The Act is open to people who do not live here
Whether both, one, or neither is domiciled in the state, settlor spouses may classify any or all of their property as community property by transferring that property to a community property trust and providing in the trust that the property is community property pursuant to this part.
Section 736.1505(1), Florida Statutes.
That opening clause is doing deliberate work. Neither spouse need be a Florida resident. A couple in New York or Ohio can create a Florida community property trust.
What ties the arrangement to Florida is not domicile but the qualified trustee requirement in section 736.1503(2), defined in section 736.1502(6) as a Florida resident individual or a company authorised to act as trustee here. One Florida trustee is the whole connection.
That is the same design instinct visible in Part XIV, where a single Florida trust director can fix a directed trust’s principal place of administration. Both Parts came from the same 2021 act, and both were built to attract trust business rather than merely to serve residents.
Note the two steps in the sentence. Transferring property to the trust is not enough on its own; the trust must also provide that the property is community property pursuant to this part. That matches the express declaration requirement in section 736.1503(1).
What the section declares
All property owned by a community property trust is community property under the laws of the state during the marriage of the settlor spouses.
Section 736.1505(3), Florida Statutes.
This is the operative declaration on which everything else rests, and it is properly limited (under the laws of the state, and during the marriage).
Florida can determine the character of property as a matter of Florida law, and that is exactly what this does. Whether a federal statute then attaches the consequence the couple is hoping for is a separate question, addressed at section 736.1511 and not resolved by any Florida statute.
The temporal limit matters too. During marriage is defined in section 736.1502(5) as ending on dissolution or the death of a spouse, which is why section 736.1507 and section 736.1508 take over at those points.
Subsection (2) adds that the trust is enforceable without consideration. Transfers between spouses are rarely supported by consideration in the contract sense, and this forecloses that attack. It is one of several places where Part XV borrows from marital agreement law, as section 736.1512 does more obviously.
Management is left to the document
Subsection (4) says the right to manage and control the property is determined by the terms of the trust agreement. The statute supplies no default.
Community property systems elsewhere contain detailed rules about which spouse may deal with which asset, often requiring joinder for significant transactions. Florida imports none of that. It is a drafting question, and a couple who do not address it have left a gap the statute will not fill.
The exit, and the trap in it
When property is distributed from a community property trust, the property shall no longer constitute community property within the meaning of this part, provided that community property as classified by a jurisdiction other than the state retains its character as community property to the extent otherwise provided by ss. 732.216-732.228.
Section 736.1505(5), Florida Statutes.
The character does not travel with the asset. Take property out of the trust and it stops being community property under this Part.
That is easy to overlook and it has a practical consequence. A couple who revoke the trust under section 736.1504(3), or who take an asset out to sell or refinance it, have ended its community property character. Whatever the arrangement was meant to achieve, it was achieved only while the property was inside.
The proviso preserves imported property. Community property classified by another jurisdiction keeps its character to the extent Florida’s own provisions on community property rights at death provide. So a couple arriving from a community property state do not lose anything by passing property through a Florida trust and out again.
The asymmetry is worth stating. Florida-created community property character is a creature of the trust and ends with it. Character acquired under another state’s law is older and survives.
A note on the one search result
Our review found no decision construing this section. A search returns exactly one document, and it does not contain the section number.
The document is an Eleventh Circuit criminal appeal from 1993, twenty eight years before this Part existed. The match comes from a citation reading 874 F.2d 1503, followed by a star pagination marker for page 736, followed by the pin cite 1505. The digits 736 and 1505 sit next to each other and the search assembled them into a statute number.
We record it because it is the sixth time we have found this pattern in chapter 736 research, and each time the separator has been different (commas, a square bracket, a line break, and now a star pagination marker). The only reliable way to dispose of such a hit is to open the document and look.