Bay County Probate Court: Where to File and What to File

Where the Bay County Probate Court Actually Sits

Bay County probate is heard in the Fourteenth Judicial Circuit, at the Bay County Courthouse at 300 East 4th Street in Panama City, where one circuit judge keeps chambers and carries every probate, guardianship and mental health case in the county. Filings go through the Bay County Clerk of Court and Comptroller, whose Estates and Wills counter is Room 105 and whose single main number is 850-747-5100.

Panama City runs on Central time, an hour behind Miami, and the Clerk’s counter closes at 4:30 p.m. Central. Room numbers do the sorting inside the building, with probate and guardianship in Room 105, circuit and county civil, evictions, family law and jury in Room 111, and domestic violence in Room 109. Fourth Street has been closed at the courthouse since February 2026, so the parking lot is reached from McKenzie Avenue.

The probate counter is at the Bay County Courthouse, 300 East 4th Street, Panama City, FL 32401, Room 105, the Estates and Wills counter, which takes guardianship as well, Monday to Friday, 8:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Central time, 850-747-5100, the single number that routes every department. Bay County runs on Central time, an hour behind Miami, which matters for a filing deadline, a phone call and every hearing. Circuit and county civil, evictions, family law and jury are in Room 111, and domestic violence in Room 109. The Clerk takes cash, a credit or debit card, a money order or a cashier’s check for every monetary transaction, and no personal checks. The probate and guardianship fax is 850-747-5163 and the email is [email protected]. Mail goes to P.O. Box 2269, Panama City, FL 32402, while Court Administration uses different boxes. Nothing is posted about how an original will is deposited, in which room, or whether a fee applies, so call before you send one, and the opening forms live on the circuit’s site rather than on the Clerk’s.

• The clerk’s probate page for Bay County
• Fourteenth Judicial Circuit judges directory
• Administrative orders of the Fourteenth Judicial Circuit
• Local probate forms and checklists

One thing worth settling before you go any further. The case belongs in the county where the person was domiciled when they died, and Florida law fixes that rather than letting anyone choose it. If your mother lived in Bay County, her estate is a Bay County case, even if you live in another state and even if a different courthouse would be more convenient for everyone involved. It is the county that decides, not the town, so estates from Panama City, Panama City Beach, Lynn Haven, Callaway, Parker, and Springfield are all Bay County cases filed with the same clerk. Which division or section then hears the case is a separate question, and the next section answers it.

Parking and Coffee on the Way to the Courthouse

Neither the circuit nor the Clerk publishes a parking page, and what stands in for one is the detour map. Fourth Street has been closed at the courthouse since February 5, 2026, from the roundabout to the courthouse lot, with Luverne and Magnolia carrying no through traffic. The Clerk’s map, revised in August 2026, prints four ways in and ends all of them the same way, turning onto McKenzie Avenue one block off Fifth Street with courthouse parking straight ahead. The court keeps its own parking and directions page.

If you are dropping off an original will or sitting through a morning calendar, coffee within a short walk is The Press at 310 Harrison Avenue, Panama City, about a four minute walk, 0.17 miles northwest through downtown from the public entrance. Hours on the cafe’s own site are 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily. The business has a second location in North Carolina, so read the Panama City page for the hours. The Press was the only cafe inside about 600 meters of the courthouse.

Which Judges Hear Probate Cases in Bay County?

Probate cases in Bay County are heard by the judges the chief judge assigns to the division, and the circuit publishes who they are. Knowing who has the division tells you whose procedures apply to your hearing, and how long a judge has had it tells you how settled those procedures are.

• Elijah Smiley, All Bay County probate, guardianship and mental health, with a fifth of the county’s circuit civil docket, chambers at the Bay County Courthouse, and the circuit’s administrative probate judge, assigned July 1, 2026 under the current assignment plan, which runs to January 1, 2029 and repeats the assignment the December 2025 plan made, so the date he first took the docket is not published (Administrative Order 2026-00-03).

The circuit’s judicial directory is the source, read on September 16, 2026. Assignments rotate, usually at the start of a calendar year, so check it before a hearing.

How Busy the Bay County Probate Court Is

The state court system counts every petition filed in the circuit probate division, and the FY 2024-25 figures for Bay County are 750 probate filings, 60 guardianship filings and 0 trust filings, plus 435 Baker Act and Marchman Act cases that the same division carries. The division closed 663 probate cases in the same year.

Statewide the probate column was 73,282 filings against 141,166 for the whole division in FY 2024-25, so more than a third of what a Florida probate judge signs has nothing to do with an estate. The figures come from the Office of the State Courts Administrator's Statistical Reference Guide, chapter 6, and the next fiscal year's edition usually appears the following autumn.

How a Case Gets Filed in Bay County Today

Florida runs one statewide electronic filing system, the Florida Courts E-Filing Portal, and every circuit court in the state receives filings through it. Attorneys have no choice about it. The rule says attorneys must file through the portal, and no other method is permitted except in the narrow situations the rule itself lists.

A self-represented person is in a different position, and this is the part almost nobody is told. You may elect to register for the portal and file electronically, or you may hand or mail paper to the clerk, who converts it to electronic format for the official court file. Both routes are proper and both land in the same queue. One caution rides along with the choice. Once you elect to file electronically, you cannot go back to paper without the court’s permission.

Registering costs nothing and filing itself costs nothing. What you pay is the statutory filing fee for the case, plus a payment convenience fee that depends on whether you pay by card or by electronic check.

The practical consequence is that a Bay County estate does not require anyone to be in Florida. An out-of-state family can open, run, and close a case from a kitchen table in another state, because the filings, the notices, and the proposed orders all move electronically. The exceptions are physical documents, and there are only a few of them.

Bay does not draw for a division. One circuit judge holds all of the county’s probate, guardianship and mental health cases under an assignment plan that runs from July 1, 2026 to January 1, 2029, and the plan it replaced in December 2025 made the same assignment. The same judge is the circuit’s administrative probate and guardianship judge, with oversight of the probate and guardianship divisions across the circuit and of the case time standards the rules set. So there is no division number to look up, no ratio to work out and no second set of practices to learn. The variable in Bay is documentary, and it is the format the order arrives in.

Are Bay County Probate Hearings Remote?

Probate hearings in Bay County can be held remotely on Zoom, and the division decides which matters must be in person. The circuit’s video conferencing page says the link arrives one of two ways, either inside the court notice of hearing or directly from the judicial assistant, and a party who does not have it 24 hours before the appearance is told to contact the court. The same page covers the setup, entering the full legal name as it appears on the case documents, muting until instructed, and the ban on recording or taking screenshots. No standing probate room or meeting ID is published anywhere on the circuit’s site. Whether a probate hearing here is remote by default is not published either, because the judge posts no probate procedures document, so ask the judicial assistant when you schedule.

The division’s remote hearing instructions carry the current links and the dress and conduct rules, which judges enforce on camera exactly as they do in the room.

Where the Original Will Goes

Here is the rule that catches almost everyone, and it is stricter than families expect. Whoever is holding the original will has to deposit it with the clerk of the court that has venue over the estate, within 10 days of receiving information that the person has died. Read that trigger carefully. The clock does not start at the death, it starts when the custodian learns of the death, and the duty belongs to that custodian personally. It does not wait for a lawyer, it does not wait for the family to agree on anything, and it applies whether or not anybody intends to open a probate case. When the will goes in, the clerk also wants the date of death or the last four digits of the deceased person’s Social Security number.

The original itself travels on paper. Whatever a county does about an electronic copy, the physical document has to reach the clerk, and how it gets there is settled county by county rather than statewide. Florida law gives the custodian ten days from learning of the death to deposit the original with the Clerk. Bay publishes nothing beyond that. The Clerk’s probate page says only that wills are not filed until the death of the party, with no deposit procedure, no room direction and no statement of whether a fee applies, so call 850-747-5100 before you send an original anywhere. Mail to the Clerk goes to P.O. Box 2269, Panama City, FL 32402, and Court Administration uses different boxes, so the envelope has to name the Clerk.

Three things families routinely get wrong here are worth naming. Depositing the will is not probating it, so handing the original to the clerk does not open an estate, does not appoint anyone, and does not make you responsible for the debts. It is a filing, not a job. A copy is not a substitute either, because a court can admit a lost or destroyed will but proving one is a separate proceeding with a heavier burden, which is a poor trade for a document that could have been walked to a counter. And sitting on a will is a genuinely bad idea. A custodian can be compelled to produce it, and where the court finds there was no just or reasonable cause for holding it back, Florida awards costs, damages, and a reasonable attorney fee against that person personally.

Two small mercies. If the original goes in attached to the petition, Florida treats it as deposited, so it is not a second errand. And once the clerk has it, the original is kept in its original form for at least 20 years whether or not it is ever admitted to probate. Scanning a will does not replace it.

Which Forms You Actually Need

The honest answer surprises people, so here it is plainly. Florida has an official statewide form set for family law, approved by the Supreme Court and free for anyone to use. It has never built the same thing for probate. The state’s own self-help service says as much, telling visitors that it does not provide any forms related to the probate process and to ask a lawyer which form is needed.

So when you search for the Bay County probate forms, you are looking for something that does not exist as one official packet, which is why the results are a scatter of clerk pages, circuit pages, and companies selling you a template. What actually controls comes from three layers, and you need all three.

• The Florida Probate Rules, which prescribe contents rather than forms. The rule on the petition for administration lists eleven things the petition must state, from the decedent’s domicile to whether the proposed personal representative has been convicted of a felony. A document that satisfies the rule is legally sufficient even if it looks nothing like anyone’s template. The rules do carry a small set of forms of their own, but they are almost entirely guardianship forms, and the rules say outright that those forms are not intended to be part of the rules and are provided for convenience only. The one decedent-estate form actually written into the probate rules is the oath of the personal representative.
• The practitioner form set. Most Florida probate documents you will ever see are built from a numbered probate form set published by a private nonprofit and sold commercially. Lawyers treat it as the standard. It is not court-approved, and nothing obliges a court to accept it.
• The local layer, which is the one that rejects you. Bay County has no probate practice order and the judge posts no procedures document, so the working rules are the circuit’s checklists and one formatting standard. Every checklist ends with a certification by the filing attorney, printed the same way on each of them, that he or she has personally reviewed the checklist and that it is accurate, over a signature, a date and a mailing address. There is no delegated review option on the form. Each checklist also names the proposed orders that follow it and says they are e-filed through the portal, with boxes for an order admitting the will, an order of summary administration, an order determining homestead, and on the formal checklist an order appointing the personal representative with letters of administration. Then comes the formatting, which is where documents come back. A proposed order goes up as a cover letter in PDF with the order itself in Word, and inside the Word file the court’s paired four-letter placeholder codes have to appear, DDDD with JJJJ for the signature date and the signature, MMMM with AAAA for the mailing date and the judicial assistant, RRRR with GGGG where a general magistrate or hearing officer signs, and CCCC for the service list. No space goes in front of JJJJ, GGGG or AAAA, which is what the alignment buttons and the tab key are for, and no page break, section break, memo, note or comment can sit anywhere in the document. The instructions say each of those causes the document to be rejected. The checklists carry the substance. The summary administration checklist, revised in July 2026, uses the current $150,000 threshold or a death two years or more ago, and asks whether the estate is not indebted or the claims are barred, whether the affidavit of diligent search and inquiry for creditors was filed, whether notice went to the Agency for Health Care Administration for a person aged 55 or older, whether an affidavit of heirs was filed in an intestate case, and whether a verified petition to determine homestead was filed. The homestead checklist is older, revised in January 2016, and its second page decides the petition. All four homestead conditions have to be met, namely that the decedent owned the property at death, that the decedent was a Florida resident, that the property was the residence of the decedent or of the decedent’s family, and that it meets the size and contiguity requirement in the Florida Constitution, with the petition stating whether the property lies inside or outside a municipality and how many acres it is. The homestead checklist also wants a verified inventory with proofs of service, an affidavit that no Florida tax is due or a non-taxable certificate, the notice of the federal estate tax return with its due date, and the federal closing letter. The checklist for opening a formal administration walks the will, the preference for personal representative, the oath and the designation of registered agent, and the three ways bond gets handled, waived in the will, waived by all interested parties with the waivers attached, or a motion to waive that states the approximate value of the probate assets.

So start at the bottom of that list rather than the top. The circuit and the clerk publish what they want on their own forms and checklists page, and half an hour there before you draft anything is the cheapest half hour in the case.

The Administrative Orders That Govern Probate in Bay County

Each circuit adds its own layer on top of the Florida Probate Rules through administrative orders signed by the chief judge and the procedures each division publishes, and that layer is where a petition gets rejected. These are the orders that govern probate practice in Bay County as of September 16, 2026.

• Administrative Order 2026-00-03, Judge Assignment Plan, July 1, 2026 to January 1, 2029 (signed June 2026, effective July 1, 2026, rescinding Administrative Order 2025-00-13). Assigns one circuit judge every Bay County probate, guardianship and mental health case and names him administrative probate judge. The court posts the order as a scanned image with no text layer, so its assignment table has to be read off the page picture, and the handwritten signing day is not legible in the scan.
• Administrative Order 2026-00-04, Administrative Plan for the Fourteenth Judicial Circuit, July 1, 2026 to January 1, 2029 (effective July 1, 2026, rescinding Administrative Order 2025-00-10). Sets the circuit’s administrative structure and gives the administrative probate and guardianship judge oversight of the probate and guardianship divisions across the circuit, including monitoring the probate and guardianship case time standards the rules set. Posted as a scanned image as well.
• Chief judge memorandum of December 15, 2020, Submission of Proposed Orders to Judiciary (December 15, 2020). Sets the placeholder format every proposed order has to use, with a companion instruction sheet listing what causes a submission to be rejected, namely a space before the signature codes, a page or section break, and any memo, note or comment left in the file. The format comes from a chief judge’s memorandum rather than from an administrative order, which is why it never appears on the order index.

The Checklist for Opening an Estate in Bay County

This is the sequence for a formal administration, which is the full version. A smaller estate skips most of it, and the section after this one covers that. Each step below happens in this order for a reason, because the later ones depend on the earlier ones being done.

1. Order certified death certificates. The funeral home usually orders them and will ask how many you want. Ask for more than feels sensible, often five to ten, because the court, each bank, each insurer, and the property records all want their own certified copy, and reordering later is slow.
2. Find the original will and deposit it with the clerk. The 10-day clock runs from when the custodian learns of the death, not from when anyone files anything, and it is the one deadline that can already be running while the family is still planning a funeral. Where the original goes in Bay County is above, and it is never just a matter of uploading it.
3. Decide which kind of administration the estate needs. Formal administration is the default. Summary administration and disposition without administration are lighter and cheaper, and they are worth ruling out before you file anything, because you cannot un-file a formal case cheaply.
4. Confirm the county. Venue follows the decedent’s domicile at death, or for someone who lived out of state, a county where they owned property. This is one of the few things in probate that is genuinely hard to fix later.
5. Prepare and e-file the petition for administration, with the local extras. The petition is verified, meaning signed under penalty of perjury, and it has to name every interested person, which is the line that most often comes back to bite an estate later. File it with whatever Bay County adds on top, because that is what a rejection is usually about. The filing fee is $400.
6. File the oath, the address designation, and the designation of resident agent. All three are due before letters issue. The oath is a sworn promise to faithfully administer the estate, and the appointment rests on it. The address designation puts the representative’s street and mailing address on the record. The resident agent designation, signed by the agent accepting the job, is required unless the representative is a corporate fiduciary with a Florida office or a Florida Bar member who lives and keeps an office in Florida, which in practice means nearly every family representative files one and the attorney usually is the agent. These can be folded into the petition or the oath rather than filed separately.
7. Get the order and the letters of administration. Once the petition is in and the will is admitted, the court appoints the representative, sets or waives bond, and confirms the oath and resident agent papers are on file. Letters of administration then issue, and the letters are the thing that carries weight in the outside world. Order roughly ten certified copies at once, because banks, brokerages, and title companies each keep one and many will not accept letters more than 60 to 90 days old.
8. Get an estate tax identification number and open the estate account. This comes right after the letters and before anything else useful can happen, because no bank will open an account for the estate without both.
9. Serve the notice of administration. Florida says promptly rather than naming a day count. It goes to the surviving spouse, the beneficiaries, anyone who may be entitled to exempt property, and the trustee and qualified beneficiaries of certain trusts. Service starts a 3-month clock for the person served to challenge the validity of the will, the venue, or the court’s jurisdiction, and after that those objections are barred. That deadline is close to unextendable, because Florida allows an extension only for estoppel based on a misstatement by the personal representative about the deadline itself, and expressly not for failure to disclose information or for other misconduct. The clock also runs only against people who were actually served, so leaving someone off the list does not save time, it leaves the case open. The same notice starts a 4-month window to claim exempt property and a 6-month window for a surviving spouse to elect against the estate.
10. Publish the notice to creditors, serve the ones you know about, and document the search. The notice runs in a newspaper in the county once a week for two consecutive weeks. An unknown creditor then has 3 months from the first publication, and a creditor who had to be served gets the later of that or 30 days from service. The representative has to make a diligent search for reasonably ascertainable creditors, though Florida does not demand an impracticable one, and a verified statement about that search goes in within 4 months of the first publication, with proof of publication filed within 45 days. One item gets missed constantly. If the person who died was 55 or older, a copy of the notice and a death certificate go to Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration within 3 months of the first publication. And a reasonably ascertainable creditor who was never served keeps a claim for up to two years from the death.
11. File the inventory within 60 days of the letters, then close the estate. The inventory lists each asset at its date-of-death value and is served on the residuary beneficiaries and the surviving spouse. After the creditor period runs and the claims are resolved, the estate distributes and the representative files a final accounting and a petition for discharge. Florida puts a real deadline on that too, generally within 12 months after the letters issued for an estate that files no federal estate tax return. A straightforward case runs 6 to 12 months from letters to discharge, and the creditor window is what sets the floor.

What It Costs to File in Bay County

These are the charges the clerk posts, not anyone’s legal fee.

Posted August 2026. Fee schedules move, so confirm the current charge with the clerk before you file. The reason the number looks the same everywhere is that it is the same number. Florida law sets the base charge for opening a formal administration and adds a small statutory service charge on top, so the entire statewide spread across the ten largest counties is one dollar. Our county-by-county filing fee study has all ten posted schedules.

And then there is the number that dwarfs every line above. Florida publishes an attorney fee schedule that is presumed reasonable and scales with the size of the estate, and it is a ceiling the estate may agree to rather than a mandate. On a $100,000 estate the schedule calls $3,000 reasonable. That, not the clerk’s $400, is what probate costs a family. You can run your own numbers in the Florida probate cost calculator.

When the Estate Does Not Need All of This

Before you open a formal administration, rule out the three lighter paths, in this order.

• No probate at all. Only assets in the deceased person’s sole name with no other instruction go through probate. Life insurance and retirement accounts with a named beneficiary, pay-on-death bank accounts, jointly held property with survivorship, property in a funded trust, and a home that passed under a lady bird deed all move without a court case. Sometimes the whole estate turns out to be in that category. Our page on whether you need probate in Florida walks the test.
• Disposition without administration. For the smallest estates, with no real property and not much more than the final bills, whoever paid those bills can ask the clerk to release what is left. It is a request rather than a case, and it costs $231 here. See how disposition without administration works.
• Summary administration. Available when the probate estate is worth $150,000 or less after exempt property, a threshold raised from $75,000 on July 1, 2026, or when the person died more than two years ago. No personal representative is appointed, and the case can close in weeks rather than months. The summary administration guide has a short qualifier.

One warning about that last figure, because it will confuse you if you go looking. Florida publishes its statutes once a year, and the edition on the official statute site still shows the old $75,000 line. The increase to $150,000 is real, it came from a 2026 session law, and the probate rule on summary administration has already been amended to match. Check the rule rather than the posted statute until the new edition appears.

If none of the three fits, the estate needs a formal administration, and the checklist above is the map.

Doing It Yourself, and Where Families Stop

Florida does not require you to hire anyone to file a document. It does require something else, and this is where most families stop. Under the Florida Probate Rules, every personal representative has to be represented by an attorney admitted to practice in Florida unless the representative remains the sole interested person in the estate, or is a Florida-admitted lawyer appearing for himself or herself in that role. Those are the only exceptions. Read it as the practical test it is. One heir, nobody else with an interest, no creditors, and you may proceed alone. A second sibling, or a creditor, and the court expects counsel regardless of how well everyone is getting along.

The smaller paths are different. Disposition without administration is designed to be done without a lawyer, and clerks routinely help with it. Summary administration sits in between, simple on its face and easy to get wrong in ways that surface years later when someone tries to sell the house.

If you do want counsel for a Bay County estate, our probate attorney page for Panama City covers what we charge and how the remote process works. And if you would rather do it yourself, nothing on this page is holding anything back. Everything above is the actual sequence.

Frequently Asked Questions

Common Situations

The order rejected over a single space. An attorney submitted a proposed order of summary administration carrying the court’s placeholder codes, with one space in front of the signature code left there by the word processor’s alignment. The circuit’s instructions say a space before that code, a page or section break, or a memo, note or comment left in the file each causes rejection. Nothing in the estate was wrong. The case waited on a second submission because of a character nobody could see.

The homestead petition that never gave the acreage. A Lynn Haven family asked the court to determine that their mother’s house was homestead, so it would pass outside the estate. The county’s checklist requires all four homestead conditions to be met, and the petition itself has to say whether the property lies inside or outside a municipality and how many acres it is, because the Florida Constitution draws the line at half an acre inside a municipality. The house qualified on every count. The petition did not say so on its face, which is exactly what the checklist catches.

Sources of Law

Statutes and rules retrieved August 19, 2026. Court, clerk, and filing-fee data retrieved on the dates noted. Local requirements change without much announcement, so confirm the current version at the links above before you file.

• Rules cited are the Florida Probate Rules, current through the opinion issued July 16, 2026, and the Florida Rules of General Practice and Judicial Administration, effective July 1, 2026.
• Filing. Fla. R. Gen. Prac. & Jud. Admin. 2.525(b)(1) (attorneys must file through the portal; no other method permitted except as the rule provides), 2.525(b)(2) (an unrepresented party may elect to file through the portal, and once made the election may not be withdrawn without leave of court), 2.525(c)(1)(A) (a paper document may be submitted to the clerk, who converts it, where filed by an unrepresented party who has not elected). Filings move through the Florida Courts E-Filing Portal, operated by the Florida Courts E-Filing Authority, which states there is no cost to register and no fee to file electronically, apart from the statutory filing fee and a convenience fee based on the payment method.
• The original will. Fla. Stat. §732.901(1) (custodian must deposit within 10 days after receiving information that the testator is dead, with the clerk having venue, supplying the date of death or the last four digits of the social security number), (2) (custodian may be compelled; costs, damages, and a reasonable attorney fee where there was no just or reasonable cause), (3) (an original submitted with a petition is deemed deposited), (4) (clerk preserves the original in original form for at least 20 years; digitizing does not eliminate the requirement). Fla. Prob. R. 5.043 (deposit of wills and codicils; retained in original form).
• Opening the estate. Venue, Fla. Stat. §733.101. Petition, §733.202 and Fla. Prob. R. 5.200 (the eleven required contents). Preference in appointment, §733.301. Nonresident personal representatives, §733.304. Oath before letters, Fla. Prob. R. 5.320 (which also carries the only decedent-estate form written into the rules). Address designation and designation of resident agent with acceptance, both before letters, with the corporate-fiduciary and Florida-Bar-member exceptions, Fla. Prob. R. 5.110. Issuance of letters and bond, Fla. Prob. R. 5.235 and §733.213.
• Notices and claims. Notice of administration served promptly, the persons served, the 3-month objection window for the validity of the will, venue, or jurisdiction, and the estoppel-only extension, Fla. Stat. §733.212 and Fla. Prob. R. 5.240 (exempt property 4 months, elective share 6 months). Notice to creditors published once a week for 2 consecutive weeks, the diligent search for reasonably ascertainable creditors, and notice to the Agency for Health Care Administration within 3 months where the decedent was 55 or older, Fla. Stat. §733.2121 and Fla. Prob. R. 5.241 (proof of publication within 45 days; verified statement of the search within 4 months). Claim deadlines, the later of 3 months from first publication or 30 days from service, §733.702. Two-year bar after death whether or not letters ever issued, §733.710.
• Running and closing. Inventory within 60 days after issuance of letters at date-of-death value, Fla. Stat. §733.604 and Fla. Prob. R. 5.340. Final accounting and petition for discharge within 12 months after issuance of letters for an estate filing no federal estate tax return, Fla. Prob. R. 5.400(c). Attorney required for the personal representative unless the representative remains the sole interested person or is a Florida-admitted attorney appearing in that role, Fla. Prob. R. 5.030(a). Presumed-reasonable attorney compensation, §733.6171.
• Smaller estates. Summary administration, Fla. Stat. §735.201 and Fla. Prob. R. 5.530(a)(7). Reading note. The statute as officially published still shows $75,000, because Florida publishes its statutes annually and the 2026 edition is not yet posted. The $150,000 figure comes from CS/HB 1337 (2026), ch. 2026-57, Laws of Florida, section 7, effective July 1, 2026, and Rule 5.530 has been amended to match. Disposition without administration, §735.301.
• Forms. The Florida Probate Rules place their forms in Part V and state that the forms are not intended to be part of the rules and are provided for convenience only; the Part V set is essentially guardianship forms. The Florida State Courts System’s self-help service states that Florida Courts Help does not provide any forms related to the probate process, in contrast with the Supreme Court-approved family law forms. The practitioner form set commonly used in Florida probate is published and sold by a private nonprofit and is not court-approved.
• Cost. Probate filing service charges, Fla. Stat. §28.2401. Posted Bay County charges read from the clerk’s own schedule, retrieved 2026-08-09; all ten largest counties are documented in our probate cost by county study.
• Caseload. Florida Office of the State Courts Administrator, FY 2024-25 Statistical Reference Guide, Chapter 6, Circuit Probate, tables of filings and dispositions by circuit, county and category, retrieved September 15, 2026.
• Bay County local court layer, retrieved September 16, 2026, from the judicial directory · Administrative Order 2026-00-03 · Administrative Order 2026-00-04 · Chief judge memorandum of December 15, 2020. Judge assignments come from the circuit’s assignment orders cited above. The parking and coffee notes are conveniences for visitors, not court information, and the research file with every source is reference/research/probate-court-pilot/bay-county.md.
• Bay County practice, retrieved 2026-08-12: clerk probate page · Fourteenth Judicial Circuit administrative orders · judges directory · local forms and checklists.

Updated on September 16, 2026. Reviewed by Kevin D. Klagge, Esq., Fla. Bar No. 99502. Attorney Kevin Klagge represents families, businesses, and international clients in estate and tax planning, business structuring, and international law, with a focus on Florida legal tools. He litigates estate and business issues in court. This page is general information about Florida court procedure, not legal advice, and no attorney-client relationship is created by reading it. Court addresses, local checklists, and clerk charges change; confirm them at the official links before you file. We serve Panama City residents wherever you are, and this is not a Bay County office.