The Florida Trust Code (Chapter 736), in Plain English

What Chapter 736 Is, and What It Governs

Chapter 736 of the Florida Statutes is the Florida Trust Code. The chapter says so in its own first section, which provides that it may be cited as the “Florida Trust Code.” The Legislature enacted it as chapter 2006-217, Laws of Florida, and it took effect on July 1, 2007, replacing the older trust law that came before it.

The Code is where the answers live to the questions families ask us most. How does a trust get created, and what makes one valid. What does the settlor, the person who created the trust, have to do to change it. What is the trustee required to tell you, and when. What can a creditor reach. How long does anyone have to sue. Florida’s Code follows the Uniform Trust Code closely enough that a Florida appellate court reading section 736.0602 in 2023 looked to the comment on the uniform version for help, a passage we quote on our annotation of section 736.0602.

It does not cover everything that carries the word trust. The scope section applies the Code to express trusts, charitable or noncharitable, meaning the ones somebody sets up deliberately. It expressly leaves out constructive and resulting trusts, which are remedies a court imposes rather than documents anyone signed, along with custodial accounts for minors, voting trusts, common trust funds, escrow arrangements, and, notably for Florida, land trusts under section 689.071 except to the limited extent the statute carves back in.

Here is the part worth carrying with you. Your trust document is not overridden by this chapter; for most questions it is the other way around. The Code says that except as otherwise provided in the terms of the trust, it governs the duties and powers of a trustee, the relations among trustees, and the rights and interests of a beneficiary. Then it sets out where your document stops winning, in a list of more than twenty items that includes the requirements for creating a trust, the trustee’s duty of good faith, the formalities for signing, the deadlines for going to court, and the duty to notify and account to the qualified beneficiaries of an irrevocable trust.

So the Code sets the floor and fills the silences. Your document does the rest. When the two of them disagree, which one wins is itself a question the Code answers, and it answers it item by item rather than with a slogan.

How the Code Is Organized

Chapter 736 is long, and nobody reads it front to back. It is split into fifteen Parts, and once you know which Part holds your issue you can usually find your answer in a few minutes. Use the table as a map rather than a claim about every section inside each Part.

Swipe the table sideways to see the section ranges.

A few things that table tells you at a glance. The Code did not stop growing in 2007; Parts XIV and XV both arrived in 2021, which is why an older summary of chapter 736 will be missing them. In our experience the Part behind most family disputes is not Part VI at all, it is Part VIII, where the trustee’s duties and the duty to account live. And Part VI, the Part covering the revocable living trust that most Florida families sign, is four sections long.

We are annotating this chapter one section at a time, in plain English, with the courts’ own words. Part VI came first because it is where families land.

Where a trust lives, and who can reach it. Four sections decide questions that come before any argument about the merits. Section 736.0107 lets a trust choose another state’s law, but only where there is a real connection to that place, and Florida keeps a veto for anything contrary to its own strong public policy. A bankruptcy court used that veto to disregard a Belize designation entirely. Section 736.0108 fixes where a trust is administered, which drives both venue and jurisdiction, and the Fourth District has twice held that a clause choosing another state’s law does not set the place of administration. That section also lets a trustee move a trust abroad on 60 days’ notice, and only a filed lawsuit, not a letter, suspends the power.

Section 736.0202 lists eight acts that submit a trustee, beneficiary or anyone else to Florida’s courts, and the one nobody expects is accepting a distribution. Four Florida decisions cite it and not one construes any of the eight, because the statute runs to the constitutional limit and the fights are therefore about minimum contacts. Section 736.0203 and section 736.0204 settle which court and which county, and neither has ever been cited.

Taking the job, and getting out of it. Section 736.0701 contains two traps facing opposite directions. You can accept a trusteeship by conduct without ever signing anything, and you can lose the chance to decline by simply not responding. It also lets you inspect the property for environmental liability before committing. Section 736.0702 means a Florida trustee posts no bond unless a court says so, and a court can waive one the trust itself demands. Section 736.0306 lets a settlor appoint someone to receive the accountings and bind a beneficiary, and bars the trustee from being that person.

Two that answer questions people actually ask. Section 736.1108 makes no-contest clauses unenforceable, and the date it runs from is not the Code’s. It is October 1, 1993. Because a revocable trust counts as created when the power to revoke ends, a trust signed decades earlier is usually still covered. What survives is the conditional gift, and the Fifth District enforced one offering a widow $5 million if she waived her elective share. And section 736.0408 lets you provide for an animal alive in your lifetime, subject to a court’s power to decide you funded it too generously and send the surplus back to your estate.

Part II, judicial proceedings. Five sections of it are annotated now, and it decides when a family may do anything at all. Section 736.0207 bars a contest to a revocable trust until the trust becomes irrevocable, which usually means the settlor’s death. The point most worth knowing is what happens to a challenge filed too soon. In the one Florida appellate decision on the question, the case was dismissed with prejudice and the Fourth District affirmed. Not parked until it ripened. Ended. The statute exempts exactly one person, the guardian of the property of an incapacitated settlor, and the court held the bar applied to a son regardless of whether his father was incapacitated, because incapacity is not what the exception turns on.

The other four decide how a trust case runs. Section 736.0201 is the one people get wrong first, because it requires a trust proceeding to be commenced by filing a complaint, governed by the Florida Rules of Civil Procedure, and the Second District has held that subsection (3) cannot be used to escape that. A petition dropped into a probate docket is not a trust proceeding. Section 736.0206 is the exception that proves it, letting a limited set of matters proceed by petition instead. Section 736.0202 covers when a Florida court has jurisdiction over a trustee or a beneficiary who is somewhere else, section 736.0203 which court hears it, and section 736.0204 which county. One further section of the Part, 736.0205, was repealed in 2013, and anything you read citing it predates that.

The capacity question that begins every one of those disputes now has its own page. Section 736.0601 sets the standard for signing or changing a revocable trust at the same level as making a will, and no Florida appellate court has ever construed it. That is not because Florida has no law on the subject. It is because the law sits in the testamentary capacity cases, filed under a different name, which is why researching the section number finds almost nothing. The page also answers the question people ask before any other. Accepting money from a trust does not automatically forfeit the right to contest it.

Part VI: Revocable Trusts, Section by Section

Four sections govern the trust you can still change. They run in a sensible order, starting with who has the capacity to make one, then how it gets amended or revoked, who the trustee answers to while it is revocable, and how long anyone has to attack it after the settlor dies.

§736.0601: Capacity of settlor of revocable trust

The whole section is one sentence.

Notice what that sentence does. It does not define capacity. It borrows the standard, deliberately, from the law of wills, and it applies that borrowed standard to four separate acts plus the act of directing a trustee.

Here is the honest part, and it is why we have not published an annotation page for this section yet. No Florida appellate decision construes section 736.0601. We looked. The one Florida district court of appeal decision that cites the section at all, a 2015 Fourth District case, mentions it in the sentence listing the counts a son had pleaded, and the ruling in that case is about something else entirely. So when a family fights about whether a parent had capacity to sign a trust amendment, the body of law that decides it is not built around this section number. It is the testamentary capacity case line, the law about what it takes to make a will, which is exactly where the statute points.

§736.0602: Revocation or amendment of revocable trust

This is the section families collide with most, because it governs every change anyone makes to a living trust. It says a trust is revocable unless its terms expressly provide otherwise, and it sets out how the settlor revokes or amends. It happens by substantial compliance with the method written into the trust, or, where the trust prescribes no method, by a later will that expressly refers to the trust or by any other method proving intent by clear and convincing evidence.

In 2023 the Second District invalidated a signed and notarized restatement and two amendments because the settlor’s trust named two trustees and the changes reached only one of them. See how Florida courts read the amendment method in your own trust, and why delivery to one of two trustees was not enough. If your trust has already been amended two or three times and the pieces no longer read together, the cleaner fix is usually a full rewrite that keeps the same trust. See amendment versus restatement.

§736.0603: Settlor’s powers; powers of withdrawal

Three short subsections, and the first one answers the question an adult child asks us every week. While a trust is revocable, the duties of the trustee are owed exclusively to the settlor. That is why a trustee will not send you a copy of your living mother’s trust, and it is not a sign that anything is being hidden. The section also gives a holder of a power of withdrawal the rights of a settlor over the property subject to that power, and since 2021 it lets a trustee follow a settlor’s direction that departs from the terms of the trust while the trust is revocable.

Read what a beneficiary can and cannot demand while a parent is alive, and what changes the day the trust becomes irrevocable.

§736.0604: Limitation on action contesting validity of revocable trust

One sentence again, and it can end a case before anyone reaches the merits. An action contesting the validity of a trust that was revocable at the settlor’s death is barred unless it is commenced within the earlier of the period chapter 95 provides, or six months after the trustee sends the person a copy of the trust instrument together with a notice of the trust’s existence, the trustee’s name and address, and the time allowed for commencing a proceeding.

See how the six-month clock starts, what the trustee has to send for it to start at all, and what happens when nothing was ever sent. If a packet from a trustee has already arrived, treat the date it was mailed as the date that matters.

Where the Courts Have Gone Quiet

Most people assume that a statute this old, governing something this common, has been picked over by the appellate courts for two decades. In parts of chapter 736 that is true. In Part VI it is not, and the courts themselves have said so.

• Substantial compliance, undefined. In Grassfield v. Grassfield in 2023, the Second District observed that the Code does not define substantial compliance and that no appellate court had defined it since the Legislature adopted section 736.0602 in 2007. Sixteen years of Florida trust amendments were signed against a standard nobody had drawn a line under. The court’s own words are on our 736.0602 page.
• The contest deadline, unaddressed. A 2025 order from the Seventh Judicial Circuit in St. Johns County, in Lunding v. Fantini, noted in a footnote that there appear to be no Florida cases directly addressing section 736.0604, and then built the analysis from a Kansas decision and Florida’s general limitations law. That order is a trial-level ruling. It is persuasive reading, not binding precedent, and a district court of appeal could see it differently. The passages are on our 736.0604 page.
• Capacity, unconstrued. Our own review of Florida’s appellate decisions found none construing section 736.0601. The standard it sets is borrowed from will capacity, so the answers come from that older body of law rather than from this section.
• Claims against the person who created the trust, unconstrued by the state courts. Section 736.0505 decides whether a trust you set up for your own benefit protects anything from your own creditors, which is the single question most asset-protection marketing is built around. Our review of Florida’s appellate decisions found none construing it. That silence is misleading on its own, though, and it took a second search to see why. This question almost always reaches a court through a bankruptcy case or a collection fight, so its law has been made by federal judges in Florida applying Florida law. We found the decisions, including a 2019 case that refused to read a Belize trust under Belize law at all, and they are on our 736.0505 page.

What that actually means for your family is worth stating plainly, because it cuts in an unfamiliar direction. Where a statute has been construed a dozen times, a lawyer can tell you fairly quickly how your facts are likely to be treated. Where it has not, two things become far more important than any general rule.

The first is the wording of your own document. In Grassfield the outcome turned on one settlor joining his amendment requirements with the word and. Nothing about that result came from a general principle of Florida law; it came from a paragraph a lawyer typed years earlier. Your amendment clause, your trustee provisions, and your notice provisions are doing that same work right now, and you can read them tonight.

The second is the record built at the signing. Who was in the room, who received a copy, what the file shows about capacity, whether delivery can be proved. In a settled area of law, a thin record can sometimes be carried by precedent. In an unsettled one, the record is close to all there is.

And a caution belongs in the same breath. Silence in the case law is not a safe harbor. It does not mean a court will side with you. It means nobody can tell you in advance what a court would do, which is a reason to build the plan carefully rather than a reason to take a chance. Nothing on this page predicts an outcome in any case, including yours.

The Sections We Annotate Next

Part VI was the starting point because it governs the document most families have. It is not, though, where most of the fights we handle actually live. Two other Parts are.

Part VIII, the trustee’s duties. Loyalty, prudent administration, recordkeeping, and above all the duty to inform and account, along with the section setting out what a trust accounting has to contain. When a beneficiary calls us angry, the complaint is almost always a Part VIII complaint wearing other clothes, namely no accounting, no answers, fees nobody explained, a distribution that never came. Two neighboring sections carry most of that weight, and both are annotated now. Section 736.0706, removing a trustee, sets out the four grounds a court can act on, and section 736.1008 holds the six month clock that starts when an accounting arrives with a limitation notice. Section 736.08135 is the one to read first if you have been handed something and told it is an accounting, because it lists what an accounting actually has to contain, and the Fourth District has held that a document dump and a set of unsworn ledgers are not one. Section 736.0817 covers what the trustee does once a trust ends.

Eight more of the Part are annotated now, and they are the quiet ones, short duty statutes, six of them a single sentence, and five with no Florida case law at all. Two repay reading even so. Section 736.0810 is the anti commingling rule, and it asks for more than most trustees realise, because subsection (3) requires the trust’s interest to appear in records kept by somebody else, meaning the bank or the recorder rather than the trustee’s own notes. And section 736.0812 makes a successor trustee take reasonable steps to redress a breach they know a previous trustee committed, which is an uncomfortable duty when the previous trustee is a sibling, and which a short six month deadline in a neighbouring section can cut off entirely. That neighbouring section now has its own page. Section 736.08125 protects a successor trustee, and the deadline sits inside it. A letter telling a beneficiary that a new trustee has accepted, if it carries the warning the statute prescribes, starts six months running from the date of acceptance. Miss it and the right to make that trustee pursue the old one is barred. No Florida court has construed any part of it, and the same 2025 act that tidied its wording created a new section barring a successor’s claim to the same extent as the beneficiary’s own.

The rest fill in the picture. Section 736.0805 limits what a trustee may spend, measured partly against the trustee’s own skills. Section 736.0806 holds a trustee to expertise they claimed, whether or not they had it. Section 736.0807 lets a trustee delegate and escape liability for the agent, but only on three conditions, and the third one, reviewing the agent periodically, is the one that fails. Section 736.0809 is the duty to gather the property in and keep it safe. Section 736.0811 puts both sides of litigation on the trustee, for the structural reason that a Florida trust is not a legal person and cannot sue in its own name. And section 736.08105 is the oddity of the group. Its heading announces a duty about marketable title and its text removes one.

Part VII, the office of trustee. Who serves, what they are paid, and what happens when they stop. Section 736.0708 is the money question, and Florida answers it differently from the way it answers attorney fees. The Second District rejected the hours times rate method and applied a twelve factor test to a trustee fee of $24,600,000. That page also covers a rule from 2020 with no case law and real teeth, under which an attorney who drafts a trust naming themselves or anyone at their firm as trustee is entitled to no compensation at all unless three specific disclosures were made to the settlor first. Section 736.0703 covers cotrustees, including the point most people get wrong, which is that standing back while the other trustee breaches the trust is not a defence. Section 736.0704 is the sequel to removal, deciding who chooses the replacement, and in what order. And section 736.05055, the notice of trust, is the short filing whose omission binds a trustee to proceedings they never attended. Section 736.0705 covers resigning, and carries the line most trustees learn too late. Stepping down does not discharge liability, and it does not release a surety on the bond either. Section 736.0709 is about being paid back, and the difference between its two subsections cost a trustee priority over a federal tax lien in the Eleventh Circuit. A right to reimbursement is a claim, while money advanced to protect the trust gives a lien.

The master key, and the powers. Section 736.0105 is the section to read before any other, because it decides how much of the rest of the Code a trust document can simply switch off. The answer is most of it, and then a list of twenty three things it cannot touch, including the duty to account, the right to resign, the effect of a spendthrift clause and the court’s power to modify a trust. Curiously, no Florida court has ever construed that list; every decision citing the section cites it for the opposite proposition, that the terms of the trust control.

What a trustee may actually do sits in two sections. Section 736.0815 grants every power an unmarried competent owner would have over the same property, without going to court, and then attaches a one sentence leash. The exercise of a power is subject to the fiduciary duties. Section 736.0816 is the itemised list of twenty five, and one of them is worth a beneficiary’s attention, because it lets a trustee employ their own firm, pay it from the trust, and act on its recommendations without independent investigation. The Fourth District has drawn one line here. A trustee could charge the trust for defending his accountings, and could not charge it for an appeal he lost.

Two more close loops elsewhere. Section 736.0401 lists the three ways a trust is created, including the declaration that needs no transfer to anyone, and is the companion to the requirements in section 736.0402. Section 736.05053 is the one that makes a trust pay the settlor’s estate bills, in a fixed order, with the trust’s own administration expenses coming first. Section 736.1010 protects a trustee who did not know a beneficiary had married, divorced or died, but only if they took reasonable care to find out. And section 736.10085 is fourteen months old. It stops a successor trustee suing a former trustee when the beneficiaries themselves would already be too late.

Four sections of Part VIII were missed until a coverage audit found them, and one is substantial. Section 736.08145 lets a trustee reimburse the person who is taxed on a grantor trust’s income, which solves a genuine unfairness. The grantor pays tax on money they never receive. It is on by default for trusts created before, on or after July 1, 2020, the opt out is irrevocable and needs sixty days’ notice, and it takes care to provide that reimbursement does not make the grantor a beneficiary including for elective estate purposes. The staff analysis for the 2022 amendment also says out loud what the rest of the chapter only implies. The object is attracting trust business to Florida.

Section 736.08163 is the environmental one, and it gives a trustee seven powers without a court order, including the power to refuse contaminated property and to resign over the conflict. A trustee who inherited the problem is not an owner or operator for liability purposes; a trustee who made it worse willfully, knowingly or recklessly is personally liable. It carries a July 1, 1995 cutoff, older than the Trust Code itself, so an irrevocable trust from before then has none of these powers.

Section 736.08165 answers what a trustee does while the trust is being challenged, and the answer is carry on as if nothing had been filed, except for anything that would prejudice a person who may be affected by the outcome. A court can release a distribution on good cause, and may require the beneficiary to post a bond. And section 736.08147 fills a silence that can cost a marital deduction. Where a trust gives a spouse income for life and says nothing about timing, income is due at least annually. A failure to distribute under it was among the grounds for a trustee removal the Third District affirmed in 2023.

Part XIV is complete now. Section 736.1411 is the provision that makes a directed trust work and the one a beneficiary will like least. The trustee has no duty to monitor the director, and the director none to monitor the trustee, though either may speak up without thereby taking on a continuing duty. Section 736.141 is its counterweight, requiring each to hand over what the other’s role needs, and it holds the only direct beneficiary right in the Part. A qualified beneficiary can demand information from a director in writing, and gets nothing without asking. Section 736.1412 carries all of this across to cotrustees, and concentrates the liability. Where one cotrustee can direct the others, that trustee answers to the beneficiaries as if the others were not in office and alone bears the obligation to account and to defend.

The remaining three complete the symmetry. Section 736.1413 gives a director a trustee’s limitation period, and a document the director never sent can start it. Section 736.1414 gives a director a trustee’s defences. Section 736.1415 makes accepting the appointment consent to Florida jurisdiction, which read with section 736.1403(2) means one Florida director can anchor a trust here and make every other director suable here. Section 736.1416 lists the thirty-one trustee provisions that apply to a director, and its silences are deliberate. Anything left off is intended not to apply. It also forbids one thing pointedly, since a trust director may not ask a court to remove the trustee.

Part XV is complete, and with it the whole of chapter 736. The Part is short and every section earns its place. Section 736.1511 is what the rest of it serves. It ties a Florida community property trust to the federal basis provision that couples are actually chasing, and it does so with the federal reference frozen as of January 1, 2021 rather than rolling. A Florida statute can fix the character of property under Florida law; whether the federal consequence follows is a federal question, and the pages say so rather than promising a result.

The two moments that matter are death and divorce. Section 736.1507 splits the trust in half at the first death, and its last sentence reaches well beyond this Part. The decedent’s half is excluded from the elective estate, so a community property trust reduces what a surviving spouse can claim against the deceased spouse’s wishes. Section 736.1508 is blunter still. On divorce the trust terminates, the split is half each, and section 61.075, Florida’s equitable distribution statute, does not apply. Whoever contributed more is the one giving something up.

Section 736.1506 is the cost side. A creditor of one spouse reaches that spouse’s half, including for a debt incurred before the marriage, and the agreement may expose more than half but has no stated power to expose less. This is not an asset protection device. Section 736.151 is what makes the Act usable for the family home, solving three separate homestead problems at once (constitutional status, the tax exemption, and the Save Our Homes assessment cap).

Three more fill in the frame. Section 736.1504 makes the trust revocable by default and contains a subsection that overrides the entire Code. While both spouses live they are the only qualified beneficiaries, even of an irrevocable trust, so the children are entitled to no accountings at all. Section 736.1505 opens the Act to couples where neither spouse lives in Florida, the connection being a qualified trustee rather than domicile. Section 736.1509 is the one floor nobody can draft through. A child’s right to support is unaffected. And section 736.1512 imports prenuptial agreement law for challenges, with a disclosure ground that is conjunctive and therefore much harder to make out than it looks.

Part XV, the Community Property Trust Act, arrived in the same 2021 act. Florida is a separate property state, and section 736.1501 names the Part that lets a married couple opt out of that by trust, usually for the income tax treatment of assets when the first spouse dies. Section 736.1502 holds the date gate, and it is wider than people expect. A trust qualifies if it was created, amended, restated or modified on or after July 1, 2021, so an older trust can be brought in by amendment. Its 2025 amendment was made remedial, so it reaches trusts whenever created. Section 736.1503 sets four requirements, and the fourth is a warning in capital letters that the Legislature drafted itself, naming creditors, divorce and death, and saying that separate counsel for each spouse is strongly advisable though not required.

Part XIV, the Florida Uniform Directed Trust Act, is the newest regime in the chapter and the one most likely to affect a modern trust. If your trust names a “trust protector”, “adviser” or “director”, this is the law that governs the arrangement. Section 736.1408 is the part people accepting the role do not expect. A trust director is a fiduciary by default, judged as a sole trustee if acting alone and as a cotrustee if acting jointly. There is one carve out, and it is unusual. A director who is a licensed health care provider owes nothing under the Part when acting in that capacity.

Section 736.1409 is the hard one. A directed trustee must follow a direction even where the direction may itself be a breach of trust, and the trustee’s only floor is its own willful misconduct, a term the drafters deliberately left undefined. That changed the law. Before 2021 a trustee could refuse a direction that was manifestly contrary to the trust or known to be a serious breach. The article by the chair of the Act’s drafting committee says in terms that the new standard is a departure from the old one. The same article explains why subsection (3) exists at all, which is something no reading of the statute would reveal.

Section 736.1405 lists the powers the Act does not reach, and the consequence is bigger than the section admits. The holder of an excluded power owes no fiduciary duty at all unless the trust imposes one. A power to remove trustees is on that list. Section 736.1406 confines a director to the powers actually granted, since the Act supplies no defaults, and section 736.1407 holds a director to a trustee’s rules on exactly two subjects, both of which protect somebody outside the family. Section 736.1403 applies the Act to trusts of any age but only to decisions made from July 1, 2021, and lets a single Florida trust director anchor a trust’s place of administration here. Section 736.1401 names the Act and explains its odd numbering.

Part XII is complete now too. Section 736.1209 is the voluntary route into permanent charity supervision, with no way back stated. Section 736.1210 is a construction rule that points at state policy rather than the settlor’s intent, which is the reverse of how the rest of the chapter works. And section 736.1211 is unlike anything else in chapter 736. It regulates state agencies and local governments rather than trustees, limiting what they may require of charities and foundations.

Part XII, charitable trusts, is federal tax law written into Florida trusts by statute, and no Florida court has ever cited any of it. The Part exists because the federal Tax Reform Act of 1969 required private foundation governing instruments to contain specific prohibitions; rather than make every foundation amend its deed, states wrote the prohibitions in by operation of law. Section 736.1204 is the substance. Distribute so as not to incur the federal payout tax, and do not engage in self dealing, retain excess business holdings, make jeopardising investments or make taxable expenditures. Its opening subsection is the only genuinely Florida duty in the Part, and it is a striking one, because it runs partly for the benefit of a donor, who is not a beneficiary.

The machinery around it is unusual. Section 736.1206 lets a trustee amend the trust with no court at all, which is remarkable in a chapter where modification normally needs a judge or unanimous consent, though the power is narrow and reaches only the distribution rule. Section 736.1205 reads like an opt out and is drafted as a duty. The verb is shall notify, and once notice reaches the Attorney General the duties switch off entirely. Section 736.1208 lets a trustee give up the power to choose which charities benefit, and one version of that is one-way. Name a public charity and the trust must thereafter be operated exclusively for it and be supervised by it, with no route back on the face of the section.

Section 736.1201 holds the definitions, four of the five written by Congress rather than the Legislature and incorporated as amended, so the target moves without Florida acting. Section 736.1202 carries the oldest date in the chapter, November 1, 1971, and opens with four words that subordinate the whole Part to the terms of the trust. Section 736.1203 is the hinge that makes those duties the trustee’s own, and section 736.1207 confirms the Part took nothing away from a court’s power to permit deviation.

Part XIII is complete now as well. Section 736.1301 is not what its heading suggests. It authorises no electronic signature and confers nothing, being a reverse preemption switch telling the federal E-SIGN Act to stand aside where the Trust Code speaks. Section 736.1302 is the severability clause, and its significance is entirely contingent, since nothing in the Code has been held invalid.

Part XI, the rules of construction, is complete now, and it is where the family arguments actually get decided. Section 736.1101 sets the terms for the rest. The settlor’s intent controls, but only as expressed in the document, and only after the non-overridable list in section 736.0105(2) has had its say. Section 736.1103 makes per stirpes the default for gifts to descendants, which is not what most people assume, and the gap between per stirpes and per capita is enormous in a family with uneven branches. Section 736.1102 decides who is inside a class at all, and the leading case is a striking one. A beneficiary adopted a 27 year old, which changed who would inherit, and the Fourth District held there is no statutory basis to stop an adult adoptee inheriting. Florida looked at the Uniform Probate Code restriction in the 1970s and chose not to enact it.

Three more of the Part are the ones people search for. Section 736.1105 is the divorce rule. Marriage and new children revoke nothing, but divorce voids the provisions favouring an ex spouse, who is then treated as having died. The Second District has pointed out the gap sitting beside it, which is that no statute does the same for an irrevocable trust. Section 736.1106 is antilapse, where two words of survivorship switch the rule off and a residuary clause expressly does not, and where one trust fell between two statutes and landed on the common law. Section 736.1104 is the slayer rule, extended in 2021 to a conviction for elder abuse or exploitation, and it uses four different standards of proof to get there.

Section 736.1109 is the homestead provision and the one with the hardest edges. Title passes by constitutional rule at the moment of death, a devise giving a surviving spouse less than a fee simple fails regardless of intent, and the Fourth District has held that reformation cannot cure it, because a void devise cannot be revived retroactively. Section 736.1107 handles stock splits and mergers, and carries a sentence in tension with the whole Part. The statute “does not require or allow for an inquiry into the intent of the testator”. Section 736.1110 is the newest section in the chapter, fourteen months old, and it answers the most common family argument there is. A lifetime gift comes off an inheritance only if a document says so.

Finally, section 736.1303 is the provision behind the date we use constantly. The Code applies to all trusts created before, on or after July 1, 2007, and its rules of construction reach documents written before it existed. It is also the reason a search result from 1985 cannot be a case about chapter 736.

Part IX, trust investments, is two sections long and one of them matters enormously. Section 736.0901 is a single sentence sending every investment question out of the Trust Code and into chapter 518, which is why reading chapter 736 for investment duties gets you nowhere. Section 736.0902 then takes life insurance back out again, switching off six prudent investor duties for a policy held in trust. It governs every irrevocable life insurance trust in Florida and no court has cited it in the sixteen years since it was enacted. The part practitioners get wrong is that five of those six duties are not switched off by default, and a single beneficiary can keep them on with a written objection inside thirty days.

Part X is now complete. The additions are the practical ones. Section 736.1017 is the answer to a bank demanding your whole trust document. A certification proves who may act and what they may do, and the statute says expressly that it need not contain the dispositive terms. Section 736.1018 runs the other way and is harsher than people expect, requiring anyone paid improperly from a trust to return it with interest from the date of payment, with only three defences and good faith not among them. Section 736.1003 disposes of the most common complaint there is. Absent a breach, a trustee is not liable for a loss, or for not having made a profit.

Two more repay attention. Section 736.1014 carries a heading about limitations and contains no deadline at all; it is a channelling rule that sends a dead settlor’s creditors into the probate estate rather than letting them sue the revocable trust, while expressly preserving claims that do not depend on the settlor’s own liability. And section 736.1015 holds the sharpest trap in the Part. Put a general partnership interest into your revocable trust and the statute makes you personally liable for the partnership’s obligations as if you were a general partner. That is the opposite of what most people think a trust does.

Part I and Part II are finished too. Section 736.0101 names the chapter, and matters mostly for the date behind it. The Code took effect July 1, 2007, which is the single most useful filter in Florida trust research. Section 736.0112 spares an out of state trustee from qualifying here just to receive a distribution, and preserves a banking statute that does the real work. Section 736.02025 allows service by signed receipt delivery where only in rem relief is sought, and was created by the same 2013 act that repealed section 736.0205, which is why the Part II numbering looks the way it does.

Part I, general provisions, and Part III, representation. Part I is nearly complete now and Part III is finished. Section 736.0102 draws the outer boundary. Eleven kinds of arrangement are excluded from the Code outright, including the ordinary bank account held in trust for someone, which the Fourth District has confirmed falls outside the revocable trust rules entirely. Section 736.0103 holds the twenty seven definitions the rest of the chapter runs on, and carries a trap worth knowing. The section has grown from twenty one definitions to twenty seven, so subsection (16) meant settlor in a 2010 case and qualified beneficiary in a 2017 one, and both courts were right. Section 736.0104 decides when you knew something, which is where limitations arguments are actually won, and the single decision on it holds that knowing about an amendment is not the same as the delivery the trust required.

Section 736.0109 is the one we would push hardest at a beneficiary. It lets a trustee give notice by posting documents to a website, and the statute itself requires the authorization to warn you that this may start a limitations period as short as six months even if you never open it. No Florida court has ever construed it. Section 736.0111 is the opposite kind of provision, a way to settle almost any trust matter without a judge, limited only by what a court could properly have approved, and what the parties agree becomes part of the terms of the trust itself.

Part III is the quietest corner of the chapter and one of the most consequential, because it decides whose consent counts. Section 736.0301 states the effect. What your representative does binds you as though you had done it, and an accounting delivered to them can start your clock. Section 736.0302 covers holders of a power of appointment, section 736.0303 parents and fiduciaries, and section 736.0304 virtual representation by someone with a substantially identical interest. Section 736.0305 is the backstop, and the reason nonjudicial settlements work at all. A court appointed representative can act with no lawsuit pending. Four of those five sections have never been cited by any Florida court. We publish that as a finding.

Three general provisions are worth reading before any of the specific ones. Section 736.0106 is a single sentence establishing that the common law of trusts and principles of equity supplement the Code rather than being replaced by it, which is the answer to any argument that a doctrine died because the statute does not mention it. Section 736.0110 hands the rights of a qualified beneficiary to three people the definition would otherwise miss, including the person appointed to enforce a trust for a pet, who would otherwise have no right to an accounting from anybody. And section 736.1013 decides when a claimant reaches the trustee personally instead of the trust. Contracts turn on how the trustee signed, torts turn on personal fault. A trustee once cited that subsection to win summary judgment and the judge quoted it back at him, because a statute that makes liability depend on fault is not a defence to a claim alleging fault.

Part V, creditors’ claims and spendthrift provisions. Whether a creditor can reach a beneficiary’s interest, what a spendthrift clause does and does not stop, what happens to a trust the settlor created for themselves, and the notice of trust a trustee files at the settlor’s death. This is the Part that decides whether a trust protects anything, and it is badly misunderstood in the places people usually read about it. Two of its sections are annotated now, and together they hold the whole tension. Section 736.0504 is the shield, under which a judgment creditor of more than a million dollars could not reach a discretionary trust even where the beneficiary was running it himself, and section 736.0503 is the exception, under which a child, spouse, or former spouse holding a support order can garnish the distributions the trustee makes, including the ones paid to third parties on the beneficiary’s behalf.

Section 736.0505, claims against the person who created the trust, is annotated now as well, and it taught us something about how to read a gap. It decides whether a trust you set up for your own benefit protects anything, which is the question most asset-protection marketing is built around, and no Florida appellate court has construed it in any decision we could locate. Our first pass stopped there. A second pass through the federal courts in Florida found where this section’s law actually lives, and the reason is obvious in hindsight. This question reaches a judge through a bankruptcy case or a collection fight, not a family dispute. Two Florida bankruptcy decisions apply it, running on an Eleventh Circuit rule from 2002, and one of them refused to read a Belize trust under Belize law at all. Section 736.0507 is annotated now too, and it is the one that answers what a creditor of the settlor can reach after death. Property in a revocable trust stays available to the estate’s creditors, and the trustee has to pay when the probate estate runs short. Sections 736.0501 and 736.0506 are still open in both directions.

Part IV, creation, validity, modification, and termination. The Part that answers the question people ask most often about a trust they cannot change, which is whether a court can change it anyway. Ten of its sections are annotated now, and read together they say something the individual pages do not. Florida gives a court several routes into an irrevocable trust, and the settlor’s intent narrows every one of them.

Section 736.04113 is the best-litigated section in this series, with five Florida appellate decisions, including one where a divorce court had no authority to touch a trust because nobody with standing had asked, and two where the change was refused outright. Its companion section 736.04115 lets a court modify a trust in the beneficiaries’ best interests, which sounds broad until you read the one decision applying it. Every beneficiary agreed the trust should end, the trial court agreed, and the Second District reversed, because what the beneficiaries wanted was their money now and the settlor had decided otherwise.

Section 736.0415, reformation, is the deepest section in the Part, with six decisions marking out a statute that can rewrite a perfectly clear trust and still cannot fix a signing done without enough witnesses, cannot respond to circumstances the settlor never foresaw, and has nothing to do where the words already match the intent. Section 736.0412 is the route that avoids a judge entirely, on unanimous agreement after the settlor’s death, and it overrides both a spendthrift clause and a clause forbidding amendment. Section 736.0410 lists the ways a trust simply ends, and quietly gives two different groups of beneficiaries two different rights to object.

Two more sections decide whether a trust exists at all, which is a different question from whether it can be changed. Section 736.0402 lists five requirements for creating one, and only a single Florida decision has applied any of them. A trust signed the same afternoon a court confirmed the settlor’s right to contract had been removed was held void. That page also reports something a summary of the statute will not tell you, which is that Florida courts deciding whether a trust exists often use older case law tests that do not match the statute’s list. Section 736.0403 is the signing rule. A revocable trust that gives property away at death needs two witnesses, strictly, and reformation will not rescue one that lacks them. It also holds an escape hatch most readers never reach, because the whole analysis can turn on where the settlor was domiciled.

The Part is now complete. Section 736.0413 codifies cy pres, the doctrine that redirects a charitable gift whose purpose has failed, and the only Florida decision naming it is a Supreme Court footnote in a class action case explaining where the term came from. Section 736.0417 lets a trustee combine or divide trusts without a court, and even backdate a division, with no decision anywhere reviewing how far that reaches.

Four more of the Part sit underneath all of that, because they set out what a trust has to be for. Section 736.0404 requires a lawful purpose that is not contrary to public policy and is possible to achieve, and the one Florida appeal to raise it declined to decide the question as premature. Section 736.0407 is the oral trust rule, and Florida allows one. No writing is required except where other law demands it, but creation and terms both need clear and convincing evidence. Section 736.0409 permits a trust for a noncharitable purpose with no beneficiary at all, capped at 21 years, which is how a trust for the upkeep of a grave or a boat is done. And section 736.0405, charitable purposes and enforcement, is where the Part met the news. A judge of the Fifth District read the words “among others” in subsection (3) as inclusive rather than exclusive, and the following year the Legislature added a second sentence barring another state’s attorney general from Florida charitable trusts entirely.

Six of these pages report that no Florida court has construed the section at all, which we publish as findings rather than leaving blank. Section 736.0406, which voids a trust procured by undue influence, is the most surprising of them, and it carries a live question. The Legislature added a sentence in 2011 reaching revocations, and the leading Florida case refusing to let anyone attack a revocation was decided two years earlier under the older text. Section 736.0414 lets a trustee close a trust under $50,000 with no court involved and no appellate guidance on how. Section 736.0416 permits retroactive modification for tax purposes and has never been tested. And section 736.04114 is a statute with an expiry date, written for the single year in which the federal estate tax did not exist.

We are not putting dates on what comes next. Each page in this series takes a full pass through the section, the published opinions construing it, and the official text, and we would rather publish one that holds up than three that do not. In the meantime, if your question sits in Part V or Part VIII, it is a question we can answer in a consult today. Our Florida trust litigation page walks through how those disputes run, and our Florida irrevocable trust page covers the trusts where creditor questions come up most.

When You Need More Than the Statute

You can read every word of chapter 736 and still not know where you stand. That is not a failure of the reading. It is how the Code is built. It sets the floor, and your document and your facts decide almost everything above it.

Which is why the two questions we start with are always the same. What does your trust actually say, in the paragraphs nobody reads. And what actually happened, in order, with dates.

If you are planning, the work is making the document say what you mean and signing it the way the law and the trust itself require, so that no one has to litigate your intent later. Start with how a Florida revocable living trust works if you are building from scratch, or amendment versus restatement if you are changing something you already have. Planning work is quoted flat at the consult and we honor the quote; the posted fees are on our pricing page, and government costs such as recording fees are additional and passed through at cost.

If a dispute has already started, the work is different. It is reading the trust and every amendment in order, pinning down what was sent and when, and telling you honestly which lane your claim belongs in and whether a deadline has already closed it. See Florida trust litigation. Disputes are quoted after we have seen the documents, because the work depends on what actually happened.

The consult is a free 30 minutes, and there is no charge for hearing an answer you did not want. We will tell you when the statute is on your side, when it is not, and when the honest answer is that no Florida court has decided the question. Book a free consult →

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources of Law

• Fla. Stat. chapter 736, the Florida Trust Code. Official text, Online Sunshine. The chapter is organized into the fifteen Parts listed on this page, with the section ranges shown. Enacted by ch. 2006-217, Laws of Florida. Sections relied on for this page: §736.0101 (short title, “Florida Trust Code”); §736.0102 (scope: express trusts, charitable or noncharitable, and the arrangements the Code does not reach, including land trusts under §689.071 except as provided there); §736.0105 (default and mandatory rules: the terms of a trust prevail over the Code except for the listed items); §736.1303 (application to existing relationships: on July 1, 2007 the Code applies to all trusts created before, on, or after that date, except as otherwise provided in the Code, with acts done before that date unaffected and limitations periods already running under prior law preserved). Parts XIV and XV were added by ch. 2021-183. (retrieved 2026-08-12)
• Part VI, revocable trusts, quoted or summarized from the official text: §736.0601 (capacity of settlor of a revocable trust, the same capacity required to make a will; history s. 6, ch. 2006-217); §736.0602 (revocation or amendment of a revocable trust; history s. 6, ch. 2006-217; s. 32, ch. 2011-210); §736.0603 (settlor’s powers; powers of withdrawal; history s. 6, ch. 2006-217; s. 6, ch. 2021-183, which added subsection (3)); §736.0604 (limitation on an action contesting the validity of a revocable trust; history s. 6, ch. 2006-217). (retrieved 2026-08-12)
• Ch. 2006-217, Laws of Florida, the act that created the Florida Trust Code, effective July 1, 2007. Every Part VI section carries s. 6 of that act in its history line. (retrieved 2026-08-12)
• Described, not quoted, on this page: Grassfield v. Grassfield, 381 So. 3d 628 (Fla. 2d DCA 2023) (no appellate court had defined substantial compliance under §736.0602 since 2007); Lunding v. Fantini, No. CA21-0840 (Fla. 7th Cir. Ct., St. Johns Cty. Aug. 19, 2025), 2025 Fla. Cir. LEXIS 3936 (a trial-level order, persuasive only, observing in a footnote that there appear to be no Florida cases directly addressing §736.0604); Gossett v. Gossett, 182 So. 3d 694 (Fla. 4th DCA 2015) (the only Florida district court of appeal decision citing §736.0601, and it cites the section in the recitation of the counts pleaded rather than construing it; the decision’s holding concerns the equitable renunciation rule). The courts’ verbatim language for the first two appears on the linked annotation pages. (retrieved 2026-08-12)
• Quotation note: the passages in quotation marks on this page reproduce the Legislature’s own statutory text, which is a public record. Court decisions are described here in our own words, with the verbatim language kept on the annotation pages that carry it. Nothing on this page is drawn from a commercial research service.
• The decisions described on this page are rulings in other parties’ cases, not matters handled by this firm. Outcomes depend on the specific documents and facts of each case, and nothing here predicts a result.

Updated on August 13, 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 chapter 736 applies to your trust depends on your specific documents and facts, which we review at a free consult. Please do not send confidential details until we have connected.