Florida Online Wills: A Florida Probate Lawyer’s Guide

Yes — Florida recognises online wills. The Electronic Wills Act has been in force since 2020, and §732.522 lets you sign a will electronically, with witnesses who appear by video and a notary who supervises the session online.

What almost no online will service tells you is that signing is the easy part. Florida attaches three conditions to an electronic will that have nothing to do with the document itself, and two of them decide whether your will survives probate rather than whether it is valid today. This page explains all three, with the statutes, so you can judge for yourself whether the online route fits your situation.

Are online wills legal in Florida?

Yes, with one distinction that causes more trouble than anything else on this subject.

People use “online will” to mean two completely different things.

The first is a form you download, fill in, and print. That is not an electronic will. It is an ordinary paper will, and it lives or dies by §732.502 — the same statute that has governed Florida wills for decades. You must sign at the end of the document, in the presence of two attesting witnesses, and those witnesses must sign in the presence of you and of each other. That last requirement is what kills most homemade wills. The paper came from a website; the law that judges it did not.

The second is a genuine electronic will under §732.522 — a document that is signed electronically, never printed, and witnessed by people who are not in the room. That is the thing the Electronic Wills Act created, and it has its own rules.

Florida does not recognise holographic wills — a will written entirely in your own hand and signed without witnesses is void here, even if it would be valid in another country. It also does not recognise nuncupative, or spoken, wills. If you are working from a form you found online because that is how it was done where you grew up, this is the point where the two systems diverge.

What Florida law requires for a valid electronic will

Under §732.522, an electronic will is validly executed when all of the following are true.

The testator signs the document with an electronic signature. Two witnesses sign as well. The witnesses may be physically present, or they may appear by audio-video communication technology under Chapter 117 — and if they appear remotely, the session must be supervised by an online notary public under §117.285, in an authenticated online notarization session that meets §117.265. The witnesses must be able to hear the testator acknowledge the signature.

The document must also be readable as text at the time of signing. A video recording of you saying what you want is not a will.

Beyond those additions, an electronic will is judged by the same standards as any other Florida will. Capacity, undue influence, and the rules on who may benefit all apply unchanged. §732.521 supplies the definitions the rest of the part runs on, including what counts as an electronic record and who qualifies as a custodian.

Signing a Florida will from outside Florida

You do not have to be in Florida. Under §732.522, an electronic will is deemed to have been executed in this state if the document states that the testator intends to execute it under Florida law and understands that it will be governed by Florida law.

That single provision is what makes the online route genuinely useful for people who own Florida property but spend most of the year somewhere else — the seasonal resident with a condo, the family that keeps a house here after moving north, the owner who has not set foot in the state since closing.

It is worth pairing with a warning that has nothing to do with technology. Under §733.304, a person who is not domiciled in Florida cannot serve as your personal representative unless they are a close relative — an adopted child or adoptive parent, someone related by direct line of descent, a spouse, a sibling, an aunt, uncle, niece or nephew, or a spouse of someone in one of those categories. Naming an out-of-state friend or a business partner as executor is a common and entirely invisible mistake in a downloaded form. The will is valid. The person you chose simply cannot serve.

The question almost nobody answers: is your online will self-proved?

This is the section that matters most, and it is the one you will not find on a will-writing website.

A self-proved will is one the court will accept without tracking down the witnesses. The witnesses swore, at the time of signing, that they watched you sign and watched each other sign, and that sworn statement travels with the document. Without it, your personal representative has to locate two people, years or decades later, and obtain their testimony before the will can be admitted.

For a paper will, self-proof comes from §732.503 — an affidavit signed at execution or at any later date.

For an electronic will, §732.523 sets four conditions, and every one of them must hold:

• The acknowledgment by the testator and the affidavits of the witnesses are made in accordance with §732.503, and form part of or are attached to the electronic record.
• The electronic will designates a qualified custodian.
• The electronic record is held in the custody of a qualified custodian at all times before it is offered to the court for probate.
• The qualified custodian holding the record at the testator’s death provides a sworn certification that the record was in its custody and that the will has not been altered since execution.

Read the third one again. Not “at the time of signing” — at all times. If the electronic record leaves qualified custody at any point between execution and probate, self-proof is gone.

Here is what that means in practice. An electronic will with no qualified custodian is still a valid will. It is simply not self-proved. So your family arrives at probate holding a perfectly good document, and then has to find the two people who witnessed it by video some years earlier, and persuade them to swear to what they saw. That is precisely the cost, delay and uncertainty the online route was supposed to remove.

What a qualified custodian actually is

Not anyone can hold an electronic will. §732.524 requires a qualified custodian to be domiciled in and a resident of Florida, or to be incorporated or organised in Florida, or to have its principal place of business here.

The custodian must keep the electronic record in a secure system, along with the audio-video recording of the signing and the notarial records. It must give you access to your own will, and your nominated personal representative access after your death. It must provide you a paper copy on request, and may not charge you for the first one. It may not restrict your ability to download your own document, and it may not contract its way out of liability for negligently losing or destroying the record.

§732.525 adds the part that tells you how seriously the Legislature took this. A qualified custodian must post a blanket surety bond of at least $250,000 payable to the Governor, or carry liability insurance with a minimum aggregate of $250,000 covering losses from errors or omissions. If the custodian stops operating, closes without arranging delivery of the records, or lets the bond or coverage lapse, the Attorney General may petition to have a receiver appointed.

Those figures exist because the Legislature understood the obvious risk: the only copy of your will is a file on somebody else’s server, and if that company disappears, so does your estate plan.

The notary, the platform and the custodian are three different things

This trips up nearly everyone, including people who sell these services, so it is worth setting out plainly. Signing a Florida will online involves three distinct statutory roles.

The online notary public. Under §117.201, a Florida notary — or a civil-law notary, or a commissioner of deeds — who has separately registered with the Department of State to perform online notarizations. A person, not a company. This is who verifies your identity, asks the §117.285 screening questions, supervises the witnesses and performs the notarial act. Their involvement ends when the session ends.

The RON service provider. Under §117.201 and §117.295, the platform that supplies the audio-video communication technology and related software, processes and data storage to the notary. It must file an annual self-certification with the Department of State and carry errors and omissions insurance of at least $250,000 in the annual aggregate. Online notaries must report to the Department which providers they use and during what periods.

The qualified custodian. Under §732.524, the entity that holds your electronic will afterwards. It must be domiciled in or incorporated in Florida, must post the §732.525 bond or coverage, and must certify at your death that the record is unaltered. Unlike the other two, its obligation runs for as long as you live.

One company can hold more than one of these roles, and several advertise all three. But the requirements are separate, and being certified for one says nothing about the others. Note especially that the $250,000 in §117.295 and the $250,000 in §732.525 are two different requirements under two different statutes for two different purposes — a provider’s RON insurance does not satisfy the custodian bond. If you are choosing a service yourself, that is the question worth asking, and the one least likely to be answered on a pricing page.

There is one more thing worth knowing, and it follows from something the statute leaves out. Nothing registers or certifies qualified custodians. There is no licence, no application and no list to look anyone up on — a company becomes a qualified custodian by saying that it is one. So when a service tells you your will is held by a qualified custodian, that is the company’s own assessment of itself, and nobody has checked it.

That is why choosing the custodian is part of the work rather than an afterthought. Before an electronic will names anyone, I confirm the custodian actually meets §732.524 and can evidence the bond or coverage §732.525 requires — and specifically that the coverage is written for the custodian role, not the separate errors and omissions policy a RON platform carries under §117.295. The two happen to carry the same $250,000 figure, which makes them easy to substitute for one another. The custodian is then named on the face of the will as §732.523 requires, and its fee is disclosed to you as a separate third-party cost rather than folded invisibly into a package price.

What happens at the courthouse

§732.526 handles the last step. An electronic will filed through the Florida Courts E-Filing Portal is deemed deposited with the clerk as an original. Alternatively, a paper printout may be admitted as an original if a notary public certifies it to be a true and correct copy of the electronic will.

So the file does become a court record in the end. The question §732.523 answers is whether it arrives there provable or merely valid.

The three questions Florida law requires before you can sign remotely

This is the requirement that surprises people, and it is the reason the online route is not right for everyone.

Under §117.285, before an online notary may supervise the remote witnessing of certain documents, the notary must ask the principal three questions. The documents covered include a will, a revocable trust with testamentary aspects, a health care advance directive, a waiver of spousal rights, and a power of attorney authorising specified transactions.

The three questions are:

• Are you under the influence of any drug or alcohol today that impairs your ability to make decisions?
• Do you have any physical or mental condition or long-term disability that impairs your ability to perform the normal activities of daily living?
• Do you require assistance with daily care?

If the answer to any one of them is yes, the signature can only be validly witnessed by witnesses who are physically present with the principal at the time of signing. Remote witnessing is off the table. The law also requires written notice that vulnerable adults may not use audio-video witnessing, and remote witnessing is not effective at all for a principal who is a vulnerable adult as defined in §415.102, with the burden of proving that status falling on the person contesting the document.

During the signing itself the notary must ask five further questions, on the record: your marital status, who assisted you in accessing the technology, who assisted you in preparing the documents, where you are located, and who else is present in the room. Your answers are admissible as evidence. A wrong answer does not by itself invalidate the instrument, but it becomes part of the file.

It is worth saying plainly what those three screening questions describe. They describe a great many older adults — people who need help with daily care, or who have a long-term condition that makes ordinary daily activities difficult. Those are the very people most likely to be handed a tablet by a relative and asked to sign something.

Read that way, the restriction is not bureaucratic. It is the point. Physical presence means an independent witness is in the room and can see who else is standing there. The Legislature decided that for the people most exposed to pressure, that protection is not optional.

If you answer yes to any of the three, you can still put a complete estate plan together remotely. Everything up to the signing — the conversation, the decisions, the drafting, the review — happens by video exactly as it otherwise would. Only the signing ceremony has to happen in person.

Why the online route has more requirements than signing in person, not fewer

Put the two side by side.

A traditional paper will requires your signature at the end, two witnesses, and those witnesses signing in each other’s presence and yours. Self-proof requires one additional affidavit under §732.503. That is the whole list.

An electronic will requires all of the equivalent formalities, plus an online notary qualified under Chapter 117, plus an authenticated online notarization session meeting §117.265, plus the §117.285 screening that may disqualify you from the remote route entirely, plus a designated qualified custodian, plus unbroken qualified custody until probate, plus a custodian certification at death.

The online will is more convenient. It is not simpler. Every service advertising a Florida will in fifteen minutes is describing the convenience and staying quiet about the rest, and the parts they leave out are the parts that determine what happens after you die — which is the only time the document is ever used.

	Downloaded form, printed	Paper will, in person	Electronic will
Governing statute	§732.502	§732.502	§732.522
Signed at the end	Required	Required	Required
Two witnesses	Required	Required	Required
Witnesses sign in each other’s presence	Required	Required	Required
Witnesses may appear by video	No	No	Yes, under Chapter 117
Online notary supervision	—	—	Required, §117.285
Screening questions before signing	—	—	Required, §117.285
Self-proof route	§732.503 affidavit	§732.503 affidavit	§732.523, plus a custodian
Qualified custodian needed for self-proof	No	No	Yes, continuously
Revocation standard	Ordinary proof	Ordinary proof	Clear and convincing evidence

Revoking an electronic will is harder than revoking a paper one

§732.506 treats the two differently, and the difference is easy to miss.

A paper will is revoked by burning, tearing, cancelling, defacing, obliterating or destroying it with the intent to revoke. An electronic will is revoked by deleting, cancelling, rendering unreadable or obliterating the electronic record with the same intent — but only as proved by clear and convincing evidence.

That heightened standard applies to electronic wills alone. Tearing up a paper will in front of your family is self-evident. Deleting a file is not, and a court asked to find that a deletion was a deliberate revocation rather than an accident, a sync error or someone else’s doing will demand considerably more.

The practical consequence: if you have an electronic will and you want it gone, do not simply delete the file. Execute a new will that expressly revokes the earlier one, and let the record show it.

When a DIY online service is enough, and when it is not

Honestly: Florida does not require you to hire a lawyer to make a will. For a genuinely simple estate — modest assets, no real property complications, an intact family, everyone adult and in agreement — a well-drafted form can do the job, provided the signing ceremony is done correctly.

The situations below are the ones where a form reliably fails, because no generic template asks about them.

Homestead. This is the big one, and it catches Florida families constantly. Under Article X, Section 4(c) of the Florida Constitution and §732.4015, if you are survived by a spouse or a minor child, your homestead cannot be devised at all — with one exception, to the spouse outright if there is no minor child. Leave the house to your children in a will while you have a surviving spouse, and that devise fails. The property passes under the constitutional formula instead of your plan. §732.4017 addresses when a lifetime transfer counts as a devise for this purpose. No downloaded form will warn you, because the restriction exists in almost no other state.

Blended families. A spouse has rights in Florida that a will cannot simply override, and children from a prior relationship are the most common source of contested estates. This needs to be designed, not filled in.

An out-of-state personal representative. Covered above — §733.304 disqualifies non-relatives who are not domiciled here.

A business interest, or property in more than one state. Both require structure the form does not contemplate.

There is also an asymmetry worth naming. A self-made will with no self-proof and witnesses nobody can locate is markedly easier to attack than one executed with an affidavit and a clean record of the ceremony. The money saved on drafting can be spent many times over in the litigation afterwards, and it will be spent by the people you were trying to provide for.

What an online will costs

There is no single figure, and I would rather explain why than publish a number that turns out not to apply to you.

Cost depends on what your estate actually requires. A single will for an uncomplicated estate is a different piece of work from a plan for a couple with homestead property, children from earlier marriages, a business interest, or assets in another state. A will alone is different from a will paired with a durable power of attorney, a health care surrogate designation and a living will. If the electronic route is used, the qualified custodian’s fee is a genuine third-party cost, and I will tell you what it is rather than hide it inside a bundle.

What I can say is that I would rather find an arrangement that works than have someone leave without a plan because of the price. Tell me what you need and what your situation looks like, and I will be straight with you about what it takes and what it costs before you commit to anything.

How the process works

We talk first. A video conversation about your family, your property, and what you want to happen. Most of the complications above surface here, which is the point of doing it before anything is drafted.

I draft the documents. Not a form with your name in it — documents written for the situation we discussed, including the homestead, spousal and personal-representative issues that apply to you.

You review, and we revise. In writing and on video, until it says what you meant.

We handle the signing. If the §117.285 screening allows remote witnessing, we schedule the online notarization session with the witnesses appearing by video. If it does not, we arrange an in-person signing. Either way the ceremony is supervised, and either way the self-proof affidavit is executed.

The record is deposited. If the will is executed electronically, the record goes to the qualified custodian named in it and stays in that custody — which is what keeps §732.523 satisfied and your will self-proved.

To start, call (305) 224-6811 or send a message through the contact page.

Frequently asked questions

Can I write my own will without a lawyer in Florida?

Legally, yes. Florida imposes no requirement that a lawyer prepare your will. Whether you should depends on your situation — homestead property with a surviving spouse or minor child, a blended family, a business, or an out-of-state executor are the circumstances in which forms most reliably fail.

How much does it cost to do a will online in Florida?

It depends on the complexity of your estate and how many documents you need. A single simple will is not the same job as a plan for a couple with homestead property and children from earlier marriages. If an electronic will is used, the qualified custodian’s fee is a separate third-party cost. I will give you the figure before you commit to anything.

Do I need a qualified custodian for my Florida electronic will?

Not for the will to be valid — but yes, for it to be self-proved. §732.523 requires the will to designate a qualified custodian and requires the electronic record to stay in qualified custody at all times before probate. Without that, your personal representative has to locate the witnesses and obtain their testimony before the will can be admitted.

Is the qualified custodian the same as the online notary?

No. The online notary is a person, registered with the Department of State under §117.201, who supervises the signing session and then is done. The qualified custodian is an entity under §732.524 that holds the electronic record for as long as you live and certifies at your death that it has not been altered. A third role sits between them — the RON service provider under §117.295, the platform supplying the video technology. One company can perform more than one role, but the qualifications are separate, and a provider’s §117.295 insurance does not satisfy the §732.525 custodian bond.

Can I sign a Florida will if I live in another state?

Yes. Under §732.522, the will is deemed executed in Florida if it states that you intend to execute it under Florida law and understand it will be governed by Florida law. Be careful about who you name as personal representative, though — §733.304 bars a non-resident who is not a close relative.

Why was I asked whether I need help with daily care?

Because §117.285 requires it before remote witnessing. If you answer yes to that question, or to the questions about drugs or alcohol or about a condition affecting daily activities, your signature can only be witnessed by people physically present with you. The requirement protects people who are most vulnerable to pressure at the moment of signing.

Is a handwritten will valid in Florida?

Only if it meets the ordinary formalities — signed at the end, two witnesses, each signing in the presence of the testator and of each other. Handwriting does not invalidate a will. Florida does not recognise holographic wills, meaning one written and signed without witnesses, even where another country would.

What happens to my electronic will when I die?

Under §732.526, it is filed through the Florida Courts E-Filing Portal and deemed deposited with the clerk as an original, or a notary certifies a printout as a true and correct copy. If the will was self-proved under §732.523, the qualified custodian also provides a sworn certification that the record was in its custody and has not been altered.