Inheriting a House in Florida: Now What?

1. Start With the Deed, Because the Deed Decides Everything

Before you talk to a realtor, a buyer, or a sibling, find out how the house was titled. Pull the most recent deed from the county’s official records (most Florida counties post them online for free). What it says determines whether you are weeks away from clear title or months away. If a stepparent is in the picture, start with whether a stepparent can keep you from inheriting the family home.

If there was a lady bird deed or the house was in a trust, you may not need probate at all. A lady bird deed (an enhanced life estate deed) passes the home to the named beneficiaries automatically at death. Clearing title is mostly paperwork, recording the death certificate and the right supporting affidavits. The same is generally true for a home owned by a revocable trust; the successor trustee can deal with it under the trust’s terms. Here is exactly what to do with a lady bird deed after a death →

If the house was in the decedent’s sole name, it has to go through probate before anyone can sell it. Probate is the court process that moves title from the person who died to the people who inherit. Until it runs, no heir can sign a deed a title company will insure. Depending on the size of the estate and how long ago the death occurred, that may be a full formal administration or the faster, cheaper summary administration. Either way, start it sooner rather than later; the house is in limbo until you do.

One more titling wrinkle is worth checking. If the home was owned jointly with a right of survivorship (common between spouses), it may have passed to the surviving co-owner automatically. The deed will tell you.

2. The Mortgage Follows the House, Not You

Many heirs panic about the mortgage. Take a breath. The loan is secured by the house, not by you personally. Inheriting a mortgaged home does not make you personally liable for the debt, and federal law (the Garn-St Germain Act) generally blocks the lender from calling the whole loan due simply because the home passed to a relative at death.

What the lender can do is foreclose if the payments stop. So the practical rules are simple.

• Keep the payments current, even while probate is pending. If the estate has funds, the personal representative can pay from there; if not, the heirs who want to keep the house should cover it.
• Tell the servicer about the death. Send the death certificate and ask to be confirmed as a successor in interest, which entitles you to information about the loan.
• Decide later. Once title is clear, you can usually keep paying as is, formally assume the loan, refinance into your own name, or sell and pay it off at closing. You do not have to solve this in week one.

One caution belongs here. A reverse mortgage works differently and does come due after the borrower’s death, on a clock. If the home had one, get advice quickly.

3. Florida Homestead: Protection From Creditors, and Some Special Rules

If the house was the decedent’s primary Florida residence, it was probably their homestead, and that is good news for you. Under Florida law, a homestead that passes to the owner’s spouse or heirs generally passes protected from the decedent’s creditors. Credit card companies and most other creditors of the estate cannot force the sale of the family home to get paid. That protection is one of the strongest in the country, and it travels to you with the house.

The flip side is that homestead has special inheritance rules when a spouse or minor child survives. Florida restricts how a homestead can be left in a will in those situations, and if the rules were broken the surviving spouse may end up with a life estate (the right to live there for life) while the children hold the remainder, or the spouse can elect a half interest instead. If you are a surviving spouse, or you inherited alongside one, read how Florida homestead works for a surviving spouse →

4. Inheriting With Siblings: What Happens When One Wants to Sell

This is where inherited houses turn into family fights. When several heirs inherit one house, they own it as tenants in common, where each holds an undivided fraction of the whole and nobody owns any particular room. No survivorship, no majority rule. Your brother cannot sell the house out from under you, but he also does not need your permission to sell his share, and any co-owner can file a partition case asking a court to divide or sell the property.

For inherited family homes, Florida’s heirs-property law softens what used to be a brutal process. When a court finds the home qualifies as heirs property, it must order a neutral appraisal of the whole property, and the co-owners who want to keep the home get a 45-day right to buy out the co-owner seeking a sale, at the appraised value times that person’s fraction, with no lowball discount. If no buyout happens, the court prefers physically dividing the property where that is practical, and if a sale truly is necessary, it is an open-market sale through a broker at no less than the appraised value, not a courthouse-steps auction.

Those protections matter, but a partition case is still a lawsuit against your own family. The better sequence is almost always agreement first, court second. One sibling buys the others out at an agreed price, or everyone signs a co-ownership agreement covering expenses and an eventual sale, or the family lists the house together. We negotiate and paper those deals, and when a co-heir will not be reasonable, we litigate partition and inheritance disputes in court →

5. Taxes: Mostly Better News Than You Fear

Capital gains. The step-up usually saves you. When you inherit, your tax basis in the house resets to its value at the date of death. Sell soon after, and the taxable gain is usually small or zero, because you are only taxed on appreciation after the death, not the decades of growth before it. This is the single most misunderstood piece of inheriting real estate. Here is how the step-up in basis works →

Inheritance tax. Florida has none. No Florida inheritance tax, no Florida estate tax, nothing owed to the state for receiving the house. The details, including the handful of other states that do tax inheritances →

Property taxes. This is the one real trap. The decedent’s homestead exemption and their Save Our Homes cap (the limit on how fast the assessed value can rise) do not transfer automatically. If you make the home your own permanent residence, you must apply for your own exemption with the county property appraiser, generally by March 1 of the year after you take title. If nobody qualifies, the property is reassessed at full market value and the cap resets, and on a home the family has owned for decades the tax bill can jump dramatically. Some narrow exceptions exist (certain transfers to a spouse or other circumstances), so check before assuming the worst, but never assume the old tax bill is your tax bill.

6. Call the Insurance Company Before Anything Else Goes Wrong

One quiet, urgent item remains. The homeowner’s insurance policy was issued to the person who died, and most policies treat a vacant home very strictly. Coverage can shrink or lapse after the home sits empty for as little as 30 to 60 days. Call the carrier, report the death, and ask what the estate or the heirs need to keep the house covered (often a vacant-home endorsement or a new policy). A burst pipe in an uninsured, empty house can cost more than the entire probate. While you are at it, secure the property, forward the mail, and keep the utilities on enough to prevent mold and freeze damage. If you are in the first days and everything feels equally urgent, this is close to the whole list of things that genuinely are, and we separated the rest in what is urgent after a parent dies and what can wait. A vacant house also draws code-enforcement attention, and code liens attach to the property itself. Our county guides map every office that now matters to you in Broward, Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, Hillsborough, Orange, Pinellas, Duval, Lee, Collier, Sarasota, Brevard, Volusia, Polk, Pasco, Marion, Sumter, Manatee, Seminole, St. Johns, and Charlotte.

What Happens When You Inherit a House That Is Paid Off?

A paid-off house removes the mortgage question entirely, which is the one piece of good news, and it leaves three costs that keep running whether anybody lives there or not. Property tax comes first, and it is the one that changes, because the decedent’s homestead exemption and Save Our Homes cap do not carry over to you. Insurance comes second, and a vacant policy is a different and more expensive animal. Maintenance comes third, and on an older Florida house the roof and the air conditioning are the two line items that decide the year.

The reason people ask this question is usually not the costs, though. With no mortgage the equity is the entire asset, and a house worth $400,000 free and clear is $400,000 that several people now own together. Nobody has to sell to pay a lender, so the pressure that forces a decision in a mortgaged estate is absent, and the house can sit for years while the taxes and the premiums accrue against everyone’s share. The paid-off house is the one most likely to still be sitting empty three years later.

Frequently Asked Questions

Common Situations

The out-of-state daughter. A woman in New Jersey inherits her mother’s Naples condo, sole name, small mortgage. We open a summary administration wherever you are, she keeps the payments current, and four months later she sells with clear title. The step-up in basis means almost no capital gain on the sale.

The lady bird shortcut. Three siblings learn their father recorded a lady bird deed years ago. No probate is needed; we record the death certificate and the supporting affidavits, and the title company clears the sale within weeks. The only surprise is the property-tax reassessment, which we flag before they price the house.

The brother who wants out. Two sisters want to keep the family home; their brother demands a sale. Before he files a partition case, we get a neutral appraisal and negotiate a buyout of his one-third at appraised value, with the sisters refinancing to fund it. The house stays in the family and nobody pays litigation costs.

The reverse mortgage clock. A son inherits his mother’s condo and assumes he can take his time, the way he could with a regular mortgage. But her loan was a reverse mortgage, and a reverse mortgage comes due after the borrower dies, on a deadline. He calls the servicer in week one, gets the payoff figure, and lists the condo; it sells in time, and the equity above the loan comes to him instead of being lost to foreclosure. With a reverse mortgage, the first call to the servicer is the step that protects everything else.

Sources of Law

• Fla. Stat. §732.401 (descent of homestead; spouse’s life estate or election of a half tenancy in common) and §732.4015 (restrictions on devise of homestead with a surviving spouse or minor child). flsenate.gov (retrieved 2026-06-10)
• No partition while a life estate is outstanding: Barden v. Pappas, 532 So. 2d 707 (Fla. 5th DCA 1988) (homestead descending as a life estate to the widow with the remainder to two adult children of a prior marriage; an exchange of deeds made the widow and one child tenants in common of the life estate, and they were "nevertheless not entitled to partition against the remainder"; final judgment reversed and the partition sale set aside), resting on Weed v. Knox, 157 Fla. 896, 27 So. 2d 419 (1946) (a remainderman cannot partition against another remainderman while a life estate is outstanding) and Garcia-Tunon v. Garcia-Tunon, 472 So. 2d 1378 (Fla. 2d DCA 1985) (nor can the life tenant partition against the remaindermen). (Opinion read 2026-09-08.)
• Fla. Stat. §§64.201 to 64.211 (Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act: appraisal at §64.206, the 45-day cotenant buyout at §64.207, partition-in-kind preference at §64.208, open-market sale at §64.210). flsenate.gov (retrieved 2026-06-10)
• Art. X, §4, Fla. Const. (homestead exemption from forced sale; inurement to the surviving spouse or heirs). flsenate.gov (retrieved 2026-06-10)
• 12 U.S.C. §1701j-3(d) (Garn-St Germain Depository Institutions Act; due-on-sale clause generally unenforceable on a transfer to a relative resulting from the borrower’s death).
• Fla. Stat. §196.031 (homestead property-tax exemption) and §193.155 (Save Our Homes assessment cap and reassessment on change of ownership). flsenate.gov (retrieved 2026-06-10)

The Fight Is Almost Never About the House

In 14 years of law practice, the people who inherit a Florida house rarely disagree about the house, and almost always disagree about the money it costs to keep.

A common question I hear is, "What happens when you inherit a house that is paid off?", and the money is why people ask it. The pattern I see is one heir living in the property and another heir paying toward it, or nobody paying and the county keeping score. What I ask for in the first meeting is not the will. I ask who has paid the property tax and the insurance since the death, and for how many months, because that answer tells me what the real dispute is and roughly what it will take to settle. A reassessed tax bill on a house the family held for thirty years can double, and I have watched that single number turn a family that agreed about everything into a family that agrees about nothing.

I have come across a Florida case that shows how much the answer depends on what each person actually owns. A man died owning his homestead, survived by a widow and two adult children from an earlier marriage. Under Florida’s rules for homestead the widow took a life estate and the two children each took half of the remainder. The widow wanted the property sold and filed for partition. The son sided with her and told the court he wanted the same relief. The daughter refused, and she raised the one defense that mattered, which was that a life tenant has no right to partition against the people who hold the remainder.

What happened next is the part I remember. In the middle of the trial the widow and the son traded deeds, she conveying half her life estate to him and he conveying half his remainder to her, so that the two of them would look like ordinary co-owners and the sale could proceed. The trial court ordered partition and the property was sold, and the daughter challenged the sale price as grossly inadequate on top of everything else. The appellate court reversed the judgment and set the partition sale aside. The exchange of deeds had made the widow and the son tenants in common of the life estate, and that still gave them no right to partition against the remainder.

Practice pointer. Where a Florida homestead descends as a life estate to a surviving spouse with the remainder to children, no one can force a sale by partition while that life estate stands, which is the reverse of the ordinary co-ownership rule higher up this page. So the first question I ask is never who wants to sell. I ask what estate each person holds, and I read the order that closed the probate rather than taking anyone’s word for it. A surviving spouse has six months from the death to elect an undivided half interest as a tenant in common instead of the life estate, the election is made by a recorded notice, and it cannot be undone once it is made. Making that election, or missing it in the first half year, is what determines whether this house can ever be sold over somebody’s objection.

Avoid trying to manufacture a co-ownership so that a sale becomes possible. Trading deeds among the willing parties is the move that failed in the case above, and it failed after a sale had already been held, which is the most expensive moment to find out. Where the parties genuinely want a sale, every holder of an interest signing one contract is faster than any lawsuit and costs a fraction of it.

An honest limit belongs here. Florida’s heirs property law changed how a partition proceeds once partition is available, with an appraisal and a buyout window, and none of that reaches the separate question of whether partition is available at all. Whether the spousal election was made, and whether it was made in time, is a records question I have to answer from the probate file before I can tell you what your options are.

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, 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.