01The Assumption Almost Everyone Makes

"I have a will, so my family won't have to deal with probate." It may be the single most common belief in estate planning — and it has it exactly backwards.

A will doesn't avoid probate. A will is the document probate runs on. Every asset that passes under it must go through Florida's court-supervised process: filed, inventoried, noticed to creditors, and distributed only when a judge's process says so. Your will decides who eventually receives things. It does nothing about the months and fees standing between your family and that word "eventually."

02What Actually Happens Without One

With no trust, your estate lands in formal administration in circuit court. Your personal representative hires an attorney, files the will, publishes notice to creditors, inventories everything you owned, and waits out the statutory process. In Florida, that typically runs six months to two years — and the meter runs the whole way.

Here's what that looks like on a $500,000 Florida estate, using the fee schedule Florida law presumes reasonable:

The Probate Meter on a $500,000 Florida Estate
  • ~$15,000 in attorney fees — the presumed-reasonable schedule under Fla. Stat. 733.6171 ($3,000 on the first $100,000, then 3% of the next $400,000)
  • ~$15,000 more for the personal representative, separately entitled under Fla. Stat. 733.617 — family members often waive it, but it's theirs to claim
  • ~$402 court filing fee, plus publication, bond premiums, appraisals, and accountings
  • 6 to 24 months before the estate closes and your family receives what's theirs
  • A public file — the inventory of what you owned, what it was worth, and who gets it, viewable by anyone
  • A second probate in another state if you own property there — its own filing, its own attorney, its own timeline

Two honest footnotes. The attorney schedule is presumed reasonable, not mandatory — it's negotiable, and many straightforward estates settle for flat fees below it. And extraordinary work (a will contest, selling real estate, tax disputes) bills on top of it, not inside it. The schedule is the starting point, not the ceiling.

Your will decides who eventually gets everything. Probate decides what "eventually" costs.

03The Bill Nobody Budgets For

Because the presumed fees scale with the estate, the cost of skipping a trust grows right alongside everything you've built. Typical figures for Florida formal administration:

Attorney Fees
~3% of the estate
$15,000 presumed reasonable on a $500,000 estate; $30,000 on $1 million. Negotiable — but it's the number the statute starts from.
Personal Representative
The same again
A separate statutory commission of roughly 3%. All told, Florida probate commonly runs 3% to 7% of the gross estate once costs are counted.
The Wait
6 – 24 months
Formal administration's typical span from filing to closing — longer if anyone contests, or if real estate has to be sold along the way.
Out-of-State Property
A second probate
A cabin in Georgia or a condo in Tennessee means ancillary administration in that state — a second court, second attorney, and second set of fees.
These figures reflect Florida's statutory fee schedules and ranges commonly reported by Florida probate sources as of 2026. Actual costs vary by county, estate complexity, and fee arrangements. They're offered for general planning context, not as a cost estimate for any individual situation.

04What It Costs Beyond the Legal Bill

  • A frozen year. While the estate is open, your family largely waits — on the house, the accounts, the distribution. Grief runs on its own schedule; probate runs on the court's.
  • Privacy. The probate file is a public record: your assets, their values, your debts, and your beneficiaries, laid out for anyone curious enough to look.
  • A venue for conflict. Probate is where will contests, elective share fights, and creditor claims play out. An open court process hands any simmering family dispute a courtroom and a deadline to use it.
  • The incapacity gap. A will does nothing while you're alive. If you become incapacitated with no trust, your assets face exactly the guardianship risks covered earlier in this series — a trust is the piece that closes that gap.

05The Fix Costs Almost Nothing by Comparison

A revocable living trust routes around nearly all of it. You create the trust, retitle your assets into it, and keep complete control as trustee — you can spend, sell, amend, or revoke anything, any time. Nothing about your daily life changes.

What changes is what happens when you can't manage things. If you become incapacitated, your chosen successor trustee steps in immediately — no guardianship, no court. When you pass away, that same successor distributes the trust assets to your beneficiaries under the terms you wrote: no probate filing, no statutory fee schedule, no public inventory, no six-to-twenty-four-month wait. Property in another state, held in the trust, passes the same way — no ancillary probate.

Two things a trust honestly requires. First, it only controls assets actually titled into it — an unfunded trust is a binder on a shelf, which is why funding is part of doing it right, along with a "pour-over" will to catch anything missed. Second, it isn't a magic shield: a surviving spouse's elective share and legitimate debts still apply. What it changes is the process — private, immediate, and yours, instead of public, slow, and the court's.

Probate is Florida's default plan for everything you own. It was never the only plan.