Kissimmee Lady Bird Deed Attorney — Osceola County, St. Cloud, Celebration and Poinciana

If you are looking for a Kissimmee lady bird deed attorney, the short answer is that I prepare and record these deeds for owners in Kissimmee, St. Cloud, Celebration, Poinciana, Buenaventura Lakes, Harmony, Championsgate, Reunion and the rest of Osceola County, for a flat fee of $675 that includes the recording charges and the minimum documentary stamp charge. I am Jose M. Lorenzo, Jr., Florida Bar No. 107002, and I am the only attorney at this firm — the person who reads your recorded deed is the person who drafts the deed and the person who answers the phone when you call back a year later.

To start: call (305) 224-6811 or use the contact form. I read the recorded deed before quoting, and I will tell you if a deed is the wrong instrument for what you are trying to do.

How the work runs

1. First call. You speak to me, not an intake screener. I work out whether a deed is the right answer at all.
2. Recorded deed read. I read the deed your property is currently vested under and check homestead, marital status and any mortgage before quoting.
3. Flat fee confirmed. $675 for a standard matter, quoted before drafting starts.
4. Drafting and signing. Retained powers and homestead language drafted to your facts; online notarization and the two witnesses arranged around you, wherever you are.
5. Recording and confirmation. Recorded with the Osceola Clerk, and the recorded copy comes back to you with its book and page number.

Lady bird deed in Osceola County — the short version

What I charge	$675 flat — covers speaking directly with me, online notarization, the two witnesses, the recording charges and the minimum documentary stamp charge. Quoted after I read your recorded deed, before drafting starts
Do you have to come to an office?	No. The deed can be signed where you are and submitted electronically
Where it gets recorded	Osceola County Clerk of the Circuit Court & County Comptroller, 2 Courthouse Square, 2nd floor, Kissimmee
Recording charge	$10.00 for the first page, $8.50 for each page after it
Documentary stamp rate	$0.70 per $100. Osceola charges no discretionary surtax
Probate court if the deed is not there	Ninth Judicial Circuit, probate division — Osceola shares the circuit with Orange County
Homestead filing deadline	March 1, with the Osceola County Property Appraiser
The local complication	Just under half the residential parcels in this county carried no homestead exemption on the 2018 certified tax roll, and fifty community development districts levy assessments that outlive the owner

This page runs longer than most because Osceola is not a generic Florida county. On the 2018 certified tax roll, just under half its residential parcels claimed no homestead exemption, a marker of how much of the housing stock here is not somebody’s year-round home, though not a measurement of it. Fifty community development districts levy assessments that ride on the tax bill for up to thirty years. The county publishes a list of 249 subdivisions where short-term rental is permitted, and a large share of the housing stock exists to serve visitors rather than residents. Those facts change what a deed here has to account for. Everything below is specific to this county, and where a question does not have a settled answer in Florida, I say so instead of guessing.

What a Lady Bird Deed Is, and Why It Comes Up So Often Here

What is a lady bird deed?

A lady bird deed is a deed you sign now that keeps everything in your hands for the rest of your life and sends the house to whoever you named the moment you die. You still own it. You can sell it, rent it, mortgage it, remodel it, or tear the whole arrangement up and start over, and you do not need anybody’s permission to do any of that. The general Florida rules live on my Florida lady bird deed page; this page is about how they play out in Osceola. What the deed does is remove the one step that otherwise forces your family into court: it puts the transfer on the public record in advance, so nothing has to be transferred after your death.

What is a ladybird deed, and is it different?

It is the same document. The instrument is written three ways — a lady bird deed, a ladybird deed as one word, and formally an enhanced life estate deed — and all three names describe one thing. I mention this early because Google itself splits the spellings, and about half the people who call me have typed it as one word. Nothing about the drafting changes either way.

What is an enhanced life estate deed?

It is the name the law uses. A Florida enhanced life estate deed is the same document your neighbor calls a lady bird deed, and the word doing the work is enhanced. A plain Florida life estate deed gives you the right to live in the house and gives the remainder beneficiary a present interest you cannot undo without their signature. The enhanced version keeps the power to sell, mortgage and convey entirely with you. A Florida life estate deed and an enhanced life estate deed are not the same instrument, and that difference is the whole point — it is also the single most common way a homemade deed goes wrong, because the two look nearly identical on the page.

Why is it called a lady bird deed?

Because the technique was taught to Florida lawyers using a hypothetical that borrowed the Johnson family’s names, and the label stuck. It is not named after anything in a statute, and the association is illustrative rather than historical. The name is memorable, which is why it survived, and misleading, which is why so many people arrive believing it is a category of law rather than a way of drafting a deed.

How does a lady bird deed work in Florida?

Two moving parts. The deed conveys a remainder interest to the people you name, and then a paragraph of retained powers takes back everything that would normally come with having given something away. You keep the right to possess, to lease, to mortgage, to sell, and to convey the property to somebody else entirely — which is what lets you defeat the remainder you just created. The Third District has described that retained power as the defining feature of the instrument: the life tenant may mortgage the property without the remainderman joining. The Fourth District made the same point from the other direction in 2025, holding that a life tenant without those retained powers cannot convey the fee without the remainderman’s signature.

Does a lady bird deed avoid probate?

For that parcel, yes. Nothing has to be transferred at your death because the transfer is already on the record; what happens at death is that your interest ends. Title vests in the beneficiary automatically, without probate. To make it insurable, the beneficiary records a certified short-form death certificate — the version without cause of death — and, depending on whether the property was homestead and who survived you, a title company will usually also want an affidavit that there is no surviving spouse or minor child, and sometimes an order determining homestead. It is a short list and a cheap one, but it is not a single piece of paper. It does not avoid probate for anything else you own — a bank account with no beneficiary designation, a car, a boat on Lake Toho, the contents of the house. If the house is the only asset that would have forced an administration, the deed ends the problem. If it is not, the deed solves one part of it and you should know which part.

Does a lady bird deed have to be recorded?

Yes, in practice, and this is where homemade deeds die quietly. An unrecorded deed sitting in a drawer can still be good between you and your beneficiary, but it will not protect them against a later purchaser or creditor, and it is not what a title examiner will find. Record it, and record it while you are alive. I have seen deeds signed correctly in 2019 and discovered in a filing cabinet in 2024, by which point the signer had lost capacity and the family was in a guardianship proceeding instead of a title company’s office.

Where You Record It — Osceola County Mechanics

Where do I record a lady bird deed in Osceola County?

Second floor, 2 Courthouse Square, Kissimmee. Recording and probate share that floor, in a single combined office that is both Clerk of the Circuit Court and County Comptroller.

The counter is open from eight until five on weekdays, but recording and payments stop at half past four — half an hour earlier than the building, and the sort of detail that turns a lunchtime errand into a second trip. There is one recording office. The Clerk does operate a Poinciana branch on Pleasant Hill Road, but its published services are appointments, criminal and traffic payments and submitting documents on an existing case — not recording. Despite the county’s size, no branch in St. Cloud, Celebration or Poinciana takes recordings, which is worth knowing before anyone drives to a satellite office expecting a recording counter.

Is the Osceola County Clerk the recorder of deeds?

Yes, and the combined office is the tidy arrangement rather than the universal one. Osceola runs recording and probate through one elected officer on one floor. Orange County, immediately north and sharing the same judicial circuit, splits them: deeds go to the Comptroller on East Church Street in Orlando while probate is filed with a separate Clerk of Courts on North Orange Avenue. Cross from Kissimmee into Orlando and the same two errands become two buildings. Broward goes further still and puts recording under a county records division that is not a court officer at all.

Who can prepare a deed in Osceola County, and what must appear on it?

A deed affecting Florida real property should be prepared by the owner or by a Florida attorney; a notary or document service that drafts one for you is doing something Florida reserves. Separately, the Clerk publishes its own list of what has to appear on the page, and it is worth reading before anybody drafts anything: the grantor’s signature notarized; printed names and post office addresses beneath every signature, including both witnesses; a complete legal description; the grantee’s mailing address; and the preparer’s first and last name and address — not just a business name. Two individual subscribing witnesses, as § 689.01 requires.

What gets a deed rejected in Osceola County?

In my experience, in rough order: a missing grantee mailing address, a preparer line showing only a company, witness names signed but not printed, margins too tight for the recording stamp, and a legal description copied off a tax bill rather than out of the last recorded deed. That last one is not a formatting problem — it is a title problem wearing a formatting problem’s clothes. A tax bill describes what the Property Appraiser assesses. A deed has to describe what you actually own.

Can I e-record a deed in Osceola County?

Yes, through four approved vendors — Simplifile, CSC eRecording Solutions, Indecomm Global Services and eRecording Partners Network all submit to this Clerk. The office is careful to say it has not discussed, agreed or suggested pricing with any of them, which is the correct posture and also a hint about how these arrangements work. Vendor accounts are set up by firms and title companies that submit regularly, not by individuals with a single document.

What the electronic route validates is formatting: page dimensions, margins, legibility, whether the fees tendered match the fees due. It does not validate whether the person signing had power to convey what the deed purports to convey, whether the legal description matches the chain of title, or whether the retained powers that make this a lady bird deed are actually present in the text. A clean acceptance means the document was formatted correctly. It has never meant the document works.

Can I record a deed by mail, or do I have to appear in person?

You do not have to appear. Deeds can be mailed to the Clerk with a check, and in a matter I handle the deed goes in electronically, which is faster and produces a return receipt. Nobody needs to stand at a counter in Kissimmee for this, and nobody needs to be in Florida at all when they sign — a point that matters more in this county than most, for reasons covered further down.

How long does Osceola County take to record a deed?

Electronic submissions typically come back the same business day or the next one. Mail is a function of the postal service plus the Clerk’s queue. The recording date is what fixes priority, so if timing matters — a closing, a Medicaid application, a health situation that is moving — electronic submission is not a convenience, it is the point.

How do I find my deed in the Osceola County official records?

The Clerk publishes a searchable index of the official records, and you can pull your own chain of title by grantor and grantee name without paying anybody. Search your own name as grantee and you will find the deed that put the property in your hands. That document, not the tax bill and not the Property Appraiser’s parcel page, is where the legal description for a new deed has to come from. If you are doing a deed search before a consultation, printing the last recorded deed saves both of us a step.

How do I get a certified copy of my recorded deed in Osceola County?

Copies from the official records run a dollar a page, plat copies five dollars a page, and certification is two dollars. Most people never need a certified copy of a deed; where it comes up is out-of-state institutions that do not understand Florida recording and want something with a seal on it.

How to file a lady bird deed in Florida — the three steps

Stripped of everything else: draft it correctly against the last recorded deed, sign it in front of two witnesses and a notary, and record it with the Clerk in the county where the land sits. The order matters and the middle step is where most homemade deeds fail. The statewide walk-through lives on the Florida lady bird deed page; what follows here is what changes when the land is in Osceola.

What It Costs

What does recording cost in Osceola County?

Ten dollars for page one and $8.50 for each page after. Names past the first four are indexed at a dollar each; a copy from the Official Records is a dollar a page and certifying it is two dollars a document. Osceola charges nothing per legal description, which some counties do.

Osceola County recording charges

First page	$10.00
Each later page	$8.50
Each name indexed beyond the first four	$1.00
Copy from official records	$1.00 per page
Plat copy	$5.00 per page
Certification	$2.00
Documentary stamps on a deed	$0.70 per $100
Documentary stamps on a note	$0.35 per $100

These are the Clerk’s own figures; the office publishes them on its recording FAQ page, which is also where the copy and certification charges are listed.

How much does a lady bird deed cost in Florida?

Attorney fees around the state generally run somewhere between $400 and $1,000 for a straightforward one, and the recording is small change next to that. What moves the number is not the typing. It is whether anybody read the recorded deed first, whether the property is homestead, whether there is a mortgage, and whether the person drafting it is in a position to tell you the deed is the wrong instrument for your situation.

What does a lady bird deed cost in Kissimmee?

Mine is $675, flat, quoted once I have read your recorded deed and before drafting starts. That one figure covers speaking directly with me, reading the deed your property is currently vested under, the drafting, online notarization, the two witnesses Florida requires, the Osceola County recording charges, and the minimum documentary stamp charge. What it does not cover is documentary stamp tax above that minimum — in practice, a property carrying a mortgage — which is a state tax rather than a fee, and which I work out and explain to you before you decide to proceed. It also does not include a title search; what I read is the recorded deed that put the property in your name. The tax itself is discussed in its own section below.

How much should a lady bird deed cost — what the Osceola market actually charges

I am going to publish this because the range is wide enough that people reasonably assume somebody is overcharging, and the more useful question is what each price buys.

What is on offer in the Osceola and Central Florida market

Roughly	Who	What it includes
$99–$225	Online form sellers and non-attorney document preparation services	A filled-in form. No reading of your recorded deed, and no ability to advise you whether the deed is right for you
$400–$550	Flat-fee attorney deed shops, often statewide and remote	Preparation and recording. Usually no title work beyond what you hand over
$675	This firm	Read against the last recorded deed, drafting, witnesses and notary arranged, recording charges, the minimum documentary stamp charge, and a conversation about whether a deed is the right answer at all
$850–$1,150	Full-service Central Florida estate planning firms, tiered by whether owners are single, married or a blended family	The same work, generally inside a wider estate planning engagement

The gap that matters is the first row. A document preparation service is not permitted to advise you, which means it cannot tell you that your Poinciana lot sits on the Polk side of the line, that your Celebration covenants require notice, or that the house you have described as a rental is legally your homestead and your spouse has to sign. It will produce something that records. Recording was never the hard part.

Do I need a lawyer to do a lady bird deed in Florida?

No law requires one. Whether you need one depends on facts you may not know are facts. If you own a paid-off house outright, are unmarried, have one adult child, and the legal description in your last deed is clean, this is a simple document and plenty of people handle it without me. If you are married, if there is a mortgage, if the property is a rental, if there is a minor child anywhere in the picture, if the house is in a district that levies assessments, or if there is any prior deed you are unsure about — those are the situations where a $200 saving buys a problem worth many multiples of it, discovered years later by somebody who cannot fix it because you are no longer alive to sign.

Can I do a lady bird deed myself?

You can, and whether you searched it as a lady bird deed or a ladybird deed makes no difference to that answer. The failures I am asked to unwind are consistent enough to list. The retained-powers language is missing or watered down, which produces an ordinary life estate and hands your children a veto over selling your own house. The legal description was copied from a tax bill. Only one witness signed, or the witnesses signed but never printed their names. A married owner signed alone. The deed says “$10.00 and other good and valuable consideration,” which is a phrase people copy out of form books without knowing what it does to the tax analysis. And in the most expensive version, somebody recorded a quit claim deed instead, gave the house away outright during their lifetime, and lost both the homestead exemption and the ability to change their mind.

What about the lady bird deed forms and templates online?

A Florida life estate deed form and an enhanced life estate deed form are different documents that look nearly identical, and the free versions circulating online are frequently the wrong one, or a Texas or Michigan version with the state name changed. If you want to see what the document contains and what a Florida version has to say, my Florida lady bird deed form page goes through the requirements clause by clause. I would rather you read that and decide against hiring me than sign something that does not work.

Can I do a lady bird deed online?

The signing can be done remotely, which is not the same thing as buying a deed from a website. Florida permits remote online notarization, and the witnesses can appear through the same session, so the practical answer for an owner in New Jersey or Ontario who owns a house off Highway 192 is that nobody needs to fly anywhere. What is being done online is the execution. The drafting still has to be done by somebody who read your recorded deed.

Is a lady bird deed cheaper than a trust?

Substantially, and that is the honest reason a lot of people are here. A revocable living trust in Florida is generally a four-figure engagement and only works if the house is actually deeded into it — which is the single most common failure I see in probate, a trust sitting in a binder while the house was never retitled. A deed costs hundreds and does one job completely. What the trust buys that the deed does not is coverage of everything else you own, a mechanism if you become incapacitated, and control over what happens if a beneficiary is a minor, has creditors, or has special needs. If your estate is a house and not much else, the deed is usually the better value. If it is a house plus rental property plus accounts plus a complicated family, it usually is not.

How much does probate cost in Osceola County if I do not do this?

Florida’s statutory fee schedule for a personal representative’s attorney is a presumption rather than a price, and it is calculated on the value of the estate. The value it runs on is the compensable value of the probate estate, and protected homestead is not part of that — § 733.608 keeps it out of the personal representative’s hands and it is excluded from the inventory the schedule is applied to. So a $400,000 Osceola homestead passing to your heirs does not generate a percentage fee at all. Where the house is instead a non-exempt probate asset — devised to somebody who is not an heir, for instance — $400,000 produces a presumed attorney fee of roughly $12,000 and a separate personal representative’s commission of about the same again. For an ordinary homestead family the cost of probate is not that percentage. It is the filing fee, the publication, the certified copies, the separately compensable work of getting homestead determined, and the several months that pass before anybody can sell or refinance the house. That is the arithmetic that makes a $675 deed look like what it is. My Florida probate cost page works the numbers properly.

What is the cheapest way to avoid probate on a Florida house?

For most Osceola homeowners with one property, this deed. There are other routes — a trust, joint ownership with survivorship, and for smaller estates a summary administration after the fact, which is the usual vehicle where a homestead is the main asset. Disposition without administration is not one of them: § 735.301 reaches personal property only and cannot transfer a house — but the ones that cost less than this generally do so by giving something away during your lifetime, which is not cheaper, it is just cheaper today.

Documentary Stamp Tax — and the Question Nobody Has Answered

What is the documentary stamp tax rate in Osceola County?

Seventy cents per $100 of consideration, which is the standard statewide rate under § 201.02. Osceola levies no discretionary surtax, so unlike Miami-Dade there is no county add-on to calculate. My page on the tax consequences of a lady bird deed works through the documentary stamp, property tax and income tax side at greater length.

Do you pay documentary stamp tax on a lady bird deed?

After cost, this is the question I am asked most about a ladybird deed in Florida. On an unencumbered house, the Department of Revenue’s published position is that recording one of these deeds does not by itself trigger the tax, because the deed does not transfer a present interest in the property during your lifetime. That is the answer most owners are looking for and in the ordinary case it is the answer they get.

Can I rely on that advisory?

Not the way most websites imply. A technical assistance advisement has no precedential value except to the taxpayer who requested it, and then only for the specific transaction addressed — that is § 213.22, and it is the fact almost nobody publishes. Every page you will read that cites a Department advisement as though it protects the reader is citing something that legally does not. It tells you how the Department has reasoned. It is not a ruling you own.

What if the house still has a mortgage?

This is the question I get most often in Osceola, because second homes and rentals are far more likely to be mortgaged than a paid-off retirement house, and it is the one question on this page I am not going to answer with a number.

Here is the tension, stated plainly. Since 1990 the statute has expressly defined consideration to include the amount of any mortgage the property is subject to, whether or not the new owner assumes the debt. Because the statute is explicit, there is no inquiry into who really bears the burden of the loan; the text controls. That is why an outright gift of mortgaged property by quit claim deed to a non-spouse is taxed on the balance. Against that, the Department’s own reasoning for enhanced life estate deeds is that no present beneficial interest passes at all — and if nothing passes, the mortgage-as-consideration rule has nothing to attach to. The Department reached a no-tax result in one advisory that did involve mortgaged property, though on materially different facts.

No Florida appellate court, no Department rule and no published advisory has decided the bridge between those two rules for an enhanced life estate deed on mortgaged property with remainder beneficiaries who are not your spouse. There is a defensible practitioner position that no tax is due. A defensible position is not settled law, and an advisory issued to somebody else gives you no protection.

So I am not going to give you a clean number on a web page, because Florida does not currently have a clean answer to give. What I will do in a matter is tell you the exposure, tell you the range, and if the amount is large enough to matter, tell you how to request your own advisory ruling from the Department rather than relying on somebody else’s. It is more common to see a page pick a side on this without mentioning that the question is open.

Why the deed should never say “$10.00 and other good and valuable consideration”

Because it is a recital of consideration, and consideration is the thing the tax is measured by. That phrase migrated into deed forms from commercial conveyancing, where it made sense, and it now appears in half the free templates on the internet. On a transfer where nothing is actually being paid, reciting that something was paid is at best unhelpful and at worst an invitation to an assessment. The deed should say what actually happened.

Homestead, Save Our Homes, and the Osceola Non-Homestead Problem

Why does nearly half of Osceola County have no homestead exemption?

Because a great many of these homes are second homes, vacation rentals, or owned by somebody whose permanent residence is in another state — and because the exemption has to be applied for, so some owner-occupied houses are missing from the count as well. On the Property Appraiser’s 2018 certified roll, 60,927 homestead exemptions sat against 117,944 residential parcels — 51.7 percent of them carrying the exemption, and 48.3 percent without it.

Osceola County, 2018 certified tax roll

Total parcels and accounts	194,919
Residential parcels	117,944
Homestead exemption parcels	60,927
Senior exemption parcels	4,801
Timeshares	530
Vacant parcels	30,018

Two caveats before that number gets quoted back at anyone. These are historical 2018 figures. Later certified rolls are published and carry their own parcel and exemption tables — the 2025 certified roll among them — and they have not been used to recalculate this comparison. And homestead parcels are being compared against all residential parcels, so the ratio is a fair proxy rather than an exact measurement. A third caveat matters more than either of those: the roll records who applied for an exemption, which is not the same as who lives here. An owner who simply never filed is counted alongside the vacation rentals. This page has not recalculated the ratio against the later rolls, so the 2018 figures should not be read as a current estimate.

What the roll will support is that a large share of Osceola housing does not claim the exemption — not a headcount of who sleeps here. Read that narrowly, it is still enough to change what a deed in this county has to account for, and it is why this page reads differently from the others in this series. Around Highway 192, in Championsgate, Reunion, Celebration and dozens of other communities, the typical property is a vacation home, a rental, or a house belonging to somebody whose permanent residence is in another state or another country. The county maintains a short-term rental overlay in its land development code and publishes a list of 249 approved subdivisions. That is not a footnote to the housing market here. It is a large part of it.

Does that make the deed simpler or harder?

Simpler in one respect and riskier in another. Florida’s constitutional homestead restrictions attach to the home a person actually lives in, so on a genuine vacation home they do not bite. Section 732.4015 prevents a homestead being devised away from a surviving spouse or minor child, and § 732.401 dictates how it descends when it is not. Neither reaches a property the owner does not occupy as a permanent residence. Nor does the requirement that a married owner’s spouse join in the conveyance. On a true second home the drafting gets shorter and the family conversation gets easier.

Does a lady bird deed affect my homestead exemption?

On the house you actually live in, recording a ladybird deed should not cost you the exemption, because you have not stopped owning or occupying anything. You remain the owner in every sense that matters to the Property Appraiser. What can cost you the exemption is the thing people do instead when they have not been advised — deeding the house outright to a child and keeping nothing back, which really does transfer ownership and really does end the exemption, along with the assessment cap that came with it. It is giving away the whole interest that does it, not the label on the form.

Does a lady bird deed reset Save Our Homes?

On homestead property, a deed that lists you as both grantor and grantee is designed not to reset the cap during your lifetime, for the same reason. The cap resets on a change of ownership. Section 193.155(3)(a)1.c provides that there is no change of ownership where the owner is listed as both grantor and grantee and others are additionally named as grantees, so a deed in that form is designed to avoid one. A deed in which the owner appears only as grantor and reserves a life estate does not fit that exception on its text, and no Florida appellate court has yet applied the exception to a lady bird deed. What happens at your death is a different question and is answered two headings down.

Will my property taxes go up if I sign one?

On homestead, in the ordinary case, no. On non-homestead property in this county, the question is genuinely open, and it is the most consequential unanswered question on this page.

The ten percent cap on non-homestead property, and the reset nobody has resolved

A property without the exemption has no Save Our Homes cap. Instead it falls under § 193.1554, which caps annual assessment growth at 10 percent for what the statute calls nonhomestead residential property — residential real property with nine or fewer dwelling units, including vacant land zoned and platted for residential use — and which does not reach school district levies. The cap resets to full just value on 1 January of the year after a change of ownership or control, and the statute then puts subsequent annual changes back under the same limitation, so a reset raises the base rather than removing the protection. The statute defines that trigger to include a transfer of “legal title or beneficial title in equity,” and lists a handful of exceptions that say nothing about enhanced life estate deeds.

Nobody has resolved whether recording one of these deeds trips that reset. No Florida court, Department of Revenue rule or Property Appraiser bulletin addresses it that I have been able to find. On a homesteaded house the question rarely matters. On an Osceola vacation home that has quietly accumulated years of capped assessment, it is the first question to ask and the last one anybody should answer with confidence. If you own a rental off 192 that has been under the cap since 2015, the difference between “no reset” and “reset to just value” can be substantial, and it carries forward, because the reset lifts your assessed value to just value and the 10 percent limit then runs again from that higher base. What it actually comes to depends on your assessed value, how long the cap has been running and the millage where the parcel sits, which is exactly the sort of figure worth having somebody work on your own parcel before you record anything.

Do my children keep my cap after I die?

Generally no, and this surprises people. The Save Our Homes benefit belongs to the homestead owner, and it does not simply travel to whoever inherits. An adult child who takes the house and does not make it their own permanent residence will be assessed as a non-homestead owner going forward. The deed keeps the house out of court. It was never a tax shelter and anyone selling it as one is selling something else.

Two points here are where families lose the benefit. The first is that the protection is yours, not your beneficiary’s: your death is the change of ownership, and the assessment resets to just value on the following January 1 unless that person independently fits one of the statute’s own exceptions — a surviving spouse, a permanent resident who was legally or naturally dependent on you, a surviving joint tenant with rights of survivorship who was entitled to and receiving the homestead exemption on the property and continues to qualify for and receive it, or descent by operation of law to a surviving spouse or minor child under section 732.401. The dependency exception is read narrowly: in Willens v. Garcia, 53 So. 3d 1113 (Fla. 3d DCA 2011), an able-bodied adult son who had been his stroke-bound father’s full-time caretaker for twenty years did not qualify. The second is a trap written into the statute itself. If a person named as an additional grantee applies for a homestead exemption on the property while you are still alive, that application is itself treated as a change of ownership and destroys the cap you have accumulated. Nobody named in your deed should apply until after your death.

The mistake of reading homestead off the tax roll

It is tempting to reason from the tax roll — no exemption showing, therefore no homestead, therefore no restrictions. Do not. The exemption is a tax benefit somebody has to apply for. Constitutional homestead is a status that follows where the family actually lives, whether or not anyone ever filed a form. I have had this exact conversation with an owner who described a Kissimmee property as a rental for twenty minutes before mentioning that his mother had lived in it since 2011.

How do I file for homestead exemption with the Osceola County Property Appraiser?

Through the Property Appraiser’s office at 2505 E. Irlo Bronson Memorial Highway in Kissimmee, and the deadline is March 1. If you are recording a deed in January because a health situation is moving, check the exemption status in the same pass — the two offices do not talk to each other on your behalf, and a deed recorded in February does not remind anybody to file by March.

Missing the March 1 deadline is not automatically fatal, but the second chance is a procedure you have to ask for rather than a grace period that runs on its own. File a late application directly with the Osceola County Property Appraiser before the twenty-fifth day after the county mails its annual assessment notices. The appraiser can still grant the exemption for that year if you show you were unable to file on time or had other extenuating circumstances. If the appraiser says no, you can take it to the Value Adjustment Board by that same deadline, with a $15 nonrefundable filing fee and the same showing to make.

Does my spouse have to sign?

If the property is your Florida homestead and you are married, your spouse’s involvement is not optional — because Florida’s Constitution requires a spouse to join in transferring homestead property, and a spouse’s separate written waiver of devise rights does not by itself waive that joinder requirement. Those are two different restrictions living in the same constitutional paragraph, and the waiver most people have signed covers only one of them.

Whether recording an enhanced life estate deed is itself a present “alienation” that requires joinder at signing, as opposed to a transfer that becomes effective only at death, is not settled in Florida. The prudent course is joinder, because the restriction cannot be cured after the fact and a non-joined conveyance of homestead to a third party is not effective to convey it.

Is a lady bird deed of homestead a devise?

Florida has a statute providing that a lifetime transfer of a homestead interest is not a devise, so long as the transferor keeps no power to revoke the transfer or revest title in themselves. That statute was written to protect exactly this kind of planning. But no Florida appellate court has squarely decided how an enhanced life estate deed is classified against the constitutional restriction, and there is real tension in the case law about whether a grantor who keeps the power to redirect the remainder has kept a tolerated management power or a power to revoke. Anybody who tells you this is settled is telling you something a court has not said.

What if I have a minor child?

Then the deed does not do what you want it to do with your homestead, and the answer here is not soft. Florida’s Constitution says homestead may not be devised if the owner is survived by a minor child, and there is no exception that lets anyone plan around it. If a minor child survives you, the homestead does not pass to your remainder beneficiary; it descends by operation of law, with the surviving spouse taking a life estate and a vested remainder to the descendants in being. The precise mechanism for an enhanced deed — void, ineffective as to the homestead, or simply overridden — has not been decided by a Florida court. The outcome is what matters, and the outcome is that the plan does not hold.

Who counts as a “minor child” is narrower than most people assume. It means someone under eighteen who is your child under Florida’s Probate Code — a biological child, a child you adopted, or a child born out of wedlock who meets the paternity requirements. It does not mean a stepchild you never adopted, a foster child, a grandchild, or any remoter descendant: section 731.201(3) expressly excludes a grandchild or a more remote descendant from the word “child,” and the Florida Supreme Court held in In re McGinty’s Estate, 258 So. 2d 450 (Fla. 1971), that “minor child” in the Constitution is a substantially different class from “lineal descendants.” Where the child lives is not part of the test either. In Deem’s Estate v. Shinn, 297 So. 2d 611 (Fla. 4th DCA 1974), a father’s minor daughter lived with her mother in another state and he had never actually supported her — the restriction applied anyway, because he still owed her the legal obligation. One question is genuinely open: whether a minor grandchild whose own parent died before you can trigger the restriction. No Florida court has decided it.

Does the identity of the beneficiary change the analysis?

Yes, and this is worth thinking about before you pick names. A remainder to your spouse largely removes the devise concern, and where your spouse is the sole remainder beneficiary your spouse does not also have to sign as a grantor. Be careful with that, because being named as a beneficiary is not the same act as joining in the deed. If the remainder goes to your spouse and somebody else, or to anybody other than your spouse, your spouse has to join in the deed as a grantor. The First District held exactly that in a reported 2008 decision, on a homestead deed where a husband kept a life estate for himself and his wife and left the remainder to a daughter from an earlier marriage: the life estate stood, because a conveyance between spouses is treated differently, but the remainder to the daughter was void because the wife never signed. The remainder stayed with the husband, and at his death it passed by intestacy — a life estate to his widow and a vested remainder to his lineal descendants, which is to say to the very people the deed was written to work around. That case turned on a conventional life estate deed rather than an enhanced one, so it does not settle the enhanced-deed question by itself. It settles the practical one. Have your spouse sign. A remainder to an adult child, where there is no surviving spouse and no minor child, is generally the cleanest case. A remainder to anybody else — a sibling, a friend, a partner you are not married to, a church — is where both restrictions bite hardest if a spouse or minor child survives you.

Medicaid, Nursing Homes and Estate Recovery

Does a lady bird deed protect my house from Medicaid?

This is the reason a large share of people find this page, and the answer needs two halves. The Florida homestead is generally not a countable asset for long-term care Medicaid eligibility while you are alive, within program limits. The exposure most families are actually worried about arrives afterward, when the state seeks to recover what it paid from the estate of the person who received benefits. A house that passes through probate and is not constitutionally protected homestead is exposed to that claim. A house that qualifies as protected homestead is shielded from it even when the estate is administered through probate. A house that never enters probate, because it passed under a recorded deed, is a much harder target.

I state that as the current practical effect rather than as a guarantee, because Medicaid policy changes, is applied by caseworkers, and turns on facts about your household that a web page cannot know. Anyone who promises you an outcome here without asking about your marital status, your other assets and your timeline is not being careful with you.

Does a lady bird deed trigger the five-year look-back?

A properly drafted ladybird deed is generally not treated as a transfer for look-back purposes, and that is precisely why the instrument is used in elder law rather than a plain gift deed. The protection depends on the drafting: a deed that fails to preserve your full power to sell, mortgage and revoke may not be read the same way. Because you keep the power to sell the property and take the money, you have not given anything away. Deeding the house to a child outright is a gift, is inside the look-back, and can create a penalty period at exactly the moment a family needs care approved.

Does a lady bird deed count as a gift for Medicaid?

The retained powers are the answer. A gift is a transfer you cannot undo. This is a transfer you can undo unilaterally, at any time, without telling anybody. That distinction is the whole architecture of the document, and it is also why the retained-powers paragraph is not decorative language a form generator can approximate.

What is Medicaid estate recovery in Florida?

It is the state’s program for recouping long-term care benefits from the estate of the person who received them. Florida’s recovery reaches the probate estate. The practical significance for an Osceola homeowner is straightforward: whether the house is in the probate estate is not fixed by fate, it is fixed by what deed is on record when you die.

Can Florida Medicaid take my house after I die?

Not in the sense people usually fear — nobody arrives and seizes it. What happens is a claim filed against the estate, which the personal representative has to deal with, and which for non-homestead real property can mean a sale to satisfy it where there is no cash in the estate. Where the house is protected homestead, though, the personal representative has no authority to sell it to meet a Medicaid claim and the agency cannot force one — § 733.608 keeps protected homestead out of the representative’s hands, and § 409.9101 limits the sale remedy to property that is not protected homestead. Enforcement is barred outright if the recipient is survived by a spouse of any age, by a child under twenty-one, or by a child who is blind or permanently and totally disabled under Medicaid standards. Those are bars rather than deferrals — nothing revives the claim when the spouse dies or the child turns twenty-one. There is no automatic protection for an adult child who is not disabled, although a separate hardship waiver can reach an heir who lived in the home as a primary residence for the twelve months before the death and owns no other residence. The most reliable protection is that there is no probate estate for the claim to be filed against.

Will a lady bird deed keep my home out of a nursing home claim?

It is the most common reason I am asked to prepare one for an Osceola family, and in the ordinary case it does the job. What it will not do is help if it is signed after capacity is gone, which is the version of this conversation I least like having. The deed requires a signature from somebody who understands what they are signing. By the time care is being arranged the question is capacity rather than timing, and capacity has to be looked at individually — some people signing nursing home paperwork can still sign a deed, and an existing power of attorney may or may not carry the authority to sign one for them. Where capacity is gone and no adequate power of attorney exists, the route is a guardianship proceeding that costs many times what the deed would have.

Mechanics and Validity

How many witnesses does a Florida lady bird deed require?

Two, and they must be individual subscribing witnesses under § 689.01. Both must sign, both must print their names, and both need post office addresses on the document for the Osceola Clerk. A notary is not a witness for this purpose — a notary who also signs as one of the two witnesses is doing two jobs and should sign twice.

Does a lady bird deed have to be notarized?

Yes, if you want it recorded, and you do. The grantor’s signature has to be acknowledged before an officer authorized to take acknowledgments. An unnotarized deed is not recordable, and an unrecorded deed is very nearly useless.

A notary is not without responsibility in this. Under section 117.107(5) a Florida notary has a duty to refuse to notarize if it appears the signer is not mentally capable of understanding the nature and effect of the document. But that duty is a floor, not a legal assessment. Nobody at the notary’s desk is weighing whether you have the capacity to make this particular disposition, and nobody there is building the record that defends it if someone challenges it years afterwards.

Can I sign remotely?

Yes. Florida permits remote online notarization, and the witnesses can appear in the same session. For this county that is not a nicety. A meaningful share of Osceola property is owned by people in New York, New Jersey, Ohio, Ontario, Quebec and the United Kingdom, and requiring them to be physically present would make the document impractical for the very owners who most need it.

Can I change or revoke a lady bird deed later?

Yes, unilaterally, at any time, without asking anybody. You can record a new deed naming somebody else, you can sell the property outright, or you can convey it back to yourself and start over. That is what separates this from every alternative that involves handing a present interest to a beneficiary. If your daughter and her husband separate two years from now, you are not stuck.

Can I sell my house with a lady bird deed on it?

Yes, and you do not need the beneficiary’s signature. That is the retained power the instrument exists to preserve, and it is the point on which Florida’s appellate courts have been clearest. Selling extinguishes the remainder, and the buyer takes free of it. Whether title is otherwise clear depends on the rest of your title and on the deed being drafted so the retained power is unambiguous, which is the usual reason a title company raises an objection to one of these.

Can I refinance with a lady bird deed on the property?

You retain the power to mortgage without the remainderman joining, and the Third District has said so directly. In the real world your lender may still ask questions, because loan officers see these less often than lawyers do, and the answer is generally a copy of the recorded deed and ten minutes. It has not been a deal-breaker in matters I have handled.

Can I get a reverse mortgage on a house with one of these deeds?

The retained power to mortgage is there. Whether a particular reverse mortgage program accepts the arrangement varies by holder and by loan program, and I do not publish timeframes or blanket answers on that because they differ. Ask the lender before you record anything, and if the reverse mortgage is already in place, ask before you record anything.

Can I name more than one beneficiary?

Yes, and people routinely name two or three children. Understand what you are creating: co-owners who will have to agree about a house. If they do not agree, the remedy in Florida is a partition action, and my page on siblings who disagree about selling the family home exists because that outcome is common. Naming three children is the plan. Naming three children who do not speak to each other is a lawsuit with a two-year fuse.

What if a beneficiary dies before I do?

It depends entirely on how the deed is drafted, which is why this is not a form-filling exercise. A deed that names a beneficiary and stops may leave the interest to lapse. A deed drafted with substitution language sends it to that person’s descendants. Neither is right for everyone. It is a question you should be asked and most templates never ask it.

Does a lady bird deed override my will?

For that parcel, yes. The deed operates outside the will entirely, and a will that leaves “my house at 1234 Somewhere Drive to my son David” does nothing if a recorded deed sends the same house to your daughter. That conflict is a genuinely common source of family litigation, and it is avoidable in a single sentence: when I prepare one of these, the will gets read at the same time.

Can a power of attorney sign a lady bird deed?

Only if the power of attorney was drafted to allow it, and most were not. Florida requires certain authority to be granted expressly and signed separately by the principal, and the power to make a gift or to create or change a right of survivorship falls in that territory. A general durable power of attorney with no specific language is usually not enough. I wrote a whole page on this at can a power of attorney sign a lady bird deed in Florida, because it comes up constantly and the wrong answer produces a void deed.

Will a title company insure it?

In my experience yes, routinely, when the deed is drafted properly. Underwriters in Florida have been reading ladybird deeds for decades. What draws an objection is a deed with defective retained powers, a missing witness, or a chain-of-title problem the deed inherited. The title company is not skeptical of the instrument. It is skeptical of bad drafting, which is a reasonable thing to be skeptical of.

What if the beneficiary has problems of their own?

This is the argument for a trust rather than a deed, and it deserves to be said plainly by somebody selling deeds. A remainder beneficiary who is in the middle of a divorce, who has judgment creditors, who is in bankruptcy, or who simply cannot manage money is going to receive a house outright with no strings the moment you die. A deed cannot condition, stage, or protect a gift. A trust can. If that describes your family, the deed is the cheaper answer to the wrong question.

One exception runs the other way. If your beneficiary takes the house and makes it their own Florida homestead, ordinary judgment creditors cannot reach it — the homestead exemption protects against every type of claim and judgment except the three the constitution itself names (Osborne v. Dumoulin, 55 So. 3d 577 (Fla. 2011)) — and a claim for equitable distribution in their divorce does not reach it either, absent fraud (Roth v. Roth, 973 So. 2d 580 (Fla. 2d DCA 2008)). Two things still do. Child support arrears reach it by way of an equitable lien a court imposes. So does a federal tax lien, which Florida homestead does not defeat at all, because the Supremacy Clause lets federal law override a state exemption — Weitzner v. United States, 309 F.2d 45 (5th Cir. 1962); and see United States v. Rodgers, 461 U.S. 677 (1983) and United States v. Craft, 535 U.S. 274 (2002). If your beneficiary does not live there, none of that protection applies.

What if my beneficiary has special needs?

Then do not do this without advice. An outright inheritance can disqualify somebody from needs-based benefits at the exact moment they lose the person who was caring for them. The instrument that handles this is a properly drafted special needs trust, and a lady bird deed naming that trust as the remainder beneficiary is sometimes the right combination. That is a deed and a trust working together, not a substitute for one.

Lady Bird Deed vs. the Alternatives

Lady Bird Deed vs. Living Trust in Florida

A revocable living trust covers everything you put into it and can manage your affairs if you become incapacitated. This deed covers one parcel and does nothing about incapacity. The trust costs several times more, and a house that never gets deeded into it simply stays outside it — the trust still governs everything you did fund, but that house goes through probate anyway, which happens more often than the people selling trusts admit. My comparison of the Florida lady bird deed versus a living trust works through the trade-offs at length. The short version: one house and a simple family favors the deed; multiple properties, minor beneficiaries, or a blended family favors the trust.

Lady bird deed versus a living trust for a rental property

Nobody writes about this and in this county it is the more useful comparison. If the Kissimmee property is a rental or a short-term rental rather than your home, a lady bird deed will still keep it out of probate — but it does nothing about the liability side, and holding an income property in your own name is a decision with consequences beyond your death. Owners who hold several units here typically want a structure that addresses both. A single deed on a single rental is a fine answer for one property. It is a poor answer for six.

Before any of that, I check who owns the property on the record. If title is in the name of an LLC, a partnership or a trustee rather than in your own name, an individual lady bird deed is usually the wrong instrument — an entity does not die, so there is no life estate for you to retain, and a trustee holds title on the trust’s terms rather than personally. What the record says and what people believe it says differ often enough that the recorded deed is the first document I ask for. Where the property is entity-held or trust-held, the answer lies in the operating agreement, the trust, or a change of ownership structure, and that is a different conversation from this one.

Lady Bird Deed vs. Quit Claim Deed

A quit claim deed transfers whatever interest you have, right now, with no warranty of title. Used the way people usually use it — to “put the house in my son’s name,” handing over the whole interest and keeping nothing back — it is almost always the wrong instrument. That outright transfer ends your homestead exemption, is a gift inside the Medicaid look-back, exposes the property to your son’s creditors and his divorce, and cannot be undone. What causes all of that is the transfer itself, not the words on the form. This deed does the same job at your death with none of those consequences. My page comparing the lady bird deed against a quit claim deed and the other Florida deed forms sets the two side by side.

Weighing one of these against a deed you already have, or against doing nothing? Call (305) 224-6811. I will tell you which instrument fits before anybody pays for drafting.

Does Florida have a transfer on death deed?

Not for real property. A number of states have enacted transfer on death deed statutes; Florida has not, which is precisely why the lady bird deed matters so much here. Florida does allow transfer on death registration for some financial accounts and for motor vehicle titles, so people arrive having heard the phrase in another context. For a house in Osceola County the enhanced life estate deed is the Florida equivalent, and it is a common law instrument rather than a statutory one.

Life estate deed vs. lady bird deed

A traditional life estate deed gives your beneficiary a present interest today. You cannot sell, mortgage or refinance without their signature; if they get divorced their spouse may have a claim; if they have creditors those creditors have something to attach. The enhanced version keeps all of that with you. Traditional life estate deeds still get recorded in Osceola by mistake, usually by somebody who searched for a ladybird deed form and downloaded the wrong one, and unwinding one requires the cooperation of the very person whose consent you were trying not to need.

Lady bird deed vs. a will

A will is a set of instructions that only work after a court is involved. This deed is a transfer that has already happened. They are not alternatives — you should have both, and they must agree with each other. The deed handles the house. The will handles everything else and names who is in charge.

Should I just add my child to the deed instead?

Adding a child as a joint owner is the most expensive free advice in circulation. It is a present gift of half the house, with all the Medicaid, creditor and divorce exposure that implies, and in Florida survivorship between owners who are not married is not presumed — it has to be spelled out, and frequently is not, which means the half you gave away goes through your child’s estate rather than to you. The version of this that actually works is the one this page is about.

Is a lady bird deed better than a trust?

For the right situation it is better, cheaper, and faster. For the wrong situation it is a false economy. I have talked people out of this deed and into a trust, and I have talked people out of a trust they were quoted four thousand dollars for and into this deed. The answer depends on what you own and who is receiving it, which is a fifteen-minute conversation rather than a web page.

Lady Bird Trust, Lady Bird Will, Lady Bird Law: What People Usually Mean

A large share of the people who find this page searched for something that does not exist. That is not a criticism — the name is memorable and the category is not, and the search results reward the confusion by returning pages that never correct it.

Is there such a thing as a lady bird trust?

No. There is no instrument in Florida law called a lady bird trust, and a search for a ladybird trust in Florida is almost always somebody who wants either this deed or a revocable living trust. There is a real arrangement lurking behind the phrase, though, and it is worth knowing about: a lady bird deed naming a trust as its remainder beneficiary. That is a deed and a trust working together, which is sometimes exactly right — particularly where the eventual beneficiary is a minor or has special needs. It is not a hybrid document.

Is a lady bird deed a trust?

No. There is no trustee, no trust agreement, and nothing gets retitled into anything. It is one page, one parcel, recorded in the county where the land sits.

If the property is already held by a trust or an LLC, one drafting point decides whether the deed works at all. A trust is not a legal entity in Florida, so the deed names the trustee rather than the trust. An LLC is different: it is a legal entity and holds title in its own name, so what matters there is that the right person signs for it, in the right capacity. If you are considering moving your home into an LLC, know what it costs: the Florida Constitution exempts homestead owned by a natural person, so a residence titled in a company has no protection from forced sale, no homestead exemption and no Save Our Homes cap. And it must identify the trust by name and date: under section 689.07 a deed that adds only the word trustee, without naming the trust or its date, hands the trustee the property in fee simple with full power to sell and encumber it — the opposite of what was intended, and a problem nobody notices until the property is being sold. The fee-simple result is not automatic, though. The presumption gives way where the deed shows in some other way that a trust was intended, or where a declaration of trust by that trustee is already recorded in the county: Raborn v. Menotte, 974 So. 2d 328 (Fla. 2008). Subsection (4) also lets a beneficiary enforce the trust against the trustee whether or not the trust was recorded first. That protection has a limit worth knowing: a buyer or lender who deals with the trustee for value, without notice of the trust, before the declaration of trust is recorded in the county, takes free and clear of the beneficiaries.

Is there a lady bird will in Florida?

No, and the phrase describes a contradiction — a document that avoids probate by going through probate. What people mean when they search it is usually the deed. You should still have a will; it just does a different job.

Is there a “lady bird law” in Florida?

No, and this is the most useful answer on the page. No Florida statute authorizes, defines or supplies a form for these deeds, though Florida’s general statutes on deed execution, recording, documentary stamp tax and homestead apply to them exactly as they apply to any other deed. It is a common law instrument — a way of drafting that Florida title practice and Florida courts have accepted, built out of ordinary principles of property law. If you have been searching for the lady bird law in Florida and finding nothing, that is because there is nothing to find.

That absence has consequences, and it explains the hedging further up this page. There is no statutory form, no safe-harbor language, and no legislative answer to the questions the courts have not reached. It is why the documentary stamp question on mortgaged property is still open. It is why the homestead classification is still open. A statute would have settled both years ago.

What is the lady bird clause?

The retained-powers paragraph. It is the part of the deed that reserves to you the right to sell, convey, mortgage and otherwise deal with the property without the remainder beneficiary joining. It is the clause a title examiner reads hardest and the one homemade deeds get wrong most often, usually by softening it into something that reads like a wish rather than a reservation.

Is there a lady bird deed application or paperwork to fill out?

There is no application and no government form. This is not something you apply for; it is a document somebody drafts against your existing title and you sign. The paperwork on your side is small: the last recorded deed, the parcel number, the mortgage statement if there is one, and last year’s tax bill.

The Osceola Situations That Rarely Get Written About

Can I do a lady bird deed on a vacation rental?

Yes, and in this county that is a large share of what I am asked to do. The deed does not care what the house is used for — it cares who owns it and what restrictions attach to it. What changes on a rental is everything around the deed: the assessment cap question above, the fact that the property is more likely to carry a mortgage, and the fact that homestead protections you may be counting on are not there.

Does a lady bird deed affect my short-term rental registration?

Recording one does not transfer possession or control during your lifetime, so in the ordinary case the operating arrangement itself does not change. That is not the same as saying nothing has to be reported. Check what your permit, your licence, your insurer, your association documents and any management agreement require when recorded title changes, because those obligations are set separately from who controls the property and some of them are triggered by the record itself. Osceola runs its short-term rental permitting through the county’s land development code and an overlay covering 249 approved subdivisions, and permits attach to the property and the operator. What matters is what happens after your death, and that is a question worth asking before you record: a beneficiary who inherits a house in an approved subdivision inherits a business, and the licensing does not transfer itself.

What happens to my Airbnb when I die?

Without a deed, the house goes through probate while the calendar keeps taking bookings, and somebody who has no legal authority over the property is either cancelling guests or admitting them. It is a genuinely awkward situation and I have seen it more than once here. With a recorded deed, ownership moves the day you die, and the person taking over has standing to deal with the platform, the cleaner, the management company and the county on day one instead of month five.

Who inherits my vacation home in Kissimmee?

Whoever the deed says, if there is one. If there is not, it depends on your will, and if there is no will, on Florida’s intestacy statute — applied by a Florida court, regardless of where you live, because Florida law governs Florida land. That last point is the one out-of-state owners most often get wrong.

Out-of-State and Foreign Owners

I live in another state and own a house in Kissimmee — what happens?

Your home state’s probate court has no authority over Florida real property. So your family opens a probate where you lived, and then opens a second, separate proceeding in Florida to deal with the house. That second proceeding is ancillary administration, and it means a Florida attorney, a Florida filing fee, a Florida creditor period and Florida timelines, running in parallel with everything happening at home.

What is ancillary administration, and how do I avoid it?

It is the Florida proceeding that exists because a foreign court cannot pass title to Florida land. You avoid it by making sure there is nothing in Florida that needs to be transferred at your death — which for a single house is exactly what this deed does, for $675 and one afternoon. Set against a second full probate in a state where your family knows nobody, it is the easiest arithmetic on this page. My Florida ancillary probate page covers the proceeding itself.

Can a non-US citizen sign a lady bird deed on Florida property?

Citizenship is not a requirement for owning or conveying Florida real property, and I prepare these regularly for owners who live in Canada, the United Kingdom and Latin America. What foreign owners should get advice on before recording anything is the tax side — the estate tax exposure for a non-resident who is not a US citizen is a different regime with a much lower threshold, and withholding applies on sales. The deed is the easy part of that conversation. Do not let it be the only part.

Snowbirds and the two-residence problem

If you spend half the year here and half somewhere else, the question of which house is your permanent residence is not a matter of preference. It affects whether Florida’s homestead protections apply, whether the exemption is available, and whether your spouse must sign. Bring a driver’s license, a voter registration and a tax return from the other state, and we will settle it in five minutes rather than leaving it for a court.

Can I sign without coming to Florida?

Yes. Remote online notarization handles the signing, the witnesses appear in the same session, and the deed is submitted electronically to the Clerk in Kissimmee. I have recorded deeds for owners who have never set foot in the county whose recorder holds their title.

Timeshares, Condominiums, HOAs and Community Development Districts

What happens to the CDD assessment when I die?

It stays with the land, and the person who inherits inherits it. Osceola has 50 registered community development districts, and their assessments ride on the property tax bill.

If your community is Celebration, Championsgate, Reunion, Harmony, Bellalago, Tohoqua, Storey Creek, Kindred, Remington or one of forty others, there is a district levying assessments against your parcel under § 190.022. Those assessments are collected through the uniform method in § 197.3632, which puts them on the combined tax notice alongside the ad valorem taxes and subjects them to the same collection machinery — including tax certificates and, eventually, tax deeds. The statute is explicit that such an assessment can lien even a homestead.

The consequence for a lady bird deed is straightforward and frequently missed. Capital assessments under § 190.022 can be made payable in up to thirty yearly installments. A district that issued bonds a decade ago may have twenty years left to run. The remainder beneficiary who takes the house at your death takes those installments too, on a schedule that can outlive the person who signed the deed by decades.

That is not an argument against anything. It is an argument for finding out the number. A beneficiary who understands they are inheriting a house plus a twenty-year obligation makes a different decision from one who discovers it on the first November tax bill.

Does my HOA have to approve a lady bird deed?

Usually not, but read the declaration before assuming. Homeowners associations in Florida do not generally hold approval rights over a transfer of title the way some condominium and cooperative associations do. What they frequently do have is a notice requirement, a transfer fee, an estoppel process, and occasionally a right of first refusal that was written broadly enough to catch conveyances nobody was thinking about in 1998. In managed Osceola communities I read the declaration as part of the engagement. It takes twenty minutes and it has changed the drafting more than once.

Approval is one question; money is another. Under section 720.3085(2) a parcel owner is jointly and severally liable with the previous owner for assessments that went unpaid before title passed, so a beneficiary who takes a house in a deed-restricted community inherits the arrears along with it. Ask the association for an estoppel certificate before anything else, and do it early — the figure it certifies is what the association can collect.

Can you do a lady bird deed on a Florida condominium?

Yes. A condominium unit is real property held in fee, so the instrument works exactly as it does on a house. What comes with it is the association layer: unpaid assessments follow the unit, a new owner can be jointly liable with the previous owner for what was owed, and the association’s approval and transfer procedures in the declaration still apply. Building safety obligations — milestone inspections and structural reserve studies for taller buildings — are association and owner obligations that are not affected by, and do not affect, whether a unit is transferred by lady bird deed. They matter to what your beneficiary is inheriting. They do not change how the deed works.

Who pays the condominium assessments after the owner dies?

The unit does, which in practice means whoever now owns it. This is one of the strongest arguments for the deed in a condominium: assessments do not pause for probate. Nine months of unpaid maintenance while an estate is opened is a lien, and the association is not obliged to be patient with a family that has no authority to write checks yet.

If the property is a condominium, there is a point nobody warns about and it costs more than any approval question. Under section 718.116(1)(a) a unit owner is liable for assessments regardless of how title was acquired, and is jointly and severally liable with the previous owner for everything unpaid up to the transfer of title. In Coastal Creek Condominium Association v. FLA Trust Services LLC, 275 So. 3d 836 (Fla. 1st DCA 2019), the First District held that this reaches unpaid assessments going back beyond the immediate prior owner. Your beneficiary inherits that liability with the unit and has thirty days after the transfer of title to pay it. Section 718.116(1)(c) is where that thirty-day clock sits, and it belongs to condominiums alone. In a homeowners’ association, section 720.3085(2) makes the new owner jointly and severally liable for what the previous owner left unpaid, but it sets no thirty-day deadline. Whoever takes the unit should ask for an estoppel certificate straight away.

Can you do a lady bird deed on a timeshare?

Sometimes, and Osceola is the place this question gets asked, because this county and its neighbors hold one of the densest concentrations of timeshare inventory in the country — the 2018 roll counted 530 timeshare accounts as separate line items. The answer turns on what you actually own. A deeded timeshare interest is a real property interest and can generally be conveyed. A right-to-use or points membership is contractual and cannot be conveyed by deed at all.

Before you do it, ask the harder question: does your beneficiary want it? A timeshare comes with maintenance fees that continue forever and a resale market that frequently values the interest at nothing. Passing one to a child who does not want it is passing them a bill. My page on the inherited Florida timeshare covers the options, including the ones that involve not inheriting it.

What about an inherited timeshare in Osceola County?

If somebody has already died and left you one, the questions are different: whether the interest is deeded, whether an administration is needed, and whether disclaimer is available and still timely. Disclaimer has deadlines. It is the first thing to check and the thing people find out about too late.

Mobile and Manufactured Homes

Osceola has a large stock of manufactured and mobile homes, in parks along Highway 192, around St. Cloud and out toward Intercession City and Kenansville. Whether a lady bird deed works for one depends entirely on a question most owners have never been asked: do you own the land?

Can you lady bird deed a mobile home in Florida?

If you own both your manufactured home and the land it sits on, and the home is permanently affixed, the property appraiser will assess the home as real property and the tax collector will issue an “RP” series sticker. That sticker settles how the home is taxed. It does not, on its own, let the home be transferred by deed. For that, the motor vehicle certificate of title has to be formally retired with the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles under § 319.261. Once it is retired, the statute requires the home to be conveyed by deed or real estate contract together with the land, and an enhanced life estate deed then works exactly as it would on a house. Before it is retired, a deed conveys the land and leaves the home behind on its own outstanding title. That is the trap, and it is the reason retirement is a step rather than a nicety.

What is the RP decal?

It is the sticker issued when a manufactured home is being assessed as real property rather than taxed as a vehicle. Three things have to line up: the home’s owner also owns the land, the home is permanently affixed, and the property appraiser has assessed it as real property. The decal is a consequence of that assessment, not the act that causes it. Note the baseline that surprises people — even a home permanently affixed and taxed as real property still carries an RP plate issued by the state.

What if I own the home but rent the lot?

In most land-lease and park situations a lady bird deed conveys nothing, and this is the single most important paragraph in this section. Where the lot is rented month to month or year to year, the home is personal property titled through the state motor vehicle department, there is no real property interest for a deed to operate on, and the correct instrument is a certificate of title transfer rather than a deed. Anybody who sells you a deed for a home on a short-term rented lot has sold you a piece of paper. There is one exception, and it is rarely mentioned: § 319.261 treats a recorded leasehold of thirty years or more as real property owned by the same person. If you hold a lease like that, title retirement is available to you, a copy of the lease is recorded with the retirement paperwork, and the home can then be conveyed by deed along with your leasehold interest. Most park tenancies are nowhere near thirty years, so this reaches a small group — but if you are in it, the answer flips.

Mobile home title versus deed — and the “or” that solves it

Where the home is personal property, survivorship is achieved through the title rather than through a deed. A home titled to co-owners in the alternative — using “or” rather than “and” — creates a joint tenancy under § 319.22 — a creature of the vehicle title statute rather than of the common law — so that on the death of a co-owner the interest passes to the survivor. It is a one-word difference on a state form, it costs almost nothing, and it is the most useful thing I can tell a park resident in this county. I have not seen it set out on another page in this market.

One honest limit: no Florida appellate court has squarely decided whether an enhanced life estate deed can convey a manufactured home. The conclusions above follow from the titling and classification statutes and from a Fifth District decision on when these homes are real property rather than personal property, which is a straightforward application rather than a holding on the deed question.

What about a cooperative unit?

A Florida cooperative unit is owned through shares in the association plus a proprietary lease rather than by deed, so an enhanced life estate deed is not the right tool. The interest is transferred by assigning the shares or membership and the lease, subject to the cooperative’s approval and transfer rules — and no Florida court has decided whether a lady bird deed can be used for a co-op at all. There are co-op communities in this county and the people living in them are frequently told otherwise.

What Happens Instead, If the Deed Is Not There

Which court would hear the probate?

The Ninth Judicial Circuit, shared with Orange County. Section 26.021 composes the Ninth of Orange and Osceola, and probate is filed on that same second floor in Kissimmee. There is no separate probate court in Florida — the probate division is a division of the circuit court, which is why people searching for the Osceola County probate court end up at the Clerk.

Sharing a circuit with a much larger neighbor has an ordinary consequence: administrative orders, judicial assignments and local practice are set for both counties together, and Orange is where most of the volume is. Compare Broward, whose Seventeenth Circuit is that county and nothing else, or Seminole, which shares the Eighteenth with Brevard sixty miles east.

What an administration actually involves

A personal representative has to be appointed, an inventory filed, a creditor period run, and the file is public from the day it opens. Formal administration on an Osceola house is a matter of months rather than weeks, and the property cannot be sold or refinanced until somebody has authority. Smaller estates may qualify for summary administration, which is faster and cheaper but still a court proceeding with its own thresholds and its own risks.

None of that changes the arithmetic of avoiding it. A deed that does its job keeps the property out of the whole process, which is the entire point of the exercise. Where an administration is needed anyway, my Kissimmee probate page covers how it runs in this county.

The Cities and Communities I Prepare These For

These are the Osceola communities I am asked about most. Just over the county line the Lake Nona corridor raises the same questions in front of a different property appraiser and a different clerk, and I prepare these there too.

Lady Bird Deed Kissimmee

The county seat and the place the recording actually happens — and the one section of this page where the spelling genuinely varies, because a Kissimmee ladybird deed arrives at the same counter as one spelled the long way. Kissimmee’s housing runs from the older neighborhoods near the lake and the downtown to the corridor development along 192, and the two produce completely different conversations — a paid-off house on a 1970s street where a widow has lived for forty years, and a 2019 build in a gated subdivision owned by somebody in Michigan. Both get the same instrument. They do not get the same drafting.

St. Cloud

A separate city with its own downtown and a housing stock that skews far more toward permanent residents than the west side of the county does. That means homestead is genuinely in play here, spousal joinder is a live question rather than an academic one, and the Save Our Homes cap is usually worth protecting. A St. Cloud lady bird deed — or a St. Cloud ladybird deed, if that is the spelling you searched — is drafted and recorded the same way as any other in Osceola, but the homestead analysis is the part that takes the time.

Celebration

Celebration is a covenanted community with an unusually thick layer of governing documents by Florida standards, and its community development district is one of the oldest in the county. Two practical consequences. The declaration is worth reading before a transfer rather than after, and the district assessment on a Celebration parcel is frequently a larger annual number than owners elsewhere in the county are used to. If you are comparing a Celebration lady bird deed against a trust, the assessment schedule belongs in that comparison.

Poinciana

Poinciana is the one that requires care, because it straddles the county line. Part of it is in Osceola and part of it is in Polk, and the line does not follow anything a resident would notice from the street. That determines which Clerk records the deed, which Property Appraiser handles the exemption, and which circuit would hear a probate — the Ninth for Osceola, the Tenth for Polk. I check the parcel before drafting. A Poinciana ladybird deed sent to the wrong Clerk comes back, and it comes back after the delay you did not have. If your parcel turns out to be on the Polk side, my Polk County lady bird deed page covers that county.

Buenaventura Lakes

An established, densely built community with an older housing stock and a large Spanish-speaking population, much of it with roots in Puerto Rico. Homestead is usually real here, families are frequently multigenerational, and the question of who has actually been living in the house is often the question that matters most. Consultations are available in English or Spanish.

Championsgate, Reunion and the Highway 192 corridor

This is the non-homestead heartland of the county and the reason the ten percent cap question above is not academic. Properties here are vacation homes, short-term rentals, or investments held by owners who live somewhere else entirely, frequently mortgaged, frequently inside a district. Every one of the open questions on this page — the assessment reset, the documentary stamp treatment of a mortgaged transfer, the licensing that does not transfer itself — lands hardest on exactly these parcels.

Harmony, Bellalago, Tohoqua, Storey Creek, Kindred and Remington

District-governed communities where the tax bill is the document that tells the story. Before I draft anything for a parcel in one of these, I want last year’s bill, because the CDD line is where the number lives and because a remainder beneficiary should be told what they are agreeing to inherit. A Harmony or Bellalago ladybird deed is mechanically identical to one anywhere else. The conversation around it is not.

Davenport and the Four Corners

Four Corners sits where Osceola, Polk, Orange and Lake meet, and a Davenport address can be in more than one of them. The same county-line discipline applies as in Poinciana: confirm the parcel before anybody drafts. A Davenport parcel on the Polk side is covered on my Polk County lady bird deed attorney page. This is short-term rental country and the ownership profile matches the 192 corridor.

Narcoossee and the Lake Nona edge

The northeast corner of the county, growing quickly, and the place where Osceola addresses and Orange County expectations meet. Property here is often newer, often mortgaged, and often owned by people who assume they are in Orange County and would be filing in Orlando. They are not; the recording is in Kissimmee.

Intercession City, Campbell City, Kenansville and Yeehaw Junction

The rural south and west of the county, where manufactured homes, acreage and land-lease arrangements are common and where the mobile home section above is frequently the section that actually applies. These are the parcels where the first question is not how to draft the deed. It is whether a deed is the right instrument at all.

What to Bring to the First Appointment

The recorded deed, the parcel number, the mortgage statement, and last year’s tax bill. That fourth item matters more here than anywhere else in this series, because the tax bill is where the community development district assessment appears and it is the quickest way to find out whether one exists and what it is costing.

Bring the association documents too if the property is in a managed community, and anything the district has sent about bonds or a capital assessment. Bring your will if you have one, because the two documents have to agree. If the property is genuinely a second home, bring proof of where you actually live — a driver’s license, a voter registration, a tax return from the other state. That single fact decides which half of this page applies to you, and it is not a question a downloaded form knows how to ask. My preparation checklist covers the rest of it.

How Do I Find a Kissimmee Lady Bird Deed Attorney?

Call (305) 224-6811. A standard matter is $675 with the recording charges and the minimum documentary stamp charge included, quoted once the title has been read and before drafting starts. That covers Kissimmee, St. Cloud, Celebration, Poinciana, Buenaventura Lakes, Harmony and the rest of Osceola County, and the signing can be done remotely from wherever you happen to live.

If the owner has already died and a recorded lady bird deed is in the family’s hands, that is a different piece of work. I review the recorded deed you supply and sit down with you for thirty minutes on what the death does to ownership of the property and what has to happen next, for a flat $475. That is a review and a consultation, not a title search and not a comprehensive estate review; preparing or recording anything, administering an estate, or taking on a dispute is separate work on separately agreed terms. Request a deed review and 30-minute consultation on (305) 224-6811.

People arrive at this from three directions and search for three different things. Some are looking for a real estate attorney in Kissimmee, because the document is a deed. Some are looking for an estate planning attorney in Osceola County, because the purpose is to decide who gets the house. And some are looking for an elder law attorney near St. Cloud, because a nursing home conversation started last week and somebody used the word Medicaid. All three arrive at the same document. It is the same $675 whichever door you came through.

The phrase people actually type is usually “lady bird deed attorney near me,” and I will say the honest thing about that: proximity is a poor way to choose for this particular document, because the deed is recorded in Kissimmee no matter who drafts it and the signing happens wherever you are. What is worth choosing on is whether the person drafting it read your recorded deed first. The same goes for a search for a lady bird deed lawyer near me, which will return firms in four counties and tell you nothing about any of them.

Related reading: the statewide lady bird deed attorney page sets out the fee and what it buys, the Orlando page covers the other half of this circuit and the different offices it uses, the Miami page covers the only Florida county with a different stamp tax rate, and the Broward County page covers a county where the recorder is not a court officer at all. For what happens after a death, see what to do with a lady bird deed after death.

A free template will produce something that records. It will not tell you what the district assessment is, whether the ten percent cap resets, or whether the house you think is a vacation home is legally your homestead. Those three questions are why a Kissimmee lady bird deed attorney reads the documents before quoting a price.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does it cost to do a ladybird deed in Florida?

Attorney fees around the state generally fall between $400 and $1,000; non-attorney form services advertise less and cannot advise you. Mine is $675 flat, and that one figure includes the Osceola recording charges and the minimum documentary stamp charge. Documentary stamp tax above that minimum — in practice, where the property carries a mortgage — is separate, goes to the state, and I work the figure out and explain it before you decide to proceed.

Do I need an attorney to file a lady bird deed in Florida?

No statute requires one. Whether you should use one depends on whether you are married, whether there is a mortgage, whether the property is homestead, and whether anybody has read your existing title. Those four facts decide it, and three of them are frequently misunderstood by the owner.

What is the downside of a ladybird deed in Florida?

It covers one parcel and nothing else. It does nothing if you become incapacitated. It hands the property to your beneficiary outright, with no protection against their creditors, their divorce, or their inability to manage it. And it does not, by itself, preserve your assessment cap for them. If any of those matter in your family, a trust is the better instrument.

Can I do my own ladybird deed in Florida?

Yes. The failures I unwind are consistent: weak retained-powers language, a legal description copied from a tax bill, one witness instead of two, a married owner signing alone, and the “$10.00 and other good and valuable consideration” recital.

Can I get a lady bird deed in Kissimmee, Florida?

Yes, and the recording happens at 2 Courthouse Square. You do not need to be in Kissimmee, or in Florida, to sign one for a Kissimmee property.

Does a lady bird deed have to be recorded?

To function in any practical sense, yes, and it should be recorded during your lifetime. An unrecorded deed can still be good between you and your beneficiary, but it will not protect them against a later purchaser or creditor, and a title examiner works from the official records — so a deed nobody can find there is a deed that holds up a closing.

Does a lady bird deed have to be notarized?

Yes, and it needs two individual subscribing witnesses as well. Both witnesses sign and print, with addresses, for this Clerk.

Where is the Osceola County recorder of deeds?

Second floor, 2 Courthouse Square, Kissimmee — the Clerk of the Circuit Court and County Comptroller, which handles both recording and probate. Recording happens only there. The Clerk’s Poinciana branch on Pleasant Hill Road handles appointments, criminal and traffic payments and case filings — not recording.

How much does it cost to record a deed in Osceola County?

Ten dollars for the first page and $8.50 for each additional page, plus a dollar for each name indexed beyond the first four.

Does a lady bird deed protect my house from Medicaid?

It is the instrument most commonly used to keep a Florida home out of the probate estate that estate recovery reaches, and it is generally not treated as a transfer for look-back purposes. It is not a guarantee, and it cannot be signed by somebody who no longer understands what they are signing — though capacity is assessed individually, and an existing power of attorney may carry the authority to sign for them.

Does a lady bird deed trigger the five-year look-back?

Generally not, because you retain the power to sell the property and keep the proceeds, so nothing has been given away. Deeding the house to a child outright is a different story entirely. Your home is not a countable resource for Medicaid purposes as long as it is your principal residence — or, if you have moved to a nursing facility, as long as you intend to return or your spouse or a dependent relative is still living there. Separately, if your equity in the home exceeds the annual federal limit, you will not be eligible for nursing facility, institutional hospice, or home-and-community-based waiver services until that equity is reduced below the cap, unless your spouse, a child under 21, or a blind or disabled child of any age is lawfully living in the home. Both rules come from regulations formally adopted under Florida and federal law rather than from any Florida court decision, and buying a life estate in someone else’s property is a different transaction that is not protected this way.

Do you handle Kissimmee and St. Cloud ladybird deeds?

Yes, and Celebration, Poinciana, Buenaventura Lakes, Harmony, Championsgate, Reunion, Kenansville and anywhere else in the county. The spelling makes no difference to the document.

Can I sell my house with a lady bird deed?

Yes, without your beneficiary’s signature. That retained power is the defining feature of the instrument.

Can I change or revoke it later?

Yes, unilaterally and without notice to anybody. Record a new deed, or sell the property, and the old arrangement is gone.

Does a lady bird deed override my will?

For that parcel, yes. This is why the will should be read at the same time the deed is drafted.

Can a power of attorney sign a lady bird deed?

Only where the power of attorney expressly grants that authority and was signed with the formalities Florida requires for it. Most general durable powers of attorney do not.

Will a title company insure a property that has one?

In my experience, routinely, when the deed is drafted properly. Objections come from defective drafting, not from the instrument.

Do you pay documentary stamp tax on a lady bird deed?

On an unencumbered property, the Department of Revenue’s published position is that recording one does not by itself trigger the tax. Where the property carries a mortgage and the beneficiaries are not your spouse, the question is unresolved in Florida, and I will not publish a number on it.

Does Osceola County charge a discretionary surtax on deeds?

No. The rate here is the standard $0.70 per $100. Miami-Dade is the county with a different arrangement.

Does a lady bird deed affect my homestead exemption?

On the home you actually live in, it should not, because you have not stopped owning or occupying it. Deeding the house outright to a child and keeping nothing back does end it — not because of the words “quit claim,” but because the exemption depends on your owning the property and you no longer would, even if you carried on living there. What the deed actually conveys, and what you keep, is what decides it.

Will my property taxes go up?

On homestead, ordinarily no. On non-homestead property in this county the answer is genuinely open, because I have not found a Florida court decision, Department of Revenue rule or Property Appraiser bulletin resolving whether recording one of these deeds resets the ten percent cap under § 193.1554.

Does my spouse have to sign?

On homestead property, treat it as required. Florida’s Constitution requires spousal joinder to transfer homestead, and a waiver of devise rights does not waive that.

What happens if I have a minor child?

The homestead does not pass to your remainder beneficiary. It descends by operation of law, and no drafting works around it.

Can I name more than one beneficiary?

Yes. Understand that you are creating co-owners who have to agree about a house, and that the Florida remedy when they do not is a partition action.

What if my beneficiary dies before I do?

It depends on how the deed was drafted. Substitution language sends the interest to that person’s descendants; a deed without it may let the gift lapse. It is a question you should be asked.

Lady bird deed vs. living trust — which do I need?

One house and a straightforward family generally favors the deed. Multiple properties, minor or vulnerable beneficiaries, a blended family, or a concern about incapacity generally favors the trust.

Does Florida have a transfer on death deed?

Not for real property. The enhanced life estate deed is the Florida equivalent, and it is a common law instrument rather than a statutory one.

Is there such a thing as a lady bird trust or a lady bird will?

No. Both phrases describe things that do not exist in Florida law. People searching for them usually want either this deed or a revocable living trust.

Can you do a lady bird deed on a mobile home?

Only if the home’s motor vehicle title has been retired under § 319.261. That requires the home to be permanently affixed and requires you to own the land — or to hold a recorded lease of it for thirty years or more, which § 319.261 treats the same way. The RP sticker shows how the home is taxed and is not enough on its own. Where the title has not been retired, and on an ordinary short-term rented lot, the home is personal property and a deed conveys nothing; you transfer it by certificate of title instead.

Can you do a lady bird deed on a timeshare?

If the interest is a deeded real property interest, generally yes. If it is a right-to-use or points membership, no. Ask whether your beneficiary wants it before you do either.

I live out of state. Do I have to come to Florida?

No. Remote online notarization handles the signing and the deed is submitted electronically to the Kissimmee Clerk. Avoiding a Florida ancillary probate is the main reason out-of-state owners do this.

How long does it take?

From the first call to a recorded deed is usually a matter of days once I have the last recorded deed and the tax bill. Electronic submissions typically come back the same or the next business day.

Do you speak Spanish?

Yes. Consultations are available in English or Spanish, and my Spanish-language Kissimmee inheritance page covers the probate side.

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Last updated: 18 September 2026.

Written and reviewed by Jose M. Lorenzo, Jr., attorney, Florida Bar No. 107002.

This page is general information about Florida law and does not constitute legal advice for any particular situation. Reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship.