Florida Probate Cost Calculator

How Much Does Probate Cost in Florida?

The question I get most about this is, “How much does probate cost in Florida?” On the $500,000 estate the calculator opens with, Florida law presumes $15,000 for the attorney and $15,000 for the personal representative, and the court charges about $400 to open the file, so the statutory answer is a little over $30,000 before publication and certified copies. The real answer is lower for most families, for two reasons. The personal representative is usually a child or a spouse who waives the commission, which removes half of that figure on the spot. The attorney fee is a presumption and a starting point, so a written flat fee agreed before the petition is filed replaces it, and a routine formal administration here is a flat fee from $3,500, with summary administration from $2,500. Government costs are additional and passed through at cost.

People ask me whether the fee has to come out of their own pocket while the estate is tied up, and the honest answer is that Florida law makes the attorney fee payable from the estate’s assets, so in a formal administration it is ordinarily paid from the estate account before the beneficiaries are paid rather than by the family up front. The exception is the small estate with nothing liquid in it, which is the estate where the fee has to be settled in writing at the start, and the case at the bottom of this page shows why.

Florida Statute 733.6171: The Attorney Fee Schedule

Unlike most states, Florida puts a number on it. For ordinary services, Florida law lists an attorney fee that is presumed reasonable, scaled to the size of the probate estate. A separate personal-representative commission follows the same idea (the full schedule, and whether to take or waive it, is in our personal representative fees guide). Both are presumed reasonable (a ceiling the court will accept without question) but not mandatory. The people involved can agree to less, and a flat-fee firm usually does.

The Florida Attorney-Fee Schedule

Extraordinary services (a will contest, selling real estate, tax matters, running a business, ancillary administration) are billed in addition under a separate provision of Florida law.

What Else Adds to the Cost

• Court filing fee. $400 or $401 in Florida's 10 largest counties. We verified every posted schedule in our probate cost by county study.
• Newspaper publication of the notice to creditors, typically $75 to $250 depending on the county's legal-notice paper (details in the county study).
• Certified copies, bond, accountant or appraiser where required.
• Ancillary probate for out-of-state real property, a separate proceeding with its own fees.

Which Kind of Probate Applies?

Not every estate needs full formal administration.

• Disposition without administration. Tiny estates with only exempt property and final-expense reimbursement.
• Summary administration. Estates of $150,000 or less (raised from $75,000 on July 1, 2026), or when the decedent died more than 2 years ago. Faster and cheaper.
• Formal administration. Everything else; a personal representative is appointed and the statutory fees apply.

The calculator flags which path your numbers suggest, but the facts control, and we confirm it at a consult. For a sharper answer, run the 3-question summary administration qualifier.

Frequently Asked Questions

Common Situations

The out-of-state heir. A son in Ohio inherits his mother’s $400,000 Miami condo and a bank account. He searches “how much does probate cost in Florida,” lands here, and sees roughly $24,000 in combined statutory fees (about $12,000 attorney plus $12,000 personal-representative commission) plus costs, then learns a lady bird deed would have avoided all of it. We handle the formal administration wherever you are and quote a flat fee below the statutory number.

The two-years-later estate. A widow never probated her husband’s estate; he died three years ago. Because it’s been more than two years, summary administration is available, meaning weeks instead of many months, and a fraction of the cost.

Sources of Law

• Fla. Stat. §733.6171: attorney fees for the personal representative (ordinary & extraordinary). flsenate.gov (retrieved 2026-06-05)
• Fla. Stat. §733.617: personal-representative commission. flsenate.gov (retrieved 2026-06-05)
• Fla. Stat. §733.702: limitations on creditor claims (the 3-month window). Ch. 735: summary administration & disposition without administration.
• Fee review: Fla. Stat. §733.6171(1) (fee payable from estate assets), (5) (court may increase or decrease the ordinary fee on petition of any interested person); §733.6175 (review of compensation; burden of proof on the personal representative and the person employed; refunds of excessive compensation). Cases, each read in full from the official opinion text (retrieved 2026-09-03): Faulkner v. Woodruff, 159 So. 3d 319 (Fla. 2d DCA 2015) (a personal representative may petition to review his own attorneys’ fees; the attorneys bear the burden; fees paid from a homestead sale remain reviewable); Kushner v. Engelberg, Cantor & Leone, P.A., 750 So. 2d 33 (Fla. 4th DCA 1999) (the statutory percentage is presumed reasonable, not compelled, where the parties contracted for less; fee set on the totality of the circumstances); Simmons v. Estate of Baranowitz, 189 So. 3d 819 (Fla. 4th DCA 2015) (a refund order against counsel individually requires formal notice).

What the Florida Fee Cases Show About Probate Cost

I have spent 14 years in Florida probate and trust courtrooms, and the same three cost mistakes keep arriving. A family pays the schedule as if it were the bill, a fee comes out of the house before anyone has approved it, and nobody asks the court to look at the number.

I have come across a case where all three happened to one man. He was the personal representative of his mother’s estate, and one of her beneficiaries, and in December 2008 he hired a law firm to handle what turned out to be an uncontested formal administration. A second firm was brought in a month later under an informal co-counsel arrangement between the two. The estate consisted of $4,594.02 in personal property and a house, which sold for $150,000. The two firms charged $39,869.24 for the work. They had filed a notice of lien against the house for their fees, so when it sold, the balance of the fees came out of the proceeds at the closing. In May 2010 he asked the probate court to review whether those fees were reasonable. The court dismissed his petition, because it read the statute to require him to name himself as a respondent in his own case, and it wondered aloud whether the Florida Bar or a separate civil suit was the right place for the question anyway. The firms objected to the review at every step for almost five years. By the time the appeals court took the case up in March 2015, the fee fight had added about 890 pages to the court file, against 127 pages for the entire administration of the estate. The appeals court reversed. A personal representative may ask the probate court to review the fees of the lawyers he hired, the lawyers carry the burden of proving their fee reasonable, the probate court is the only court that decides it, and paying the fee out of the house sale does not take it out of the court’s reach. The opinion’s own footnote supplies the number the schedule would have produced (for an estate with a compensable value of $40,000 or less, the presumed fee is $1,500), and the case went back for the hearing that should have been held in 2010.

In reading that opinion and the two beside it, I have a few take-home points.

The first is the burden. Florida law puts the burden of proving a probate fee reasonable on the lawyer who charged it, and it lets any interested person, including the personal representative who signed the engagement letter, petition the probate court to review the fee. Practice pointer. Get the fee in writing before the petition for administration is filed, and set it against the number the calculator shows for the estate, because a fee the lawyer cannot explain against that number is the fee a court reduces, and the writing is what the court reads first.

Second, the schedule is a presumption, and a court sets the fee on the whole of the circumstances. In another case I have reviewed, a firm handled an estate worth more than $8,000,000, where the schedule would have produced a fee above $240,000, and it had agreed to $180,000 in writing. After the estate fired the firm for cause, the court looked at the hours actually worked, found that the 1,671 hours the firm claimed had no support in the record, and sent the fee back to be set on the work that was actually done. Practice pointer. The statutory percentage is where a negotiation starts. In my practice a routine formal administration is a flat fee from $3,500, and on the $500,000 estate the calculator opens with, the schedule figure is $15,000, so the difference is the negotiation.

Third, the review has its own procedure, and the procedure decides whether the money comes back. In a third case I have reviewed, a court found a personal representative’s lawyer had been paid too much and ordered a refund, and the order was reversed because the lawyer had never been served with formal notice as an individual. Practice pointer. A petition to review compensation that seeks money back from a lawyer personally is served by formal notice under the probate rules, and a family that objects in the accounting alone has not reached the lawyer’s pocket.

Avoid a fee that is paid out of the house before the court has seen it, because in the case above the money left with the sale proceeds in a matter the statute would have priced at $1,500, and it took five years of litigation to get the question in front of a judge. A written flat fee agreed before the first filing would have priced that administration at $3,500 here, against the $39,869.24 those two firms charged, and the family would have known the number before the house was listed instead of learning it from a lien.

The appeals court decided only that the hearing had to be held, so the opinion does not say what the fee was finally set at, and it did not decide whether the lien on the house was proper in the first place. What it does settle is that the schedule on this page is a number the lawyer has to justify rather than a number the family has to pay.

Kevin D. Klagge, Esq., admitted in Florida since 2012. Each case described above is a decision of a Florida 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. This calculator is general information based on Florida statutes, not legal advice, and produces an estimate only; your actual costs depend on the facts and the court. Statutory fees under §733.6171 are presumed reasonable, not mandatory.