How Much Does a Living Trust Cost in Florida?

How Much Should a Living Trust Cost in Florida?

A common question I hear is, “How much should a living trust cost in Florida?” At our firm a revocable living trust is a flat $3,200 for an individual and $4,500 for a couple. It helps to know what that price actually buys, because a trust is rarely just one document. What you are paying for is a complete plan that keeps your estate out of probate and ready for whatever life brings, set up correctly and built to work when your family needs it. Around the state you will see trusts advertised from roughly $1,500 to well over $5,000, and the cheapest versions almost always leave out the part that makes a trust worth having. See how a Florida living trust works →

What You’re Really Paying For

The trust document is the easy part. The value is in everything around it, and our flat fee includes all of it.

• The revocable living trust itself, which can be changed or cancelled any time during your life.
• A pour-over will, a short backup will that catches anything you never moved into the trust and directs it there.
• A durable power of attorney, so someone you trust can step in if you cannot manage your own affairs.
• Your health-care documents, meaning a surrogate to make medical decisions, a living will, and a HIPAA release.
• One deed that moves your Florida home into the trust, plus guidance on retitling your accounts.

The last step has a name, “funding” the trust, and it is the step that quietly sinks bargain online trusts. A trust only avoids probate for the assets actually placed inside it. A beautiful document that never gets funded sends your family straight back to the courthouse, which is exactly what they were trying to avoid. For a row-by-row look at what the posted online prices actually include, see our LegalZoom living trust vs attorney comparison.

Trust, Will, or Deed: What Each Costs

People ask me how much a will and a trust should cost together, and the honest answer is that the trust plan already contains the will plan. The $3,200 buys the trust, a pour-over will, the durable power of attorney, the health-care documents, and one deed, so a family that buys the trust never pays for the will separately. The three prices below are the three ways to buy.

When a Trust Is Worth the Higher Price

A trust earns every dollar when your life has a little more to it than a single house and a simple family. Lean toward a trust when you own property in more than one state (a trust spares your family a second probate out of state), when you have young children or a loved one with special needs whose share should be managed rather than handed over, when you have a blended family and want to be precise about who receives what, when privacy matters to you, or when you want things to keep running smoothly if you ever lose capacity. In those situations the trust is the cheaper way to keep a hard moment from getting harder.

When You Might Not Need One

We will say this plainly, even though it is the cheaper answer for you. If you own one Florida home and want it to pass to adult children who get along, you may not need a trust at all. A lady bird deed on the home and beneficiary designations on your accounts can accomplish much of the same thing for a few hundred dollars. We would rather send you home with the $399 solution that fits than sell you a $3,200 plan you do not need. Not sure which fits? Try the deed selector →

What’s Included, and What’s Extra

The flat fee covers all the drafting, the advice, the funding deed for your home, and the guidance to retitle your accounts. The only additions are government costs we pass through at cost, with no markup, mainly the county recording fee and a small documentary stamp on the funding deed. We post the legal fee up front and honor it for 90 days. See the full price list →

Frequently Asked Questions

Common Situations

The snowbird with two homes. A couple owns a house in Ohio and a condo in Naples. Without a trust, their family would face probate in both states. A single living trust holds both, and the higher fee saves their children two court cases and a great deal of grief.

The simple estate that didn’t need a trust. A widow comes in expecting to spend $3,200, worried about probate on her one Tampa home. We set up a lady bird deed for $399 instead and send her on her way. The right answer was the cheaper one, and saying so is how we earn the next family’s trust.

The young family. Parents with two small children want to make sure that if anything happened to them, the kids’ inheritance would be managed until they are grown, not handed to an 18-year-old. A trust does exactly that, and the cost is small next to the peace of mind.

The second marriage. A remarried Sarasota man wanted his wife secure for the rest of her life and his children from his first marriage protected in what remained. A deed or a beneficiary form cannot hold both promises at once; whoever is named simply gets the asset. His trust provides for his wife while she lives, then passes the remainder to his children, with a successor trustee to keep it fair. For him, the higher fee was buying precision, not paperwork.

Sources of Law

• Florida revocable trusts are governed by the Florida Trust Code (Fla. Stat. ch. 736). Wills and probate are governed by Fla. Stat. ch. 732 and ch. 733. (retrieved 2026-06-07)
• Advertised fees are honored for 90 days from the posted date; government costs (recording, documentary stamp, certified copies) are additional and passed through at cost. Fees are not a prediction or guarantee of outcome.
• Who may decide that you need a trust, and who may draft and fund it: The Florida Bar v. American Senior Citizens Alliance, Inc., 689 So. 2d 255 (Fla. 1997) (nonlawyer living-trust sales enjoined as the unlicensed practice of law); Florida Bar re Advisory Opinion, Nonlawyer Preparation of Living Trusts, 613 So. 2d 426 (Fla. 1992) (assembly, drafting, execution and funding of a living trust is the practice of law; nonlawyers may gather information). Both read in full from the official opinion text (retrieved 2026-09-03).

What the Cheapest Living Trusts in Florida Actually Cost

I started as a prosecutor in Miami-Dade and tried 35 cases, 17 of them to a jury, before I ever drafted an estate plan. The price of a trust looked different to me after that, because I had watched what a document costs when it does not work, and the cost is never the fee.

In my practice, the question underneath the price is who decided that you needed a trust, and the Florida Supreme Court answered it in 1997 in a case I read in full. A company in Orlando, owned and run by people who were not lawyers, mailed offers of a free living will to older Floridians across the state. Anyone who called got a salesperson at the kitchen table, a rehearsed pitch built on the fear of probate, answers to specific legal questions, and a promise that a lawyer would draft the trust. The trust cost between $695 and $1,495, and at least half of it was paid at the table and deposited straight into the company’s operating account. In Orlando a paralegal filled in a 50-page form on which, in most files, two pages changed. Managers who were not lawyers decided which files to finish first, and the files that still owed money went first. A lawyer the customer never chose looked over the finished package at the end, and most customers never spoke or wrote to that lawyer at all. Customers who called with a legal question were routed to someone who was not one, and the few who got an appointment with a lawyer were cut off at 45 minutes by an employee announcing a next appointment that did not exist. Many of the trusts carried wrong information that was never corrected, and many were never funded, so they did nothing. The company handed the customers’ private financial details to an affiliated insurance seller for prospecting. In June 1994 the company filed for bankruptcy, the same summer the IRS filed a tax lien against it and the Attorney General sued it for consumer fraud, and in February 1997 the Court barred it and its two owners from the practice of law. The one fact that decided the case was that the salesperson at the table, and not a lawyer, had decided that each of those people needed a trust.

In reading that decision, I have a few take-home points.

The first is the decision itself. Florida law has said since 1992 that assembling, drafting, signing and funding a living trust is the practice of law, and that a lawyer has to decide whether you need one. What a nonlawyer may do is gather your information. Practice pointer. Ask who decided you needed a trust before you ask what it costs, because a price quoted before that decision is the price of a sale. At this firm the decision often comes out against the trust, and the person leaves with a $399 lady bird deed instead of a $3,200 plan, which is the cheaper answer stated on this page more than once.

Second, a trust that is never funded is a trust that never worked, and in that case the unfunded trusts were counted among the harms. The funding deed for your home is inside the $3,200 here, and so is the guidance to retitle the accounts, because the document alone is the cheap part. Practice pointer. A trust price that does not include a recorded deed moving your home into the trust is a price for a document, and the probate the trust was supposed to avoid is still ahead of your family.

Third, the 45 minutes. The customers in that case paid for legal advice and received a sales pitch, and the lawyer arrived last and briefly. Here the first conversation is with the lawyer who drafts the plan, it costs nothing, and the same lawyer signs off on the funded plan at the end. Avoid a trust sold at your kitchen table by someone who is not the lawyer drafting it, because in that case the sales pitch was the legal advice, the lawyer’s review came last and lasted minutes, and the company that took the money was bankrupt before the Court ruled. What those customers needed was the decision, made by a lawyer, before any money changed hands. Some of them needed no trust at all, and a lady bird deed at $399 does that job for one Florida home. The rest needed a funded trust, which is the $3,200 plan here, with the deed to the home inside it, for $1,705 more than the top of that company’s price list and with the part that makes it work included.

The opinion does not say how many of those customers ended up with a trust that worked, or what any one of them recovered, and I will not guess at either. What it does say is where the money went and who made the decisions, and that is enough to price a trust correctly.

Kevin D. Klagge, Esq., admitted in Florida since 2012. The case described above is a decision of the Florida Supreme Court rather than a matter handled by this firm. Past results do not guarantee a similar outcome.

Updated on September 3, 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. General information about Florida law and our posted fees, not legal advice, and no attorney-client relationship is created. The right plan depends on your specific facts, which we confirm at a free consult.