Florida Statute 736.0603: Can a Beneficiary See a Trust While the Settlor Is Alive?

What Section 736.0603 Says

A worried adult child asks some version of this question every week. Mom set up a trust, she named me in it, my brother is the trustee, and now nobody will show me anything. Am I entitled to see it? Can I make him tell me what is happening to her money?

The section that answers you is three sentences long. It sits in the Florida Trust Code right between the section on how a trust gets amended and the section on the deadline to contest one, and it is the shortest of the three.

Subsection (1) is the one that answers the question at the top of this page, and it answers it against the person asking. Subsection (2) covers a narrower situation, where someone holds a power to withdraw property from the trust and therefore stands in the settlor’s shoes for that much of it. Subsection (3) is newer than the rest of the section and almost nobody outside the trust bar noticed it arrive; it gets its own section further down.

Duties Owed Exclusively to the Settlor

Read subsection (1) slowly, because the whole thing turns on one word. Not primarily to the settlor. Not first to the settlor. Exclusively.

The settlor is the person who created the trust, which in the situation that brings most people here is a living parent. While that parent can still revoke the trust, they own everything in it in every practical sense. They can rewrite it tomorrow, take the house back out of it, fire the trustee, or tear the whole thing up. The Trust Code treats the trust as an extension of them, so the trustee’s reporting, its accounting, its duty to explain itself, all of it runs to that one person.

Two things follow, and families feel them very differently.

If you are the settlor, this is protection you probably never thought to ask for. Your trustee cannot be pressured into opening your books to your children, your children’s spouses, or anyone else who thinks they have a stake in what you leave behind. Your financial life stays yours. If you want a child to see the trust, you hand them a copy, and that decision stays with you.

If you are the adult child, the same rule lands hard. Being named in a trust does not make you the trustee’s client. It does not entitle you to the document, to statements, or to an explanation of a transfer that worries you. That can feel like a wall built specifically against you, especially when the sibling holding the papers is the one you already do not trust. It is worth knowing that a trustee who says no here is doing what the statute tells them to do, and that a lawyer advising that trustee would tell them the same thing.

What the rule does not do is decide whether something wrong is happening. It decides who has the right to ask right now. Those are different questions, and the difference is where the rest of this page lives.

What the Courts Have Held

Unlike some corners of the Trust Code, this section has real appellate law behind it. Three published Florida decisions do most of the work. All three are cases between other families, not matters handled by this firm, and all three are free to read in full at the links in the Sources block at the bottom of this page. We quote them because the courts said it better than a summary would.

Hilgendorf v. Estate of Coleman (Fla. 4th DCA 2016): the leading case

A beneficiary asked a successor trustee for an accounting covering the years while the settlor was alive and the trust was revocable. The Fourth District started by explaining that the statute did not invent this rule in 2007. It wrote down a rule Florida courts were already applying.

“Although not in effect on the date the trust was created, these provisions comport with section 736.0603(1), Florida Statutes (2007), which provides that ‘[w]hile a trust is revocable, the duties of the trustee are owed exclusively to the settlor.’ § 736.0603(1), Fla. Stat. This codified prior law, which held that a trustee owes duties to the settlor/beneficiary of a revocable trust and not to contingent beneficiaries.”

Hilgendorf v. Estate of Coleman, 201 So. 3d 1262, 1264 (Fla. 4th DCA 2016).

What that means for you is that this is not a technicality somebody slipped into a 2007 bill. Florida law has treated the settlor as the trustee’s only client during the revocable years for a long time, and the Legislature wrote the existing practice into the statute.

The court then connected this section to the one families actually care about, the accounting statute.

“In fact, section 736.0813, Florida Statutes (2012), which provides for the duty of the trustee to provide trust accountings to qualified beneficiaries, specifically does not apply while a trust is revocable: ‘As provided in s. 736.0603(1), the trustee’s duties under this section extend only to the settlor while a trust is revocable.’ Thus, a statutory duty to account to the qualified beneficiaries does not arise until a trust becomes irrevocable.”

Hilgendorf, 201 So. 3d at 1265.

What that means for you is that the accounting right and the revocable period do not overlap. The duty to account to qualified beneficiaries begins when the trust becomes irrevocable, and it does not reach backward on its own into the years the settlor controlled.

That last point is the one people find hardest to accept, because the instinct after a parent dies is to ask for the whole history. Here is how the court disposed of exactly that request.

“Here, Hilgendorf makes no claim that Smith, as successor trustee, violated any of the terms of the trust during Coleman’s lifetime. She merely claims a general right to an accounting of the trust while the trust was revocable. As neither the trust nor the statutes impose a duty of the trustee to render accountings to a contingent beneficiary while a trust remains revocable, we conclude that there is no authority to impose that duty retroactively after the settlor is deceased and the trust becomes irrevocable, absent any claim of breach of fiduciary duty in carrying out the terms of the trust.”

Hilgendorf, 201 So. 3d at 1265 to 1266.

Read the words the court chose there, because they mark the difference between two very different cases. A general right to see the revocable years is what failed. Notice what the sentence keeps open, which is a claim that the trustee violated the terms of the trust during the settlor’s lifetime. The same opinion quoted the earlier authority describing that lane.

“the beneficiary may sue for breach of a duty that the trustee owed to the settlor/beneficiary which was breached during the lifetime of the settlor and subsequently affects the interest of the vested beneficiary.”

Hilgendorf, 201 So. 3d at 1264, quoting Brundage v. Bank of America, 996 So. 2d 877, 882 (Fla. 4th DCA 2008).

What that means for you is that the door is not welded shut. It is narrow, and it opens on facts rather than on status. You get through it by identifying something specific the trustee did that broke a specific duty owed to your parent while your parent was alive, and by showing that it damaged the interest you now hold. That is a real claim with real proof behind it, not a request to see the books because you are finally a beneficiary. Whether your facts fit that description is exactly what a consult is for, and we will tell you plainly when they do not.

Capo v. Capo (Fla. 3d DCA 2025): the fresh authority

In October 2025 the Third District decided a Miami-Dade family case in which an excluded son and his two children had lost, after a six-day nonjury trial, claims that included a failure to furnish accountings for two revocable trusts. The opinion is a short per curiam, so the citation string is the ruling.

“After reviewing the record, analyzing the briefing of the parties, and conducting oral argument, we find no legal error. See § 736.0603(1), Fla. Stat. (2018); § 736.0813(4), Fla. Stat. (2018); Anderson v. Dimick, 77 So. 2d 867, 868 (Fla. 1955) (‘It is perfectly clear that the remainders are contingent and are not vested.’); Hilgendorf v. Est. of Coleman, 201 So. 3d 1262, 1264 (Fla. 4th DCA 2016) (explaining section 736.0603, Florida Statutes, ‘codified prior law, which held that a trustee owes duties to the settlor/beneficiary of a revocable trust and not to contingent beneficiaries.’). Likewise, we find the trial court’s factual findings are supported by competent, substantial evidence.”

Capo v. Capo, No. 3D24-0409 (Fla. 3d DCA Oct. 15, 2025), 423 So. 3d 493 (slip op. at 4).

What that means for you is two things, one about law and one about time. The Third District is a different appellate district than the Fourth, so this is no longer one district’s reading of the statute. And a family litigated this all the way through trial and oral argument in the 2020s and got the same answer the Fourth District gave in 2016. Be honest with yourself about that before spending years on the general version of the claim. As with any decision, this one turned on its own record, and it says nothing about what would happen with yours.

Swan v. Trost (Fla. 2d DCA 2012): when the parent is alive but incapacitated

This is the case that answers the hardest version of the question. A father was alive, under guardianship, and a relative served as trustee of his trust. His son, who was not a beneficiary of that trust, sued for the trust documents. A general magistrate looked at the documents privately and said no, and the Second District agreed with the reason.

“Matthias Trost sued Ms. Swan, as trustee, for declaratory relief. He sought the production of various Trust documents. After conducting an in-camera inspection, the general magistrate concluded that Mr. Trost was not entitled to discovery of these documents because the trustee owed duties to inform and account only to the settlor, Erich Trost. See § 736.0603(1), Fla. Stat. (2009) (‘While a trust is revocable, the duties of the trustee are owed exclusively to the settlor.’). Upon Erich Trost’s death, the trustee would owe a duty only to beneficiaries. Matthias Trost was not a Trust beneficiary.”

Swan v. Trost, 100 So. 3d 1205, 1206 to 1207 (Fla. 2d DCA 2012).

Then the part no other case supplies. The son argued that the guardianship gave him a way in, since a guardianship is a public court proceeding with a judge supervising it. The court quashed that portion of the order.

“However, section 744.441 did not allow the trial court to force the trustee to disclose Trust documents to Matthias Trost on the basis that he was next of kin. See § 736.0603(1), Fla. Stat. (2009). When the trial court issued the order on review, the ward was alive and Ms. Swan had no duty to Matthias Trost.”

Swan, 100 So. 3d at 1209 to 1210.

What that means for you is that incapacity does not move the line. Being next of kin does not move it either. While the settlor is alive and the trust is revocable, the trust stays closed to you, even when a court is already involved in your parent’s life. Two honest footnotes on that case. It came up as a certiorari review of a discovery order rather than a ruling on the merits, and it was decided under the 2009 statutes. And it drew a line that cuts both ways. The son got nothing from the trust, but the court left standing the part of the order reaching the guardianship reports and their attachments, because those come from the guardianship system rather than from the trust. That distinction is the practical map for a family in this position, and we come back to it below.

When the Duties Shift

Everything above describes one period, the years while the trust is revocable. That period ends, and when it ends your standing changes overnight. For an ordinary living trust the end point is the settlor’s death. Some trusts become irrevocable earlier by their own terms, which is a question to answer from the document rather than from a general rule.

Here is the turn, in the words of the general magistrate whose findings the Second District left standing in Swan.

“(2) Under Florida Law, the trustee’s duties to inform and account are owed exclusively to the settlor of the trust for as long as the trust is revocable.
(3) Once the Trust has become irrevocable, the trustee has 60 days to give notice of the existence of the Trust, and the right to request a copy of the Trust, to the qualified beneficiaries of the Trust.”

Swan, 100 So. 3d at 1206 to 1207 (findings of the general magistrate, recited in the opinion).

Those two sentences sit next to each other for a reason. The first is the door you have been pushing on. The second is the door opening. Once the trust is irrevocable, the qualified beneficiaries are entitled to be told the trust exists and that they may request a copy, and the accounting duty under section 736.0813 runs to them going forward.

So the practical advice for a family that has been told no for years is this. The answer changes, and when it changes you should move rather than settle back into waiting. Two reasons.

Records are easiest to get while they are fresh. Bank records, medical records, the drafting file, the identity of whoever was in the room when a document was signed. None of that improves with age, and some of it disappears.

The same envelope can start a clock against you. A trustee who sends you the trust instrument along with the notice the Trust Code describes may be starting a six-month period to challenge the trust’s validity, and most people who receive that packet have no idea a deadline is running. That is a separate section with its own annotation, Fla. Stat. 736.0604 and the deadline to contest a trust. If the packet has already arrived, treat the postmark as the date that matters and get it read now.

If what you are looking at is a trustee who will not account after the trust became irrevocable, fees that look wrong, or a distribution that never came, that is trust litigation territory rather than a section 736.0603 problem. Our Florida trust litigation page walks through how those disputes actually run.

The 2021 Change Most People Missed

For fourteen years this section had two subsections. In 2021 the Legislature added a third, by chapter 2021-183, and it says something that sounds startling the first time you read it. While a trust is revocable, the trustee may follow a direction from the settlor that is contrary to the terms of the trust. That direction power is expressly made subject to two other sections, sections 736.0403(2) and 736.0602(3)(a), so it is not unlimited.

If you are the settlor, this is the statute catching up to how people actually live. Your trust says the trustee shall do one thing; you are alive, you can revoke the whole document tomorrow, and this month you want something else. Subsection (3) means your trustee does not have to choose between following a document you can rewrite at will and following you. It reduces the friction of ordinary changes of mind while you are still in charge.

If you are watching a third-party trustee take instructions, read the limits closely. The subsection operates only while the trust is revocable, which means it stops at the same line everything else on this page stops at. And it is subject to the amendment-method rule in section 736.0602(3)(a), the subject of our companion annotation on revoking or amending a Florida trust. A direction is not an amendment. Telling a trustee to do something different this month is not the same as changing who inherits, and the rules for making that kind of change still live in section 736.0602 and still have to be followed the way the trust itself requires.

Here is the part that matters for a family with a bad feeling. Subsection (3) makes the trustee’s answer to “why did you do that, the trust does not say that” capable of being “because the settlor directed it.” Which moves the real question one step back, to whether the direction was genuinely your parent’s. Capacity and undue influence are not answered by this section at all, and they are not answered by the trustee either. If the concern is that someone is steering a parent’s decisions, or using a power of attorney to do it, start with power of attorney abuse in Florida and bring the timeline to a consult. Nothing on this page tells you what a court would conclude about your facts, and we will not pretend otherwise.

What This Means for You Right Now

The answer splits three ways depending on where you are standing.

If you are a beneficiary of a living parent’s revocable trust, start from the honest baseline. You generally cannot compel a copy of the trust, an accounting, a list of assets, or an explanation from the trustee, and pushing harder will not change that. What you can do is worth doing anyway.

• Ask your parent, not the trustee. The settlor can hand you the trust any day. A calm request to the person who actually holds the power is both the fastest route and the least damaging one.
• Write down what you are seeing, with dates. New names on accounts, a deed that was recorded, a sudden change in who drives your parent to appointments, a document signed during a hospital stay. Contemporaneous notes are far better evidence than a memory reconstructed two years later.
• Take capacity and pressure seriously as their own issue. Undue influence and diminished capacity are not trust-access questions, and they have their own routes, including the guardianship system. Swan shows the line. The trust stayed closed, while guardianship reports were a different matter. If a guardianship exists or should, see guardianship versus power of attorney.
• Know that the picture changes at death, and be ready to act in weeks rather than years when it does.

If you are the settlor, subsection (1) is on your side, and it is worth understanding rather than just benefiting from. Your trustee answers to you. Nobody in your family can force that person to open your affairs while you can still revoke the trust. Two practical thoughts follow. Choosing a trustee your children can live with matters more than most people plan for, because the day your duties shift to them is the day their relationship with that person begins. And if your trust has not been read in a decade, the free consult is a good place to find out whether it still says what you think it says. Flat fees for planning work are posted on our pricing page, and government costs such as recording fees are additional and passed through at cost.

If you are the trustee, your instructions run from one person while the trust is revocable, and subsection (3) now lets you follow that person’s direction even when it departs from the document. Two habits keep you out of trouble. Document the directions you receive, in writing, at the time, because the person who gave them will not be available to confirm them later. And put a reminder on the moment everything flips. When the trust becomes irrevocable your duties run to the qualified beneficiaries, notice is owed within 60 days, and the accounting obligation begins. Trustees who miss that turn create most of the disputes we see on the other side.

Nobody can tell you from a web page what your document says or what happened in your family. What we can do is read the trust, put the events in order, and give you a straight answer about where you stand and whether there is anything worth doing right now. The consult is a free 30 minutes and there is no charge for hearing an answer you did not want. Trust disputes are quoted after we have seen the documents, because the work depends on what actually happened. Book a free consult →

Frequently Asked Questions

Common Situations

“I only answer to your mother.” A daughter in Fort Lauderdale calls her brother, who became successor trustee when their mother’s dementia advanced. She asks for a copy of the trust and a list of the accounts. He tells her, correctly, that he answers to their mother and not to her. She hears a confession. What we would look at first is not the trust at all. It is whether a guardianship exists, what the guardianship file already contains, and whether there is a power of attorney in play, because that is where a person in her position has actual leverage while her mother is alive. We would also ask her to start a dated log that night. If a claim ever gets brought, it will be built on specific events with specific dates, not on how the phone call felt.

The week the door opened. A son spends three years being told nothing about his father’s trust, and by the time his father dies he has stopped asking. Four months later he mentions it to a friend, who tells him the rules changed the day his father died. By then the successor trustee has sent a packet, sold a rental property, and made a partial distribution to herself. Two clocks are now relevant, and one of them may be close to running out. The family that moves in the first weeks after a death has options the family that waits a year sometimes does not, which is the practical reason we tell people to come in early even when they are not sure they want a fight.

The direction nobody wrote down. A widow’s longtime friend serves as trustee of her revocable trust and starts making monthly transfers to a home health company the trust never mentions. Her children see the statements after she dies and assume the worst. The trustee says the widow directed every payment, which since 2021 the statute permits while the trust is revocable. Whether that answer holds up depends on proof, meaning what was written down, what the widow’s capacity looked like at the time, and whether anyone else was steering her. This is the situation subsection (3) makes possible and the situation good trustees protect themselves from by documenting directions when they receive them.

Sources of Law

• Fla. Stat. §736.0603 (settlor’s powers; powers of withdrawal: while a trust is revocable the trustee’s duties are owed exclusively to the settlor; the holder of a power of withdrawal has a settlor’s rights to the extent of the property subject to the power; and, subject to ss. 736.0403(2) and 736.0602(3)(a), the trustee may follow a settlor’s direction contrary to the terms of the trust while the trust is revocable). Official text, Online Sunshine. History: s. 6, ch. 2006-217; s. 6, ch. 2021-183 (which added subsection (3)). (retrieved 2026-08-12)
• Hilgendorf v. Estate of Coleman, 201 So. 3d 1262 (Fla. 4th DCA 2016) (No. 4D15-4870). Quoted above at 1264, 1265, and 1265 to 1266. Full opinion: CourtListener. The official Fourth District slip PDF was not publicly retrievable when this page was prepared; the “codified prior law” sentence quoted above is independently reproduced word for word inside the official Third District slip opinion in Capo, below. The passage quoting Brundage v. Bank of America, 996 So. 2d 877, 882 (Fla. 4th DCA 2008), appears at 1264. (retrieved 2026-08-12)
• Capo v. Capo, No. 3D24-0409 (Fla. 3d DCA Oct. 15, 2025), 423 So. 3d 493, affirming Miami-Dade County Circuit Court No. 21-3338-CP-02. Quoted above from the official Third District slip opinion PDF at page 4; CourtListener mirror. A per curiam affirmance with no separate reasoning beyond the citation string, carrying the standard legend that it is not final until disposition of any timely filed motion for rehearing as of its filing date. Authorities cited within the quoted passage: Anderson v. Dimick, 77 So. 2d 867, 868 (Fla. 1955); Fla. Stat. §736.0813(4). (retrieved 2026-08-12)
• Swan v. Trost (In re Guardianship of Erich Josef Trost), 100 So. 3d 1205 (Fla. 2d DCA 2012) (No. 2D11-5826, Lee County). Quoted above at 1206 to 1207 and 1209 to 1210. Official Second District slip opinion PDF, served by the Internet Archive; CourtListener. Certiorari review of a discovery order rather than a merits ruling, decided under the 2009 statutes; the court quashed the order except as to the guardianship reports and their attachments. Fla. Stat. §744.441 is the guardianship provision discussed in the quoted passage. (retrieved 2026-08-12)
• Related sections: Fla. Stat. §736.0813 (the trustee’s duty to inform and account to qualified beneficiaries, which by its own terms extends only to the settlor while a trust is revocable); §736.0604 (limitation on an action contesting the validity of a trust that was revocable at the settlor’s death); §736.0602 and §736.0403 (the two sections subsection (3) is expressly made subject to). (retrieved 2026-08-12)
• Quotation note: the passages above reproduce the courts’ own published words and the Legislature’s own statutory text. Court opinions and statutes are public records, and nothing here is drawn from a commercial research service.
• The decisions on this page are published opinions in other parties’ cases, not matters handled by this firm. Court outcomes depend on the specific documents and facts of each case, and nothing here predicts a result.

Updated on August 12, 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 published court decisions, not legal advice, and no attorney-client relationship is created. How section 736.0603 applies to your family depends on your specific documents and facts, which we review at a free consult. Please do not send confidential details until we have connected.