses HOVER. All five are free to search for case details, but the documents themselves generally require an in-person visit or a records request.
No. The inventory filed with the clerk is confidential and exempt from public records disclosure under Florida Statutes section 733.604(1)(b). Only the personal representative, that person's attorney, an interested person as defined in section 731.201, or someone with a court order showing good cause can obtain it. Value work in Florida has to run through the county property appraiser and official records instead of the probate file.
Summary administration is available under Florida Statutes section 735.201 where the entire estate subject to administration in Florida, less the value of property exempt from the claims of creditors, does not exceed $150,000, or where the decedent has been dead more than two years. The threshold was doubled from $75,000 by section 7 of chapter 2026-57, Laws of Florida, enacted as CS/HB 1337 and effective 1 July 2026. It is also unavailable in a testate estate whose will directs administration under chapter 733.
Formal administration typically runs 6 to 18 months from filing to distribution, and contested estates run longer. Summary administration can close in weeks. Florida sets no outer deadline for completing an administration but does impose interim ones: creditors have three months from first publication of the notice to creditors under section 733.702, objections to the will, venue or jurisdiction run three months from service of the notice of administration under section 733.212, and section 733.710 bars claims absolutely two years after death.
Miami-Dade, at 13,344 cases filed in FY 2023-24, followed by Broward at 10,499 and Palm Beach at 8,838, according to a law-firm analysis of the Office of the State Courts Administrator's Probate Statistical Reference Guide. Per-judge caseload runs the other way: Palm Beach carries the heaviest at 4,419 cases per judge, ahead of Broward at 3,499 and Miami-Dade at 2,780.
Generally not. Florida Statutes section 28.2221(5)(a) bars a county recorder from placing images of probate court files on a publicly available website for general public display, and the clerks' case-search systems apply comparable restrictions under the judicial access rules. The Palm Beach Clerk states the position most plainly: guests see case details and document names, viewing documents requires registration, and probate documents are not viewable online except by the parties to the case or the attorney of record.
In the Circuit Court of the Florida county where the decedent's Florida property is located. For a Florida resident, venue is the county where the decedent lived at death rather than where the property sits, which is the more common trap: an estate filed in Broward can hold a house in Lee County.
