Lady Bird Deed Tampa: Two Courthouses, Two Post Office Boxes, and Only One Same-Day Counter
A lady bird deed Tampa homeowners sign is recorded at 419 N. Pierce Street, but if that enhanced life estate deed fails the probate opens two blocks away on Twiggs — different building, different room, different post office box. At Lorenzo Law I handle these across Hillsborough County. Jose M. Lorenzo, Jr., Florida Bar No. 107002.
| Hillsborough County | Where |
|---|---|
| Deeds | Clerk of the Circuit Court & Comptroller, 419 N. Pierce St., Room 140, Tampa |
| Probate | George E. Edgecomb Courthouse, 800 E. Twiggs St., Room 204 — a different building |
| Homestead and parcel data | Property Appraiser, 601 E. Kennedy Blvd., 15th floor, Tampa |
| Judicial circuit | Thirteenth — Hillsborough County alone |
| Recording, page one | $10.00, then $8.50 each later page |
| Documentary stamps | $0.70 per $100 — the standard rate, no surtax |
| Lorenzo Law flat fee | $675, recording included |
| Call | (305) 224-6811 |
Where does a lady bird deed Tampa owners sign get recorded?
Room 140 of the Pat Collier Frank Courthouse, 419 N. Pierce Street. The Clerk of the Circuit Court and Comptroller runs that counter, weekdays from eight until five, on (813) 276-8100.
Note the street number. The Clerk’s own website gives 419 Pierce Street on its locations page and 401 Pierce Street on another, and the Thirteenth Circuit’s facilities page says 419 N. Pierce. Two of three primary sources say 419, and that is the one to use. Competing pages have copied the other.
Recordings sent by post go to Official Records, P.O. Box 3249, Tampa 33601-3249. Write that box number down, because it is not the probate box.
Why does the probate go somewhere else?
Because Hillsborough splits the two functions across separate courthouses. Recording is on Pierce Street. Probate is filed at the George E. Edgecomb Courthouse, 800 E. Twiggs Street, Room 204.
| County | Deed goes to | Estate goes to |
|---|---|---|
| Hillsborough | 419 N. Pierce St., Room 140 | 800 E. Twiggs St., Room 204 — two blocks |
| Palm Beach | One combined office | The same office |
| Miami-Dade | 20 NW 1st Ave., level five | Level six, same building |
| Broward | A county department | Clerk of Courts, a mile and a half |
| Orange | Comptroller, Church St. | Clerk, N. Orange Ave. |
The trap is the post. Recording uses P.O. Box 3249; probate uses P.O. Box 3360. Send a deed to the probate box and it comes back to you unrecorded, having cost a week. That is the kind of detail nobody discovers until it happens to them.
There is a compensation. Because the Clerk here is also the County Comptroller, one elected officer holds the recording function and the county’s financial administration together — the opposite arrangement to Orange County, which hived recording off to a separate elected Comptroller entirely. Hillsborough is the most consolidated officer of the five counties in this series and the most spread out in bricks and mortar.
Can I record anywhere other than downtown?
Yes — three full-service counters take deeds. Downtown Tampa, Brandon and Plant City all record, and all three also accept probate filings.
| Counter | Address | Hours |
|---|---|---|
| Downtown Tampa | 419 N. Pierce St., Room 140 | 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. |
| Brandon | 311 Pauls Drive, Suite 110 | 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. |
| Plant City | 301 N. Michigan Ave., Room 1071 | 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. |
Read the middle row twice. Brandon closes an hour earlier than the other two, and a late-afternoon walk-in with a signed deed and a notary in the car is exactly the person who will find that out the hard way.
That degree of decentralisation is unusual. Miami-Dade identifies one office as its County Recorder across a county of nearly a million parcels. Hillsborough runs three, and the two suburban ones sit where the owner-occupied housing actually is — the county’s owner-occupancy rate is 61.5% against Tampa city’s 50.3%, so the deed work is in Brandon and Plant City rather than downtown.
What does recording a lady bird deed cost in Hillsborough?
Ten dollars for the first page, then $8.50 for every page after it. Names past the first four index at a dollar each, so a two-page deed naming two people costs $18.50.
| Charge | Amount |
|---|---|
| First page | $10.00 |
| Each additional page | $8.50 |
| Each name indexed beyond the first four | $1.00 |
| Name search, per year searched | $2.00 |
| Certified copy | $2.00 |
| Documentary stamps on the deed | $0.70 per $100 |
Those are not local figures, and it is worth knowing where they come from. § 28.24 builds the first page out of a $5.00 base, $1.00 for the Public Records Modernization Trust Fund and a $4.00 court technology charge. Each later page is $4.00 plus $0.50 plus $4.00. Hillsborough charges exactly the statutory maximum, which is why the number matches Broward, Palm Beach and Pinellas to the cent. There is no per-legal-description charge here, unlike Palm Beach County.
The Clerk publishes its own deed calculator, which prices stamps and recording from the value of the home and the number of pages. It is the official source and worth using before anyone quotes you a figure.
Does the mortgage change what a lady bird deed costs?
Yes, and it is the only number here that reaches four figures. § 201.02 counts an outstanding mortgage as consideration for the transfer whether or not anybody assumes the debt.
Hillsborough pays the ordinary seventy cents per $100. It levies no discretionary surtax and structurally cannot: § 125.0167 permits one only in a county as defined by § 125.011, which reaches a county holding a home rule charter preserved from the 1885 constitution. Miami-Dade is the only county in that class.
So on a Tampa house carrying $300,000, the documentary stamp tax on a gift deed is $2,100, payable at the counter, on a transfer where no money changes hands. On a house that is paid off it is nominal. Whether your mortgage is cleared is the first question worth answering, because it decides whether this costs eighteen dollars or two thousand.
Can I e-record it myself, or do I have to go in?
Going in person is the only way to be certain of same-day recording. The Clerk says plainly that it cannot promise same or next-day recording for post or e-recording.
That sentence matters more than it looks. Where a grantor is in declining health, the date a deed reaches the official records can be the difference between a working instrument and an estate, and a promise of “within a few days” is not a promise at all.
Electronic recording is available through ten approved vendors, and there is no direct public channel — every submission travels through an enrolled provider. The Clerk’s business rules contemplate firms and title companies with accounts, not a homeowner with one document. One vendor, RecordNation, is flagged by the Clerk itself as a low-volume vendor, and that is the only published route for an individual to e-record a single deed in this county. Nobody else writes that down.
Whatever route you choose, the formatting rules bite. Since 1 January 2024 § 695.26 has required the post office address of each witness to be legibly printed on the face of the instrument, and the Clerk is explicit that an email address will not do. Two subscribing witnesses under § 689.01, a proper acknowledgment under § 695.03, the preparer named, and the grantee’s address on the face of it.
What happens to my homestead exemption?
Nothing, if the deed is drafted properly — but file by 1 March. The office sits on the fifteenth floor of the County Center, 601 E. Kennedy Boulevard, open weekdays until 5 p.m.
| Hillsborough County Property Appraiser | Detail |
|---|---|
| Office | 601 E. Kennedy Blvd., 15th floor, Tampa · (813) 272-6100 |
| Filing deadline | 1 March, under § 196.011 |
| Late filing | accepted up to 25 days after the TRIM notice mails |
| Tested as of | 1 January — title, domicile and residency all |
| Exemption | first $25,000 on everything; a second $25,000 between $50,000 and $75,000, excluding school taxes |
| Save Our Homes cap | the lesser of 3% or the change in CPI |
One Hillsborough quirk worth the paragraph. The additional senior exemption is not uniform across the county. A homeowner in the City of Tampa or in unincorporated Hillsborough can claim up to $50,000; a homeowner in Temple Terrace, subject to the same income limit, can claim up to $25,000. Same county, same statute, half the relief, decided by which side of a municipal boundary the house sits on.
None of that is disturbed by a properly drafted deed. The owner keeps a life estate together with the power to sell, mortgage or revoke without anyone’s consent, so the exemption and the assessment cap ride through. What disturbs it is a deed drafted without those retained powers, which converts the transfer into a completed gift of a remainder interest and changes the analysis on every front at once.
What if the property was bought a long time ago?
Then the chain of title may predate the online index. Hillsborough’s records go back to 1836, but the free online index only reaches 1965.
Roughly 25 million documents have been recorded here since 1846. Everything from 1965 forward is searchable online, with a paid subscription available for deeper access, and anything earlier runs through a separate historical portal. For a house in Ybor City, Hyde Park or Seminole Heights, the deed that actually governs your legal description may sit in a volume that was microfilmed rather than scanned.
This is precisely where a downloaded lady bird deed form fails. The legal description has to be copied from the recorded deed, not from the tax bill or the property appraiser’s website, and if the recorded deed is not on the internet then the person filling in the blanks has no way to copy it correctly. A free form cannot fetch a document it cannot see.
Which court hears the estate if the deed does not work?
The Thirteenth Judicial Circuit, which is Hillsborough County and nothing else. § 26.021 composes the Thirteenth of this county alone.
A single-county circuit means one probate bench, one set of administrative orders and no cross-county variation in practice. Compare the Ninth, shared by Orange and Osceola, or the Eighteenth, where Seminole is yoked to Brevard sixty miles east on the coast.
Predictable is not the same as painless. The estate still opens, an inventory is still filed, the creditor period still runs, and the file is public. A deed that works keeps the house out of all of it, which is the entire point of paying attention to it now.
What should I bring to a consultation?
The recorded deed, the folio number and the mortgage statement. With those three the title question is usually answered in the first meeting rather than the second.
Then the family picture: who inherits, how old they are, and whether anybody in that group draws needs-based assistance. A remainder interest landing on someone who receives SSI or Medicaid can cost them the benefit, and the fix is normally to send that share into a trust rather than to give up on the deed altogether. Our preparation checklist sets out everything else worth gathering.
How do I reach a lady bird deed attorney in Tampa?
Call (305) 224-6811. A standard matter is $675 with the recording charges included, quoted after the title review and before any drafting, with the documentary stamp tax stated separately because it follows your mortgage.
That covers Tampa, Brandon, Riverview, Plant City, Temple Terrace, Valrico, Lutz and the rest of Hillsborough County.
Related reading: the statewide lady bird deed attorney page sets out the fee and what it buys, the Miami page covers the only Florida county paying a different stamp tax rate, the Broward County page covers a county where the recorder is not a court officer at all, and lady bird deed versus a trust sets the instrument against the alternative. Getting this right starts with somebody reading the current deed rather than filling in a form.
A lady bird deed Tampa owners can rely on is drafted from the recorded title, priced against the mortgage, and taken to the right counter on Pierce Street.
Last updated: 7 August 2026.
What changed: new page. Addresses, fees, hours and exemption figures verified against those offices; the counter given as 419 N. Pierce Street, which two of three primary sources use; fees traced through § 28.24; population from Census QuickFacts; statutes cited to the 2025 edition. No parcel count is stated, because none is published.
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.