The section
This chapter may be cited as the “Florida Trust Code” and for purposes of this chapter is referred to as the “code.”
Section 736.0101, Florida Statutes. Enacted in 2006 and never amended.
It does two things rather than one. It supplies the name, which is how the chapter is cited everywhere else, and it supplies the internal shorthand, which is why hundreds of sentences in this chapter begin this code rather than this chapter.
Note where the quotation marks fall. The chapter may be cited as the Florida Trust Code, with the word the outside the quoted name.
The date that matters more than the name
The Code was enacted by chapter 2006-217, Laws of Florida, and took effect on July 1, 2007. It replaced former chapter 737.
That date is load bearing in a way the short title is not. A decision issued before July 1, 2007 cannot be construing a section of this chapter, because the chapter did not exist. It is the single most useful filter in Florida trust research, and it disposes of a surprising proportion of what a search for a chapter 736 section number returns. Two of the seven documents returned by a search for this section number are from 1915 and 1985.
Former chapter 737 has not vanished from the law. Several provisions of the current Code refer back to it, and a trust created under the old chapter can still raise questions that turn on it. Section 736.0102(3) is one example, protecting a trust governed at its creation by this chapter or former chapter 737 from being reclassified later.
Why a section with no content gets cited at all
Three decisions cite this section, and between them they show its only two uses.
As the anchor for a citation to the whole chapter. A federal court in Florida recorded that a plaintiff sought relief under the Florida Trust Code, Fla. Stat. § 736.0101 et seq. That is the section’s workaday function. You cite the first section and add et seq. when you mean the lot.
To say what the chapter is before discussing it. The Second District did that in a 2018 prohibition case, in a footnote.
Chapter 736, Florida Statutes, is the Florida Trust Code. § 736.0101.
Baden v. Baden, 260 So. 3d 1108 (Fla. 2d DCA 2018), footnote 2.
Nine words, and it is the model. That case is worth reading for other reasons; our page on section 736.0201 covers what it decided about how a trust proceeding has to be started.
A footnote worth noting, carefully
The third citation is from a 2023 Second District appeal about whether a settlor validly amended his trust. Here is its footnote 2.
Per section 736.0101, chapter 36 of the Florida Statutes is referred to as the “Florida Trust Code” or the “code.”
Grassfield v. Grassfield, No. 2D22-600 (Fla. 2d DCA Dec. 13, 2023), footnote 2, as reproduced in the sources described below.
Chapter 36 is not the Florida Trust Code. Chapter 736 is, which is what the footnote is citing.
We want to be careful about how far we take that, because asserting that a court made a typographical error is not something to do from a single database record. So here is exactly what we checked. Two independent full text reproductions of the opinion both read chapter 36, word for word. One was taken from the court’s own opinion feed, and one was republished and separately edited by a commercial publisher. Neither is an extract. We were not able to inspect the court’s own PDF, because the district’s opinion archive was returning a server error when we looked.
On that basis we report what the reproductions say and leave it there. The decision itself is sound and we rely on it elsewhere. It is the only Florida authority on section 736.0104, and it holds that a beneficiary’s knowledge of an amendment is not the delivery the trust instrument required.
There is a smaller point in the same sentence. The statute says the chapter may be cited as the Florida Trust Code, and that it is referred to as the code. Those are different things, and the footnote runs them together.
Getting to the right chapter
The practical reason to know the name is that Florida splits this material across several chapters, and people search the wrong one.
Chapter 736 is trusts. Chapter 733 is probate administration, with definitions in chapter 731. Chapter 518 holds the investment rules that section 736.0901 imports. Chapter 48 governs service of process, which section 736.02025 points to.
If you are reading about a trustee’s duty and finding nothing in chapter 736, that is often because the answer was never in chapter 736 to begin with.