Florida Trust Beneficiary Rights

What You’re Entitled To

If you are a qualified beneficiary (a current beneficiary or a first-in-line remainder beneficiary), Florida gives you the right to be kept reasonably informed. Here is what that covers.

• Notice that the trust exists and who the trustee is (within 60 days after a revocable trust becomes irrevocable, usually at the creator’s death).
• A complete copy of the trust document.
• Accountings, showing the trust’s assets, income, expenses, distributions, and the trustee’s compensation, at least annually.
• The right to enforce all of this in court if the trustee will not cooperate.

A trustee who keeps beneficiaries in the dark is breaking a duty the statute spells out, and a court can enforce it.

Can I Get a Copy of the Trust, and When?

The question I get most about this is, "Can I see the trust?" Yes, once the trust can no longer be revoked, which usually means once the person who made it has died. From that point a qualified beneficiary is entitled to a complete copy of the trust instrument on request, and the trustee has 60 days from learning of the death to tell you the trust exists, who created it, and that you can ask for the document and for accountings. Before that point the answer is different, and it surprises people. While the person who made the trust is alive and can still change it, the trustee answers only to that person, and a child named in a parent’s revocable trust has no right to read it. People ask me who enforces the 60 days, and the honest answer is that nobody does until a beneficiary sends a written request and, when it goes unanswered, asks the court to compel it.

You Can Demand an Accounting

The accounting is your window into the trust. The accounting is how you find out whether the trustee has done their job or has been mismanaging, favoring one beneficiary, or quietly helping themselves. If the trustee refuses or stalls, you can ask the court to compel one. The petition to compel is usually the first step, before any larger dispute, and often the accounting it produces tells you everything you need to know.

When a Trustee Breaches Their Duty

A trustee owes you loyalty, prudence, and impartiality. When a trustee falls short by self-dealing, making improper distributions, or mismanaging assets, the court can compel them to perform, remove them for serious breaches or unfitness, surcharge them (order them to personally repay the losses they caused), and order misapplied assets returned. If the trust itself was the product of undue influence or exploitation, that is its own claim. See how we handle estate and trust disputes →

Watch the Clock

Do not sit on your concerns. If the trustee gives you a proper accounting with a limitation notice, you may have as little as six months to object before you lose the right. A breach the trustee never adequately disclosed carries a four-year limit, and it starts only when you actually know the facts. Because the clock can start quietly the moment an accounting lands in your mailbox, have a lawyer review any accounting promptly. When no accounting ever arrives, waiting still costs you something. A Palm Beach beneficiary whose trustee prepared none at all sued years later and had his recovery capped at a four-year look back, which we walk through in the accountings that never came.

The Trustee Kept the Trust Secret for Years. Is It Too Late?

Clients are often confused about what years of silence did to their claim, and ask me, "The trustee hid this from me for eight years. Is it too late?" Usually the answer is no, because the six-month clock starts only when the trustee hands you a document that actually discloses the problem, and the four-year clock for a breach that was never disclosed starts only when you actually know the facts. Years of silence start neither clock. In one case I have reviewed, a trustee ended a trust in 2002 by moving all $944,038.89 of it into two new trusts that left one beneficiary out, and sent that beneficiary his first accounting on October 11, 2011, nine years later. He sued five months after the accounting arrived. The trial court threw the case out as too old, and the appellate court put it back, because no clock had run during the nine years of silence and the six-month clock started the day the accounting was received. The practice pointer is that the day an accounting or any written report from the trustee arrives is the day to have it read, because from then on six months is six months.

Frequently Asked Questions

Common Situations

The silent trustee. A sibling serving as trustee will not share the trust or any accounting after their parent’s death. We demand the document and an accounting, and when it does not come, petition the court to compel it.

The self-dealing trustee. A trustee pays himself large "fees" and sells trust property to a friend below value. The accounting exposes it, and we pursue removal and a surcharge to recover the losses.

The accounting with a deadline inside. An out-of-state daughter receives a thick trust accounting from her stepmother, the trustee, with a formal limitation notice tucked at the end. The notice starts a six-month clock. Object within it or lose the right. A prompt review shows distributions quietly favoring the stepmother’s own children, and the objection goes in with months to spare. Had the envelope sat in a drawer, the claim would have expired with it.

Sources of Law

• Fla. Stat. §736.0813 (annotated) (trustee’s duty to inform and account; 60-day qualified-beneficiary notice); §736.08135 (annotated) (trust accounting content); §736.1008 (annotated) (limitation on actions, the 6-month period after a qualifying accounting and limitation notice); §736.0706 (annotated) (removal of trustee); §736.1001 (annotated)-.1002 (remedies and surcharge). flsenate.gov (retrieved 2026-06-09)
• Cases retold above: Landau v. Landau, 230 So. 3d 127 (Fla. 3d DCA 2017) (trust assets frozen until the accounting was filed); Woodward v. Woodward, 192 So. 3d 528 (Fla. 4th DCA 2016) (no limitations period ran until the first accounting arrived); Turkish v. Brody, 221 So. 3d 1206 (Fla. 3d DCA 2016) (release set aside for an undisclosed fact). The four-year cap: Corya v. Sanders, 155 So. 3d 1279 (Fla. 4th DCA 2015); Ch. 2018-35, §§7 to 8, Laws of Fla. (the retroactive amendment to §736.1008(3)); Revah v. Revah, No. 4D2024-1992 (Fla. 4th DCA Nov. 12, 2025) (inviting the abrogation argument on remand). Opinions read in full; retrieved 2026-09-03.

What I Have Seen Happen When a Beneficiary Waits

What I see is that the problem surfaces years later, when the person who could explain the intent has died. The person who set up the trust knew why the income went to a surviving spouse for life and the principal to the children afterward. Once that person is gone, the trustee holds the checkbook and the children hold a document, and the annual accounting is the only thing that connects the two.

A case decided by a Florida appellate court in 2017 shows the whole pattern. A mother died in 2013 and left her trust in her husband’s hands as trustee. He was entitled to the income for life, plus up to 5% of the principal each December, and her three children would split whatever remained when he died. A probate court ordered about $2,000,000 of her estate moved into the trust, and it did not move. Her daughter asked for the asset list and the annual accountings, got nothing, and in January 2016 filed a petition to compel them. The accounting that finally arrived was unsigned, left out an asset worth about $1,000,000, and showed the trustee paying himself far more than the trust earned that year. Sixteen months and two hearings later the court froze every asset in the trust until the next accounting was filed, and he filed it the day after he appealed the freeze.

My reading of that case is that the petition did the work the letters could not. Nothing the daughter sent changed the trustee’s conduct until a judge froze the trust, and the accounting he had still not produced by the second hearing appeared within a day of that order. In reviewing the Florida appellate cases on trust accountings, I have a few take-home points.

The first is the request. A trustee’s duty to account runs to qualified beneficiaries, and the daughter in that case was one because she stood next in line for the principal. The request that starts everything is a written one, sent to the trustee, asking for the complete trust instrument and for accountings from the date the trustee took over. I put the statute sections in that letter, because a trustee who receives it has already had 60 days to give notice on their own and has no reason left to say they did not know what was owed. The practice pointer is that the request is evidence as much as it is a request, so it goes by a method that proves delivery.

Second, an accounting is a specific document, and a stack of bank statements is not one. Florida law requires a reasonably understandable report that shows every cash and property transaction, the trustee’s compensation, gains and losses, and two values for each asset, what it cost and what it is worth now. The unsigned page in that case failed on its face because a $1,000,000 asset was missing from it. The practice pointer is to compare what arrived against the list in the statute before deciding whether the trustee has complied, because a trustee who says he has handed over everything has often handed over nothing that counts.

Third, the freeze is available, and trustees know it. A Florida probate court can stop every distribution from a trust until the accounting is filed, and the appellate court in that case affirmed the order on the ground that protecting the assets under its supervision is part of what the court is for. Avoid signing a receipt, release or waiver that arrives in the same envelope as an accounting before someone has read both, because a release that recites accurate facts can still leave out the one fact that made the transaction a breach, and until a court sets it aside, the release stands.

What would have changed the outcome is timing. The same petition, filed the month after the first unanswered request instead of after a year of waiting, would have put the missing $1,000,000 on the record before another December distribution went out. On the drafting side, the mother could have required in the trust itself that the trustee deliver the annual accounting to each remainder beneficiary by a fixed date, and could have named an independent co-trustee or a trust protector with the power to remove him if he did not. An owner can build that into a trust at the drafting stage, and it is part of every Complete Trust Plan I prepare, flat fee from $3,200. Enforcing the right after the fact is litigation, and I quote that per matter at the consult rather than posting a flat fee, because the cost depends on how far the trustee is willing to go.

One question is open. Before 2018, the Fourth District held that where no accounting had ever been done, a beneficiary could reach back only four years. In 2018 the Legislature wrote into the statute that a beneficiary’s knowledge that no accounting arrived does not start any limitations period, and made that change retroactive, and in November 2025 the same court invited a beneficiary to argue that the four-year cap is gone. No Florida appellate court has decided it. How far back your accounting can reach is something I can answer only after reading your trust and your dates.

Kevin D. Klagge, Esq., admitted in Florida since 2012. Each case described above is a decision of a Florida court rather than a matter handled by this firm. Past results do not guarantee a similar outcome.

Updated on September 3, 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. Deadlines and outcomes depend on your facts; past results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Do not send confidential information until we have agreed to represent you.