What Section 736.0604 Says
Most of the Florida Trust Code is long. This section is not. It is a single sentence that bars an action contesting the validity of a trust that was revocable at the settlor’s death, unless the action is commenced within the earlier of two periods.
Fla. Stat. §736.0604, in full
736.0604 Limitation on action contesting validity of revocable trust. An action to contest the validity of a trust that was revocable at the settlor’s death is barred, if not commenced within the earlier of:
- The time as provided in chapter 95; or
- Six months after the trustee sent the person a copy of the trust instrument and a notice informing the person of the trust’s existence, of the trustee’s name and address, and of the time allowed for commencing a proceeding.
That is the entire section, quoted as it appears in the official Florida Statutes at Online Sunshine, §736.0604 (retrieved August 12, 2026). Added by ch. 2006-217, effective July 1, 2007.
Two things about that sentence do the work. It applies only to a trust that was revocable when the settlor died, which is the ordinary living trust most Florida families use. And it uses the word earlier, not later, so the shorter of the two periods is the one that ends your right to sue. Everything else on this page is about which of those two clocks is actually running in your situation.
The Two Clocks, and Which One Runs
Think of it as a default clock and a clock the trustee can start on purpose.
The default clock is chapter 95, Florida’s general limitations law. It runs whether or not anybody sends you anything, and it starts when there is a claim to bring, which for a revocable trust means when the trust becomes irrevocable, usually at the settlor’s death. How long that period is for a trust contest is the genuinely unsettled part, and the next section is where that gets interesting.
The six-month clock does not start on its own. Under the statute it begins only when the trustee sends the person a copy of the trust instrument together with a notice covering three specific points, namely that the trust exists, the trustee’s name and address, and the time allowed for commencing a proceeding. All of it, together. A note announcing that mom died and that a sibling is now the trustee, with nothing attached, is not what the statute describes.
Notice also what the statute measures from. It runs from when the trustee sent the packet, not from the day you opened it or the day you understood what it meant. That single word is why the postmark and the cover letter matter more than anyone expects, and why the first thing we ask for is the envelope.
One more boundary is worth keeping straight. This section covers actions contesting the validity of the trust. Complaints about how the trustee has behaved since, such as a missing accounting, a distribution that never came, or self-dealing, are different claims that run on their own separate clocks. Those are mapped on our Florida trust litigation page.
What the Courts Have Said (and Have Not)
Here is the part that surprises even lawyers. A statute that can end a family’s case in six months has almost no case law behind it. In a 2025 order out of the Seventh Judicial Circuit in St. Johns County, the court said so directly, in a footnote.
“There appear to be no Florida cases directly addressing section 736.0604; nevertheless, Florida courts have routinely held: 'Although we have found no Florida cases directly on point, cases from other jurisdictions are persuasive.'”
Lunding v. Fantini, No. CA21-0840 (Fla. 7th Cir. Ct., St. Johns Cty. Aug. 19, 2025), 2025 Fla. Cir. LEXIS 3936 (observation appears in a footnote to the order).
That order is the most useful document in existence on this section. It granted summary judgment against a trust contest brought thirteen years after the settlor died, and along the way the court had to build the analysis from scratch. Its reasoning, in the court’s own words, went in four steps.
First, when a contest can even be brought.
“Florida law is clear that a party cannot bring an action to contest the validity of a trust until it becomes irrevocable per its terms or by the grantor's death. See § 736.0207, Fla. Stat. (2021).”
Lunding, 2025 Fla. Cir. LEXIS 3936, at [*23] to [*25].
Second, what “validity” actually covers. This matters because the six-month bar and the chapter 95 branch both apply to validity contests and nothing else.
“Whether a document is 'valid' relates to whether it is 'legally sufficient' or 'binding.' VALID, Black's Law Dictionary (11th ed. 2019). As with contracts, a challenge to a trust instrument's validity includes-but is certainly not limited to-fraud, fraud in its execution, undue influence, lack of testamentary capacity, and improper execution; in other words, anything that could and should undermine its enforceability. See § 736.0406, Fla. Stat.; In re Tobias' Estate, 192 So. 2d 83, 86 (Fla. 2d DCA 1966).”
Lunding, 2025 Fla. Cir. LEXIS 3936, at [*23] to [*25].
Third, how long the chapter 95 branch gives you. With no section of chapter 95 written for trust contests, the court routed the question to the catch-all period.
“Thus, questions of proper execution are questions of validity. Therefore, after a grantor's death, the statute of limitations ('SOL') to contest the validity of a trust due to improper execution is four years. See § 95.11(3)(p), Fla. Stat. (2021) (mandating that any action not otherwise provided for in section 95.11 is held to a four-year statute of limitations); § 736.0604(1) and (2), Fla. Stat. (2021). Thus, even if a party raises a colorable trust contest, it is wholly barred after the passing of four (4) years from the time of the settlor's death.”
Lunding, 2025 Fla. Cir. LEXIS 3936, at [*23] to [*25].
Fourth, why Florida courts lean toward closing these windows. The policy the court invoked is old and it cuts against the family that waits.
“Florida has a longstanding public policy 'that estates of decedents be speedily and finally determined.' In re Brown's Estate, 117 So. 2d 478, 480 (Fla. 1960).”
Lunding, 2025 Fla. Cir. LEXIS 3936, at [*23] to [*25].
Applied to the case in front of it, where the challenge arrived more than a decade after the death, the court wrote this.
“The SOL on Count II ..., which plainly challenges the validity of the Restatement, began to run when the Robert Trust became irrevocable upon Robert's death ... Even though the delayed discovery doctrine does not apply this is even outside the twelve-year statute of repose for fraud. See § 95.031(2)(a), Fla. Stat. (2003).”
Lunding, 2025 Fla. Cir. LEXIS 3936, at [*23] to [*25].
Having no Florida authority to work with, the court went looking out of state and landed on Kansas, whose statute is built the same way.
“[Ast v. Mesker] is persuasive, as it examines Kansas' similar SOL. 480 P.3d 795 (Kan. Ct. App. 2020). Compare Kan. Stat. § 58a-604 with § 736.0604(1) and (2), Fla. Stat. (2021).”
Lunding, 2025 Fla. Cir. LEXIS 3936, at [*23] to [*25].
Now the honest caveat, and it is a real one. Lunding is an order from a circuit court, which is a trial court. It is persuasive reading, not binding precedent, and no other Florida judge is required to follow it. A district court of appeal that takes up the chapter 95 branch could read it differently and land on a different period. The six-month branch was not the issue in that case, so the order tells you little about how a court would treat a trustee’s notice that actually went out. And this is a decision in another family’s case, not one of ours. It illustrates how the analysis has been done once; it predicts nothing about your facts.
Outside Florida, exactly one appellate court has applied this section. In Newcomer v. Roan, 2016-Ohio-541, 56 N.E.3d 408, an Ohio appellate court in Williams County decided a case involving a Florida trust in February 2016, and one of the assignments of error was that the lower court had failed to apply the six-month limitation set out in section 736.0604. That is where the appellate map ends, with an out-of-state court applying Florida law, which no Florida court has to follow either.
So the practical picture is this. The six-month branch is clear enough on its face and gets used every week by trustees. The chapter 95 branch, the one that governs when no notice was ever sent, has been construed in writing exactly once, by a trial judge, in 2025. If you are relying on a long runway, you are relying on an open question.
Not sure whether your clock has already run?
Bring the trust, the trustee’s letter, and the envelope. In 30 minutes we will tell you what we see on the calendar and whether there is still a case to bring.
Book your free consultWhy the Notice Matters So Much
Everything above collapses into one practical question. Did a compliant packet go out, and when.
If you are the trustee, that packet is the one lever the statute hands you. Without it, your exposure to a validity challenge sits open on the chapter 95 clock, and as the last section showed, nobody can tell you with confidence how long that clock is. Send what the statute describes, and six months later the window closes. That is why careful trustees send it early, send the whole trust instrument rather than a summary, include all three notice items, and keep proof of the date it went out. A trustee who does this is not being aggressive. They are doing the thing that lets a family move on.
If you are a beneficiary or an heir, the same envelope is the one nobody warns you about. It arrives in the weeks after a funeral, in a stack of mail nobody wants to open, and it looks like paperwork. Inside is a document telling you how long you have to challenge the trust, and the day it was mailed may be the day your clock started. Six months sounds generous until you count what has to happen inside it, which means reading a trust you have never seen, gathering medical records, finding the drafting file, finding out who was in the room when it was signed, and getting a lawyer up to speed.
What the statute asks the trustee to send is short enough to check against your own mail.
- A copy of the trust instrument, not a summary and not selected pages.
- Notice that the trust exists.
- The trustee’s name and address.
- The time allowed for commencing a proceeding.
Keep the envelope with the postmark, keep the cover letter, and write down the date it arrived. If what came to you was missing a piece, that is a fact worth preserving rather than arguing about from memory a year later. A related question, how a trust was amended and whether the settlor followed the method the trust itself required, is the subject of the companion annotation on Fla. Stat. 736.0602.
If You Think You Have Been Timed Out
Plenty of people arrive at this page convinced they are too late. Sometimes they are, and we will say so plainly rather than take a case that cannot be brought. Often the picture is less settled than it looks, because three specific facts decide it and most people have only guessed at two of them.
When the trust became irrevocable. For an ordinary living trust that is the settlor’s death, and that date anchors the chapter 95 branch. If the trust had already become irrevocable during life by its own terms, the analysis shifts.
Whether a compliant notice was ever sent, and when. This is the fact that most often turns out differently than the family assumed. Sometimes nothing was sent at all. Sometimes a letter went out that did not carry what the statute describes. Sometimes it went to the wrong address. The mailing date, not the reading date, is what the statute measures.
What else may still be on the table. A validity contest is one claim, and it is the one this section closes. Claims about the trustee’s conduct since the death, such as a demand for an accounting, a challenge to fees or self-dealing, or a petition to remove a trustee, are governed by other rules and other deadlines. So are claims that live on the probate side of the family’s estate, which we cover on our Florida probate litigation page. Losing one door does not always mean losing the room.
Nobody can tell you from a web page whether your deadline has run. What we can do is read the trust, read what the trustee sent, put the dates in order, and give you a straight answer about where you stand. The consult is a free 30 minutes and there is no charge for hearing that answer. Planning fees are posted on our pricing page; a trust dispute is quoted after we have seen the documents, because the work depends on what actually happened. If timing is tight, say so when you book and we will get you in sooner. Book a free consult →
Frequently Asked Questions
How Long Do I Have to Contest a Trust in Florida?
For a trust that was revocable when the settlor died, section 736.0604 gives you the earlier of two periods, either the time provided in chapter 95, or six months after the trustee sends you a copy of the trust instrument along with a notice of the trust’s existence, the trustee’s name and address, and the time allowed for commencing a proceeding. If that mailing never happened, the chapter 95 branch is the one in play. A 2025 circuit court order read that branch as four years from the settlor’s death, but no Florida appellate court has decided the question, so treat the calendar as urgent rather than settled and get the documents reviewed.
Does the Six-Month Clock Always Apply?
No. The statute conditions the six-month period on the trustee having sent both a copy of the trust instrument and a notice with the specific contents the statute lists. A short letter announcing that a parent died and that someone is now the trustee, with no trust attached and none of the required contents, does not fit what the statute describes. Whether a particular mailing did what the statute requires is exactly the kind of question that gets fought over, so keep the envelope, the cover letter, and anything showing the date it was sent.
What Notice Does a Trustee Have to Send?
Under the section, the trustee sends the person a copy of the trust instrument and a notice that tells them three things, namely that the trust exists, the trustee’s name and address, and the time allowed for commencing a proceeding. That last item is the part people miss. The statute contemplates that the notice itself tells you how long you have. If you received a packet from a trustee and cannot find those three items in it, bring the whole packet to the consult rather than deciding on your own whether it counted.
What if I Never Received Anything From the Trustee?
Then the six-month branch of the statute has no starting point as to you, and the chapter 95 branch is what governs. That does not mean you have unlimited time. The general limitations law still runs from the date the trust became irrevocable, which for a revocable trust is usually the settlor’s death. One wrinkle matters. The statute measures the six months from when the trustee sent the packet, not from when you opened it, so mailing records can decide the question even when your memory is clear.
Is There a Deadline if the Trust Was Never Revocable?
Section 736.0604 is written for a trust that was revocable at the settlor’s death, so a trust that was irrevocable from the day it was signed sits outside this particular section and a different limitations analysis applies. There is also a timing gate on the front end. As the court put it in the 2025 order discussed above, a party cannot bring an action to contest the validity of a trust until it becomes irrevocable by its terms or by the grantor’s death. Bring the actual document to the consult, because the answer turns on what the instrument says.
Can a Trustee Shorten My Deadline by Sending a Letter?
In effect, yes, and that is what the statute is designed to let a trustee do, but only by sending what the statute requires. A compliant packet can close the window six months later even if the chapter 95 period would have run longer. It works one direction only. Because the statute uses the earlier of the two periods, a trustee cannot buy extra time by sending the notice late, and a bare letter with no copy of the trust does not do the job the statute describes.
Common Situations
The envelope nobody opened. A daughter in Jacksonville loses her father in the spring. Four weeks after the funeral a thick packet arrives from her stepbrother, who is the successor trustee. It goes into the pile on the counter with the insurance forms and the utility notices. In the fall she starts asking why the trust reads so differently than what her father described, and by then she is five months past the postmark. The first thing we look for is not the merits. It is the mailing date and whether the packet carried everything the statute describes, because on these facts the calendar can decide the case before anyone reaches the evidence.
The trustee who sent nothing for three years. A son learns almost by accident that his stepmother has been administering his father’s trust for three years and has never sent him a copy of it. He assumes he is far too late. He may not be, because the six-month period in the statute is tied to a mailing that never happened, which leaves the chapter 95 branch as the clock in play, and how long that branch runs is the open question the 2025 order addressed without settling. What we can do is establish what was sent and when, put the dates in order, and tell him honestly what the risk looks like from there.
The trustee who wanted the door closed. A successor trustee in Sarasota has a half-sibling who keeps hinting that the last amendment was not really their mother’s idea. She wants to distribute, and she does not want a lawsuit two years from now over money that is already gone. Sending the statutory packet is the one step the Trust Code gives her to convert an open-ended exposure into a defined six months. We tell her exactly what goes in the envelope, how to document the send date, and what she should not distribute until the window closes.
Sources of Law
- Fla. Stat. §736.0604 (an action contesting the validity of a trust that was revocable at the settlor’s death is barred if not commenced within the earlier of the time provided in chapter 95, or six months after the trustee sent the person a copy of the trust instrument and a notice of the trust’s existence, the trustee’s name and address, and the time allowed for commencing a proceeding). Added by s. 6, ch. 2006-217, effective July 1, 2007. (retrieved 2026-08-12)
- Lunding v. Fantini, No. CA21-0840 (Fla. 7th Cir. Ct., St. Johns Cty. Aug. 19, 2025), 2025 Fla. Cir. LEXIS 3936 (order granting summary judgment; quoted passages appear in the order at [*23] to [*25], and the observation about the absence of Florida cases appears in a footnote). A circuit court order is a trial-level ruling. It is persuasive only, it is not binding precedent, and a district court of appeal could construe the chapter 95 branch differently. (retrieved 2026-08-12)
- Newcomer v. Roan, 2016-Ohio-541, 56 N.E.3d 408 (Ohio Ct. App., Williams Cty., Feb. 12, 2016) (Ohio appellate court addressing Fla. Stat. §736.0604 as to a Florida trust; the only appellate decision anywhere applying the section, and not binding on a Florida court). (retrieved 2026-08-12)
- Fla. Stat. §736.0207 (contest of a revocable trust; a contest is not brought until the trust becomes irrevocable by its terms or at the settlor’s death); §736.0813 (trustee’s duty to inform and account, including the mechanics of a limitation notice). (retrieved 2026-08-12)
- Fla. Stat. §95.11 (general limitations periods, including the four-year catch-all at §95.11(3)(p) and the accounting-related period at §95.11(6) relied on in the order); §95.031 (statutes of repose, including the twelve-year fraud repose at §95.031(2)(a)). (retrieved 2026-08-12)
- Corya v. Sanders, 155 So. 3d 1279, 1285 (Fla. 4th DCA 2015) (limitations in the trust accounting context under §95.11(6); note that the opinion expressly declined to address §736.1008, and the Legislature later added clarifying language to §736.1008(3) in ch. 2018-35, stating that the change was remedial and applied retroactively). Authorities cited within the quoted passages: In re Tobias’ Estate, 192 So. 2d 83, 86 (Fla. 2d DCA 1966); In re Brown’s Estate, 117 So. 2d 478, 480 (Fla. 1960); Ast v. Mesker, 480 P.3d 795 (Kan. Ct. App. 2020). (retrieved 2026-08-12)
- The decisions described on this page are court rulings in other people’s cases, not matters handled by this firm, and they are not a prediction of any result. Limitations questions turn on the specific dates and documents in your situation, which we confirm at the consult.
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, not legal advice, and no attorney-client relationship is created. Whether a deadline has run in your situation depends on your specific facts, which we confirm at a free consult. Please do not send confidential details until we have connected.