How Much Does a Will Cost in Florida?

The Short Answer

A standalone Florida will, the document formally called a last will and testament, is a flat $299 at our firm. Most people, though, are better off with a complete will-based plan at $1,200 for an individual or $1,950 for a couple, because a will by itself leaves real gaps. It is worth a minute to understand what the higher number adds, since it is usually the difference between a document and an actual plan. Whether you write a will on its own or as part of a plan, the fee is flat and posted before we start. See how Florida wills work →

What a Will Does, and What It Doesn’t

A will is your voice in the probate court. It names who inherits, who raises your minor children, and who is in charge of carrying out your wishes. That is genuinely important, and everyone should have one. What a will does not do tends to catch families off guard. It does not avoid probate (it guides probate), and it does nothing at all while you are alive. If you were in the hospital and unable to manage your affairs tomorrow, a will would sit in a drawer, useless, because its job only begins when you die.

Why Most People Want the Fuller Plan

The $1,200 will-based plan fills the two gaps a will leaves wide open.

• A durable power of attorney, so a person you trust can pay your bills, handle your accounts, and keep your life running if you cannot.
• Your health-care documents, meaning a surrogate to make medical decisions for you, a living will to state your wishes, and a HIPAA release so your family can talk to your doctors.

Without those, a family facing a sudden illness often has no choice but to ask a court for a guardianship, which is slow, public, and far more expensive than the plan would have been. The extra cost up front buys your family a much easier path later.

Will, Trust, or Deed: What Each Costs

The question I get most about this is, "How much should a will and trust cost in Florida?" A will-based plan is $1,200 for an individual and $1,950 for a couple, a trust-based plan is $3,200 and $4,500, and the reason for the $2,000 difference is that the trust is built to skip probate rather than to guide it. Very few people need both a standalone will and a trust, because the trust plan already contains the will that pours into it.

How Much Does It Cost to Make Your Own Will in Florida?

Almost nothing, which is the honest answer. A blank form off the internet is free, the online will services run about $200, and an attorney-drafted will here is $299, so the whole distance between doing it yourself and having a lawyer do it is under $100. Cost is rarely the reason people hesitate once they see those three numbers next to each other.

The part worth your attention is the signing, because Florida is particular about it and a form cannot watch you. Florida wants you to sign at the end of the document in front of two witnesses, and it wants both of those witnesses to sign in front of you and in front of each other. A separate notarized affidavit at the signing is what lets the will prove itself later without tracking those witnesses down. Get the signing wrong and the document is worth what you paid for it, and nobody discovers the problem while you are still able to fix it. See the full comparison with the online services →

When a Simple Will Is Enough

Plenty of Florida families do not need anything fancier. If your estate is straightforward, your heirs are adults who get along, and you are comfortable with a simple probate, a will-based plan covers you well. And if your main worry is the house, a lady bird deed can keep that out of probate for a few hundred dollars while your will handles the rest. We will help you find the lightest plan that actually does the job.

What’s Included, and What’s Extra

The flat fee covers the drafting, the advice, and coordinating the documents so they work together. The lady bird deed in the plan is the one document that gets recorded, so the only extras are the county recording cost, from $19.20, and a small documentary stamp, passed through at cost. We post the fee up front and honor it for 90 days. See the full price list →

Frequently Asked Questions

Common Situations

The $200 online will that failed. A man fills out a discount will but signs it without the witnesses Florida requires. After he dies, the will is challenged and parts of it do not hold, and his family spends far more untangling it than a proper will would have cost. The document was cheap; the cleanup was not. (See LegalZoom will vs attorney for the full comparison.)

The plan that covered a stroke. A woman buys the $1,200 will-based plan, mostly for the will. A year later she has a stroke. Because the plan included a power of attorney and health-care surrogate, her daughter steps in immediately, with no court, no guardianship, no delay. The documents she almost skipped turned out to be the ones that mattered.

The simple, right-sized plan. A retired couple with one home and two grown children wants the basics done well. A will-based plan, with its lady bird deed on the house, gives them everything they need, and nothing they do not.

The second-marriage will. A widower who remarried late in life bought a $200 online will leaving everything to his daughters from his first marriage. In Florida a will alone cannot cut out a spouse. A surviving spouse can still claim 30% of the estate no matter what the will says, plus rights in the home. Doing that plan properly takes a written marital agreement paired with the will, which no template will ever suggest. The consult that catches this is free; untangling it after a death is not.

Sources of Law

• Florida wills and their execution, and probate, are governed by Fla. Stat. ch. 732 and ch. 733. Durable powers of attorney are governed by ch. 709; health-care directives by ch. 765. (retrieved 2026-06-07)
• Fla. Stat. §732.502(1) governs execution of a Florida will, requiring signature at the end by the testator, in the presence of at least two attesting witnesses, who must then sign in the presence of the testator and of each other. §732.503 provides the self-proving affidavit.
• The case described at the bottom of this page is In re Estate of Pratt, 88 So. 2d 499 (Fla. 1956). It applied former Fla. Stat. §731.19, which made a will "invalid unless it was duly executed at least six months prior to the death of the testator" as to a charitable devise, and it declined to apply dependent relative revocation to revive the charitable gifts in the revoked earlier will. The reasoning that survives is that "[t]he law of wills is calculated to avoid speculation as to the testator's intent and to concentrate upon what he said rather than what he might, or should, have wanted to say." ⚠️ Section 731.19 is no longer part of the Florida Probate Code. Chapter 731 today contains only §§731.005, 731.155, 731.201, 731.301 and 731.401, so the six-month charitable-devise restriction described there is former law and is not a current deadline. (Opinion read and chapter 731 checked 2026-09-08.)
• Advertised fees are honored for 90 days from the posted date; any government costs are additional and passed through at cost. Fees are not a prediction or guarantee of outcome.

What the Price of a Will Does Not Tell Me

In 14 years of law practice, price is the only question some people ask me about a will, and it is the one that tells me least about what they need.

I have a few take-home points.

The first is that the drafting is the cheap part, and I say so at the consult. What I charge for is the twenty minutes before it, where I ask when you last signed a will, who has died since, whether you have remarried, and what you own that will pass outside the document anyway. Nobody at a form service asks those four questions, and every one of them has changed a plan in my office.

The second is what one sentence of boilerplate can do, and I meet it most often in second and third wills. In one case I have reviewed, a Florida man signed a new will three days before he died. The document was complete, it was unambiguous, and it opened with the ordinary sentence that revokes every will made before it. One third of his residuary estate went to five charities he had supported for years, among them a children's home in Jacksonville and a school in Alabama.

Florida law at the time voided a charitable gift unless the will had been signed at least six months before the testator died, and signing three days out missed that by a wide margin. His earlier will, executed properly and well outside the window, had made the same gifts to the same five charities and would have held. The new will had already revoked it.

The charities spent two appeals asking the courts to look at the revoked will and revive the gifts inside it. The courts declined, and the executor's lawyer was not even required to produce the older document. The entire charitable third passed as though the man had died with no will at all, to his widow and children. The refusal to even look at the earlier document is the part I point to when somebody tells me a judge will work out what they must have meant.

What decided the case was the revocation sentence, and the fix would have cost less than the will did. Amending the old will by codicil rather than replacing it would have preserved the gifts, because the six-month clock ran from the date of the will and not from the date of an amendment to it. A lawyer in a similar case out of state gave his client exactly that advice, the client asked for a fresh will instead, and the gifts failed the same way.

Practice pointer. I ask every client who has signed a will before when they signed it and what was in it, because the first paragraph of the new will destroys the old one. Where the change you want is small, such as a different personal representative or one new beneficiary, a codicil amends the will without revoking it, and a codicil is the cheaper document.

Avoid treating the revocation clause as boilerplate because every form contains one. The revocation sentence is the operative provision in the whole instrument for anybody who has signed a will before, and a form has no way of knowing whether the will it wipes out was doing work the new one does not repeat.

An honest limit belongs here. The six-month statute that destroyed those charitable gifts is no longer in the Florida code, so that particular trap is gone. What survives is the rule the court used to get there, which is that Florida reads what a will says rather than what the person signing it meant. What I have seen is that a cheap document fails because nobody reads it again after the one person who could explain it has died.

Kevin D. Klagge, Esq., admitted in Florida since 2012. General information rather than advice on your situation.

Updated on September 8, 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 our posted fees, not legal advice, and no attorney-client relationship is created. The right plan depends on your specific facts, which we confirm at a free consult.