Florida Statute 736.1008: The Six Month Clock on a Trust Accounting

What Section 736.1008 Says

Something arrived from the trustee. Maybe it is forty pages of columns you cannot read, maybe it is one page that says the trust is fine. Somewhere in it, usually near the end, sits a paragraph telling you that you may have six months to do something. Nobody explains that paragraph, and most people put the packet down.

That paragraph is section 736.1008 at work. The section is long, and it does several jobs at once, but the piece that decides most cases is a single sentence.

Read the three passages together and the architecture shows itself. Subsection (2) is the trap. The definitions in subsection (4) are the conditions on the trap, and they are where nearly every real fight happens. The rest of the section handles what occurs when those conditions are not met, which is more often than trustees expect.

This section is the timing rule for claims against a trustee, and it sits near the end of the Florida Trust Code. Keep it separate from two neighboring questions people mix into it. The deadline to attack the trust document itself is a different section, annotated at Fla. Stat. 736.0604. Whether an amendment was validly made in the first place is a different section again, annotated at Fla. Stat. 736.0602. And what the trustee owed you before any of this started is the subject of our trust administration page.

The Six Month Clock, and What Starts It

Here is the short version. Two documents have to reach you, and the clock runs from whichever one arrives later.

The first is a trust disclosure document. Notice how wide the statute draws that. It is a trust accounting or any other written report of the trustee or a trust director. So the category is wider than the formal annual accounting with its columns and schedules. A written report the trustee mails you about a sale, a settlement, or a distribution can qualify. People assume the clock only starts on an official-looking accounting, and that assumption has cost beneficiaries their claims.

The second is a limitation notice. That is the written statement telling you that an action based on a matter adequately disclosed in the document may be barred unless it is commenced within six months. The statute sets out specific rules for when a limitation notice counts as applying to a particular disclosure document, covering the situation where the notice is contained in the document itself, where it is sent at the same time, where it follows within a short defined window, and where it comes later under conditions the statute spells out. Those rules are a checklist for both sides, and they are worth reading in the official text rather than trusting a summary.

The clock runs from the later of the two. If the accounting came in March and the limitation notice came in May, you count from May. If they arrived stapled together, you count from that day.

Here is the part to sit with. Six months is a genuinely short period for what has to happen inside it. You have to read an accounting you have never seen before, work out whether the numbers describe something wrong, gather bank records and closing statements, find out what the trust actually said, and get a lawyer far enough up the curve to file. Families routinely spend four of the six months deciding whether they want a fight with a sibling at all.

The Fourth District laid out how the whole section fits together in Woodward v. Woodward, and this is the clearest paragraph any Florida court has written about it. It is a published decision in another family’s case, not a matter handled by this firm.

“The four-year statute of limitations does not begin to run until a beneficiary receives an adequate trust disclosure document issued by the trustee. § 736.1008(1)(a), Fla. Stat. (2012). When a matter is adequately disclosed in a trust disclosure document, a beneficiary must bring an action against a trustee for breach of trust within six months after receipt. § 736.1008(2), Fla. Stat. (2012). If a matter is not adequately disclosed, the statute of limitations begins to run on the date of receipt of the final trust accounting and notice of the availability of the trust records for examination. § 736.1008(1)(b), Fla. Stat. (2012). When a matter is not adequately disclosed, and a trustee has not issued a final trust accounting, a claim against the trustee for breach of trust does not begin to accrue until the beneficiary has actual knowledge of the ‘facts upon which the claim is based if such actual knowledge is established by clear and convincing evidence.’ § 736.1008(3), Fla. Stat. (2012).”

Woodward v. Woodward, 192 So. 3d 528 (Fla. 4th DCA 2016) (slip op. at 4; the Fourth District later pinned this discussion to 192 So. 3d at 531).

Here is what that means for you. The six-month clock is the shortest of four possibilities, and it is the one the trustee has to earn by handing you something that discloses the matter. Until that happens, one of the longer branches governs.

The facts of Woodward make the point better than the law does. The trustee terminated a trust in 2002 and the beneficiary received nothing about it for nine years. Here is how the court treated that gap.

“In the instant case, Orator terminated the Mary T. Woodward Trust in 2002 but did not provide an accounting to Gregor until October 11, 2011. Thus, pursuant to section 736.1008(1)(a), the statute of limitations did not begin to run until October 11, 2011. In addition, the limitations notice contained in the accounting advised Gregor that he had six months to bring a cause of action. Gregor timely commenced his action within this timeframe, in accordance with section 736.1008(2).”

Woodward, slip op. at 4 to 5.

Nine years of silence did not bury the claim. The accounting that finally arrived started the clock, and the beneficiary who moved inside the six months kept his case. That is the whole lesson of this section in one paragraph, running in both directions at once.

Adequate Disclosure Is the Whole Fight

Every trustee defending a late claim says the same thing. The accounting showed it. It was right there on page nine. You had six months and you sat on it.

The statute answers that argument with a standard, not with a page number.

“A trust disclosure document adequately discloses a matter if the document provides sufficient information so that a beneficiary knows of a claim or reasonably should have inquired into the existence of a claim with respect to that matter.”

Fla. Stat. §736.1008(4)(c).

Notice what the sentence is measuring. Not whether the transaction appears somewhere in the document. Whether the document gave you enough that you knew about a claim, or reasonably should have gone looking for one. Those are very different tests, and the difference decides cases.

The Third District applied it in Turkish v. Brody. A beneficiary sued over a transaction that the trust accountings had reported. The court framed its own question this way.

“Therefore, we must determine whether the 2008 trust accountings provided Carole with sufficient information such that she should have known of her claim or reasonably inquired into her claim.”

Turkish v. Brody, 221 So. 3d 1206 (Fla. 3d DCA 2016) (slip op. at 19).

Then it answered it, and the answer is the reason this page exists.

“Therefore, the 2008 accounting for Trust Number One discloses the IRS transaction itself, and that Arthur ‘contributed’ the promissory note to Trust Number One as part of an agreement among the beneficiaries. The 2008 accounting, however, fails to disclose that the promissory note that Arthur contributed to Trust Number One was basically worthless due to Mrs. Trask’s lack of personal funds and due to the fact that the Bal Harbour condominium Mrs. Trask lived in would never be part of the Estate because the condominium was owned by the 1980 Trust, not Mrs. Trask. Further, the 2008 accounting for Trust Number One did not provide Carole with sufficient information that reasonably should have led her to inquire into her claim against the Co-Trustees. Therefore, the six-month statute of limitations set forth in section 736.1008(2) is not applicable because the matter was not ‘adequately disclosed in a trust disclosure document.’ As such, Carole’s claims for breach of fiduciary duty against Arthur and Shari were not time barred.”

Turkish, slip op. at 19 to 20.

Here is what that means for you, in plain terms. The accounting was accurate and it still did not start the clock. It reported that a promissory note came into the trust. It did not report that the note was worth almost nothing. A beneficiary reading that document would see a transaction and no reason to worry, which is precisely why the court held the matter was not adequately disclosed.

Two consequences follow, and both are counterintuitive.

One document can start the clock on one matter and not on another. Adequate disclosure is judged matter by matter, not packet by packet. The same accounting might fully disclose the trustee’s fees, so that a fee claim is barred after six months, while saying nothing meaningful about a real estate sale to the trustee’s business partner, so that claim runs on a different and longer clock. When a trustee says you got the accounting, you are out of time, the honest reply is a question. Out of time on what, exactly?

Accuracy is not the same as disclosure. A technically correct line item that omits the fact making the transaction a breach is what Turkish was about. This is also why signing a receipt and release because it feels like keeping the peace is such a costly move. In that same case, the Third District affirmed the invalidation of a release where the co-trustees had failed to disclose that the note being contributed was virtually worthless, a point we describe here rather than quote because the court’s sentence uses punctuation this site does not reproduce.

Two honest caveats about Turkish. The adequate-disclosure ruling came from a divided panel, with one judge concurring in part and dissenting in part as to that portion of the opinion, so it is binding Third District precedent but it was not unanimous. And the opinion cites the adequate-disclosure definition to subsection (4)(a) under the version of the statute then in force; in the current statute that sentence sits in (4)(c). The words are what matter, but check the subsection letter against the year of the statute you are applying.

Silence Starts No Clock

Here is the fear that brings people to this page late. I knew for years that nobody was sending me anything, and I did nothing about it. Haven’t I waited too long?

The Legislature answered that question directly, in the statute, in words a non-lawyer can read.

“A beneficiary’s actual knowledge that he or she has not received a trust accounting does not cause a claim to accrue against the trustee for breach of trust based upon the failure to provide a trust accounting required by s. 736.0813 or former s. 737.303 and does not commence the running of any period of limitations or laches for such a claim, and paragraph (a) and chapter 95 do not bar any such claim.”

Fla. Stat. §736.1008(3), closing sentence.

Knowing you were being kept in the dark is not the same as knowing what happened in the dark. The statute says that knowledge starts nothing.

The older strand of law points the same way. Under the predecessor statute, the Third District put the precondition plainly in Taplin v. Taplin.

“The distinguishing characteristic between the two limitation provisions is whether the account or statement ‘fully discloses the matter’ to the beneficiary.”

“Importantly, however, a precondition to the commencement of either limitation period is the receipt by the beneficiary of an ‘account’ or ‘statement,’ whether it is final, annual, or periodic.”

Taplin v. Taplin, 88 So. 3d 344 (Fla. 3d DCA 2012) (slip op. at 4 to 5), construing former Fla. Stat. §737.307, the predecessor of §736.1008.

No account, no clock. That sentence has saved more intake calls than any other line in this area of law.

The 2018 change, and the honest state of the argument

The closing sentence of subsection (3) has not always been there. It arrived in 2018, and it arrived for a reason worth knowing.

Before that, the Fourth District had held in Corya v. Sanders that, on the facts of the case before it, statutory laches under section 95.11(6) limited a beneficiary’s right to an accounting, where no accounting had ever been done, to no more than four years before filing an action against the trustee of an irrevocable trust. The same opinion contained a line that landed hard on beneficiaries. A beneficiary’s failure to know the law or to consult a lawyer was not a lack of actual knowledge of the facts on which the claim was based, those facts being that no accountings were given. Two things about that decision matter here, and we state them without quoting it, because the same opinion expressly said it was not discussing the application of section 736.1008 or its predecessor to the conduct at issue. So Corya is not a ruling about the six-month clock or about adequate disclosure at all.

In 2018 the Legislature passed chapter 2018-35. Section 7 of that act added to section 736.1008(3) the exact sentence quoted above, and then Section 8 of the same act said this about its own effect.

“The changes to ss. 736.08135 and 736.1008, Florida Statutes, made by this act are intended to clarify existing law, are remedial in nature, and apply retroactively to all cases pending or commenced on or after July 1, 2018.”

Ch. 2018-35, § 8, Laws of Fla. (approved and filed March 19, 2018). The act’s own title describes the §736.1008 change as “clarifying that certain knowledge by a beneficiary does not cause a claim to accrue for breach of trust or commence the running of a period of limitations or laches.”

In November 2025 the Fourth District said out loud what practitioners had been arguing since 2018.

“Although this issue was not preserved, we are compelled to reverse for other reasons. On remand, therefore, Suzanne shall be given leave to amend her pleadings to raise the issue of whether the legislature abrogated Corya by amending section 736.1008, Florida Statutes, in 2018. See Ch. 2018-35, § 8, Laws of Fla.”

Revah v. Revah, No. 4D2024-1992 (Fla. 4th DCA Nov. 12, 2025) (slip op. at 11).

Now read that carefully, because it is easy to over-read. The court did not hold that Corya is dead. The limitations issue had not been preserved in the trial court, so what the Fourth District did was give a beneficiary leave to raise the abrogation question on remand. No Florida appellate court has yet held that Corya’s reasoning was abrogated. What exists today is a session law anyone can read, in the Legislature’s own words, calling the change remedial and retroactive, plus an appellate court inviting a party to make the argument. That is an argument with strong support. It is not a settled holding, and we will not tell you otherwise. It is also a reason to move now rather than to rely on a question a court has not yet answered.

The same 2025 decision decided two things that are settled, and both matter to ordinary families.

“Cecile’s argument that the constructive trust claim was time barred fails because the limitations period did not begin to run until Suzanne had actual knowledge of the facts, established by clear and convincing evidence. § 736.1008(3), Fla. Stat.; Woodward, 192 So. 3d at 531.”

“For similar reasons, the trial court’s reliance on public records is misplaced in the context of a trustee’s obligations to a beneficiary under Chapter 736. The public recording of the deeds in 2012 and 2014 could not have commenced the running of any limitations period. Constructive notice through public records was insufficient to establish the ‘actual knowledge’ required by Chapter 736.”

Revah, slip op. at 13.

Here is what that means for you. It was in the public records the whole time, you could have looked is the most common answer a trustee gives when a deed turns up in the wrong name. The Fourth District rejected it. A recorded deed is not the actual knowledge chapter 736 requires.

The court also restated the concealment rule inside a fiduciary relationship.

“But fraudulent concealment is easier to establish in the context of a fiduciary relationship that exists between a trustee and a beneficiary. ‘A fiduciary’s deliberate withholding of material information the fiduciary has a duty to disclose constitutes fraudulent concealment.’ First Union Nat’l Bank v. Turney, 824 So. 2d 172, 190 (Fla. 1st DCA 2001).”

Revah, slip op. at 11 to 12.

And it summed up the whole fact pattern in a sentence that describes a great many Florida families.

“The case is an object lesson that loose, informal recordkeeping common to family finances is contrary to the requirements imposed on trustees by Florida statutes.”

Revah, slip op. at 1.

One procedural lesson from that case cuts against beneficiaries, and it deserves saying. The limitations theory itself was held unpreserved because it had not been raised properly in the trial court. Arguments have to be made at the right time and in the right place, which is another reason a deadline-driven area of law is a poor place to represent yourself.

The Outer Limits: Repose, and Active Concealment

Behind the six-month clock and the four-year clock sits a third layer that almost nobody knows about. A statute of repose is different from a statute of limitations. A limitations period usually starts when a claim accrues or when you learn something. A repose period runs from an event and can close the door even on a claim that never accrued, simply because too much time has passed.

Subsection (6) sets those outer bars in decades rather than years. As the section is structured, a claim is barred at the later of ten years after the trustee and beneficiary relationship ends where the beneficiary had actual knowledge throughout, or twenty years after the act complained of, and in all events at forty years. The precise conditions attached to each of those periods are in the official text, and they are the kind of detail that has to be read against the actual dates in your family rather than summarized.

Then comes the provision a concealing trustee should read twice.

“When a beneficiary shows by clear and convincing evidence that a trustee actively concealed facts supporting a cause of action, any existing applicable statute of repose shall be extended by 30 years.”

Fla. Stat. §736.1008(6)(b).

Thirty years added to the outer ceiling. That is the Legislature putting a price on hiding things from a beneficiary, and it is the sharpest sentence in the section.

Two honest qualifications. Clear and convincing evidence is a demanding standard, well above the ordinary civil burden, and active concealment means more than failing to volunteer information. It is proved with documents, timelines, and testimony, not with a feeling that something was off. And no Florida appellate decision construing this extension was located when this page was prepared. That is not a reason to ignore it. It is a reason to be careful about anyone who tells you confidently how a court would apply it.

What to Do When an Accounting Arrives

Most of this page is law. This part is what to actually do, and it takes about ten minutes.

Open it the day it comes, and write down the date. Not the date on the letter, the date it reached you, because the statute measures from receipt. Keep the envelope with the postmark. This sounds fussy until the year you spend arguing about it.

Look for the limitation notice. It is a short written statement saying an action based on a matter adequately disclosed in the document may be barred unless commenced within six months. It might be a paragraph inside the accounting, a separate page, or a line in the cover letter. If you cannot find one, that is a significant fact, not a relief, and it is worth having someone confirm.

Get it read quickly, by someone who reads these for a living. The question is not whether the numbers add up. It is what the document disclosed and what it left out, which is the Turkish question, and it is not a question a family member with a spreadsheet can answer. Six months is short, and it gets shorter every week you spend deciding whether you want to make trouble.

Do not sign anything the trustee sends back with it. Receipts, releases, waivers, and consents can end claims you have not learned about yet. If keeping the peace matters to you, and it does to most people, keeping the peace after a lawyer has read the document costs you nothing.

And the other side of this, honestly. If you are the trustee, this section is the one that lets you finish. A trust administration cannot stay open forever, and a trustee who never accounts is a trustee whose exposure never closes. A complete accounting that discloses what actually happened, paired with a limitation notice, is how a careful trustee moves from open-ended risk to a defined six months and then to finality. That is not a trick played on beneficiaries. It is the mechanism the Trust Code built so that families can finish and move on, and it works only when the disclosure is real. Turkish is the case that shows what happens when a trustee tries to get the protection without giving the disclosure.

Nobody can tell you from a web page whether your six months has started, or on which matters. What we can do is 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 an answer you did not want. Flat fees for planning work 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 a date is close, say so when you book and we will get you in sooner. Book a free consult →

Frequently Asked Questions

Common Situations

The envelope opened in month seven. A son in Tampa gets a packet from his sister in February, three months after their mother’s funeral. It is thick, it is full of numbers, and he is not ready. It sits on the dining room table through the spring. In September he finally reads it with his wife and finds a transfer to a company he has never heard of. He calls a lawyer expecting to be told the door is shut. The first thing we look for is not the transfer. It is whether the packet contained a limitation notice, what date it actually reached him, and whether the document disclosed the transfer in the sense the statute means, or merely listed it. Those three answers can put him inside a longer clock even in month seven, and they can also confirm that he is late, which he deserves to hear plainly.

The one-page summary that disclosed nothing. A daughter receives a single sheet from her stepfather’s attorney. It shows the trust’s beginning balance, its ending balance, a line for fees, and a paragraph warning her that she has six months. Nothing about the sale of the condominium, nothing about who bought it, nothing about what it sold for. She assumes the six months applies to everything and stops asking questions. It may apply to very little. Adequate disclosure is measured matter by matter, and a document that never mentions a sale cannot have adequately disclosed a claim arising out of that sale. What the trustee’s own accounting had to contain is a separate statutory checklist, and comparing the sheet against it is usually the first productive hour of the case.

The trustee who wants to be finished. A successor trustee in Naples has done everything right and has a brother who has been hinting for a year that he was cheated. She wants to distribute and close the trust without wondering for the next decade whether a lawsuit is coming. The section gives her a path, namely a complete accounting that discloses the transactions honestly, including her own compensation, paired with a limitation notice that meets the statute, delivered in a way she can prove. Six months later the window on the disclosed matters closes. We tell her what goes in the packet, what she should not distribute until the period runs, and where trustees usually get this wrong, which is disclosing the transaction while omitting the fact that makes it look bad.

Sources of Law

• Fla. Stat. §736.1008 (limitations on proceedings against trustees). Quoted above: subsection (2), the six-month bar; subsection (3), closing sentence; the definitions at (4)(a) and (4)(c); and the repose extension at (6)(b). Official text, Online Sunshine. History: s. 10, ch. 2006-217; s. 5, ch. 2007-153; s. 3, ch. 2008-76; s. 7, ch. 2018-35; s. 9, ch. 2021-183; s. 57, ch. 2022-4. Predecessor: former §737.307, repealed by ch. 2006-217. The quotation of (4)(a) above is shown only as far as the opening of the definition, which continues in the official text; the outer repose periods in (6) are described in this page’s prose rather than quoted. (retrieved 2026-08-12)
• Ch. 2018-35, Laws of Fla., official session law (approved by the Governor and filed with the Secretary of State March 19, 2018). Section 7 added the closing sentence of §736.1008(3) quoted above; Section 8, quoted above, states that the changes to §§736.08135 and 736.1008 are intended to clarify existing law, are remedial in nature, and apply retroactively to all cases pending or commenced on or after July 1, 2018. (retrieved 2026-08-12)
• Woodward v. Woodward, 192 So. 3d 528 (Fla. 4th DCA May 4, 2016) (No. 4D15-449, Palm Beach County; reversed and remanded). Quoted above from the official Fourth District slip opinion PDF at pages 4 and 4 to 5, mirrored by CourtListener (opinion page); the court’s own path no longer serves a PDF. The Fourth District later pinned the structural discussion to 192 So. 3d at 531. (retrieved 2026-08-12)
• Turkish v. Brody, 221 So. 3d 1206 (Fla. 3d DCA Nov. 30, 2016) (Nos. 3D14-1819 and 3D14-38, Miami-Dade County; affirmed in part, reversed in part and remanded). Quoted above from the official Third District slip opinion PDF at pages 19 and 19 to 20, mirrored by CourtListener (opinion page). Pin cites are to slip-opinion pages; the reporter star pagination is not in the PDF. One judge concurred in part and dissented in part as to the portion containing the adequate-disclosure ruling. The opinion cites the adequate-disclosure definition to subsection (4)(a) under the version of the statute then in force; that sentence sits in (4)(c) in the current statute. The release ruling discussed in this page’s prose is described, not quoted, because the court’s sentence contains punctuation this site does not reproduce. (retrieved 2026-08-12)
• Revah v. Revah, No. 4D2024-1992 (Fla. 4th DCA Nov. 12, 2025) (Palm Beach County; affirmed in part, reversed in part, and remanded). Quoted above from the official Fourth District slip opinion PDF at pages 1, 11, 11 to 12, and 13; CourtListener mirror. No Southern Reporter citation appeared in CourtListener’s citation table when this page was prepared, so pin cites are to slip-opinion pages, and the slip carries the standard legend that it is not final until disposition of any timely filed motion for rehearing as of its filing date. The abrogation passage is an issue the court gave a party leave to raise on remand, not a decided holding. (retrieved 2026-08-12)
• Taplin v. Taplin, 88 So. 3d 344 (Fla. 3d DCA May 9, 2012) (No. 3D10-2919, Miami-Dade County; reversed and remanded). Quoted above from the official Third District slip opinion PDF at pages 4 to 5, served by the Internet Archive; CourtListener. Decided under former §737.307, the predecessor of §736.1008, and at the pleading stage. (retrieved 2026-08-12)
• First Union Nat’l Bank v. Turney, 824 So. 2d 172 (Fla. 1st DCA 2001) (No. 1D00-2803). CourtListener. This page quotes the fraudulent-concealment sentence at 824 So. 2d at 190 only as it appears inside the official Fourth District slip opinion in Revah. No court-issued PDF of Turney itself was retrieved, so nothing else from that opinion is quoted here. (retrieved 2026-08-12)
• Corya v. Sanders, 155 So. 3d 1279 (Fla. 4th DCA Feb. 11, 2015) (Nos. 4D12-3067 and 4D12-3926, on rehearing). Described in this page’s prose and not quoted. The opinion held, on the facts before the court, that statutory laches under §95.11(6) limited the right to an accounting where none had been done to no more than four years before filing against the trustee of an irrevocable trust, and it expressly stated that it was not discussing the application of §736.1008 or former §737.307 to the conduct at issue. It is therefore not authority on the six-month clock, adequate disclosure, or limitation notices. Whether the 2018 amendment abrogated its reasoning is the open question the Fourth District identified in Revah. (retrieved 2026-08-12)
• Related sections: Fla. Stat. §736.0813 (the trustee’s duty to inform and account, including the annual accounting duty this section’s subsection (3) refers to); §736.08135 (what a Florida trust accounting must contain); §736.0604 (the separate deadline to contest the validity of a trust that was revocable at the settlor’s death, annotated on our 736.0604 page); §95.11 (general limitations periods, including the statutory-laches provision at §95.11(6)). (retrieved 2026-08-12)
• Quotation note: the passages above reproduce the courts’ own published words, the Legislature’s statutory text, and an official session law. Court opinions, statutes, and session laws are public records, and nothing here is drawn from a commercial research service or its editorial material.
• 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. Deadlines under this section turn on which documents were delivered, what they disclosed, and the dates they were received, which we confirm at a 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 and published court decisions, not legal advice, and no attorney-client relationship is created. Whether a limitations period has run in your situation depends on your specific documents and dates, which we review at a free consult. Please do not send confidential details until we have connected.