Palm Beach County Probate Court: the 15th Circuit’s Three Courthouses, Checklists and Timelines

Reviewed by Jose M. Lorenzo, Jr., Esq. — Florida Bar No. 107002, admitted 2013. Former judicial clerk in the Probate Division of Florida’s Eleventh Judicial Circuit. Probate, guardianship and estate litigation across Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade, in English and Spanish. Last reviewed: 8 August 2026.

In short: The Palm Beach County probate court is the Probate Division of Florida’s Fifteenth Judicial Circuit, and it operates from three courthouses — Main in West Palm Beach, South County in Delray Beach, and North County in Palm Beach Gardens. Which one gets your case is decided by zip code, and not the one most people expect. Since March 2022 a completed checklist must be filed with ten categories of petition, or the petition is rejected with leave to refile. Proposed orders go through the circuit’s Online Scheduling system (OLS) and cannot be mailed, emailed or handed in. Formal administration costs $401; summary administration $346. The Clerk currently reports a 6-to-8-week wait for orders from the probate court.

Quick reference — Palm Beach County probate court

Court	Probate Division, Fifteenth Judicial Circuit of Florida
Main Courthouse	205 North Dixie Highway, West Palm Beach, FL 33401
South County	200 West Atlantic Avenue, Delray Beach, FL 33444
North County	3188 PGA Boulevard, Palm Beach Gardens, FL 33410
Palm Beach County probate court phone number	(561) 355-2986
Self-service centre	(561) 355-7048
Mailing address (originals)	P.O. Box 4667, West Palm Beach, FL 33402
Checklists	Mandatory with 10 petition types — completed in OLS
Proposed orders	OLS only. Not by mail, email or in person
Ex parte docket	Suspended. UMC hearings by Zoom
Clerk turnaround	48 hours to index a new case · 72 hours to docket in an existing one
Wait for an order from the judge	6 to 8 weeks
Formal / ancillary administration	$401
Summary administration	$346 ($1,000+) · $236 (under $1,000)
Caveat / notice of trust	$41 each

Three courthouses — and the rule that decides which one gets your case

The Palm Beach County probate division is not one building. Probate is handled at the Main Courthouse at 205 North Dixie Highway in West Palm Beach, at South County at 200 West Atlantic Avenue in Delray Beach, and at North County at 3188 PGA Boulevard in Palm Beach Gardens.

So which one handles your estate? Here is where nearly everyone guesses wrong.

The case is assigned by zip code — the zip code of the petitioner’s attorney’s office. Not the decedent’s address. Not where the property is. If the petitioner is self-represented, the decedent’s last address is used instead.

Read that again if you are hiring counsel. A Boca Raton family whose lawyer sits in Palm Beach Gardens can find their file at North County; a Jupiter estate handled by a Delray firm can land at South County. The geography of your case follows the geography of your lawyer’s office.

Two consequences follow. Originals go to the courthouse handling the case — a will or death certificate mailed to the wrong location is a delay, and in a county with a six-to-eight week order queue a delay is expensive. And ask before you engage: if proximity matters to you, ask a prospective attorney which location their office zip routes to. Almost nobody thinks to ask.

Wellington, Boca Raton, Jupiter and Belle Glade families asking “where is the probate court in Palm Beach County” are usually asking the wrong question. The right one is: given who represents me, which courthouse will my case sit in?

Palm Beach County probate filing fees, 2026

Filing	Fee
Formal administration	$401
Ancillary administration	$401
Summary administration — estate $1,000 or more	$346
Summary administration — estate under $1,000	$236
Disposition of personal property without administration	$232
Petition to admit a foreign will, authenticated copies or transcript	$232
Generic petition and order — open a safe deposit box, determine heirs	$232
Conservatorship / curatorship	$401
Caveat	$41
Notice of trust	$41
Oath of witness to will	$3.50
Re-opening a closed estate	$50
Depositing an original will	no fee
Statement of claim against an estate	no fee

A small thing that reveals a big one. A caveat costs $41 in Palm Beach, $42 in Broward, and $40 in Miami-Dade. Three adjacent counties, three different prices, on the same filing. The Palm Beach probate filing fee schedule is its own; nothing carries across a county line by assumption, and the tri-county practitioner who assumes otherwise gets a rejection.

Two fees worth knowing about in advance: re-opening a closed estate costs $50 — which happens more often than people expect, usually when an asset surfaces after discharge — and depositing an original will is free. There is no charge for complying with the ten-day rule.

The $150,000 change, and why it matters in this county

On 1 July 2026, Chapter 2026-57, Laws of Florida (CS/HB 1337) took effect and doubled the summary administration ceiling under §735.201 from $75,000 to $150,000 — measured on the estate subject to administration in Florida, less property exempt from creditors’ claims. The same act lifted the no-court intestate threshold to $20,000, the tax-refund threshold to $5,000, and the bank-affidavit threshold to $2,000.

Palm Beach has an unusual reason to care. This is a county of high property values and modest liquid estates — a residence worth well over the ceiling and comparatively little else. Where the homestead qualifies as protected homestead and passes to heirs, it is generally exempt from creditors’ claims, so once the court makes that determination its value comes out of the §735.201 calculation before you test the ceiling. That determination is a step of its own, not an assumption — and it is one of the ten petition types that carries a mandatory checklist here.

Which means the homestead determination is doing double duty in Palm Beach: it decides whether the estate qualifies for the cheaper, faster route, and it is a filing the circuit will reject outright if the checklist is missing.

A caution on sources. A great deal of Florida probate material still prints $75,000, including material published by county clerks. If what you are reading does not say $150,000 and does not cite Chapter 2026-57, it predates July.

Guardianship in the 15th Circuit

The Palm Beach probate division also handles guardianship. Two points are worth stating here, with the detail on the Florida process covered separately.

The alleged incapacitated person gets a lawyer. The court appoints an attorney for the person whose capacity is in question. That is not a formality — it is the structural protection at the centre of Florida guardianship law, and it is why a guardianship petition is not a form-filling exercise.

Professional guardians face fingerprinting and credit-report requirements before the court will let them serve. If you are considering a professional guardian for a family member, those requirements are the floor, not the ceiling, of the diligence worth doing.

The checklists: the single most common reason a Palm Beach petition is rejected

Since 23 March 2022, the Fifteenth Judicial Circuit has required a completed checklist to be electronically filed with ten categories of petition — including petitions for summary administration, formal administration, appointment of a guardian, determination of homestead, sale of property, ancillary administration and discharge. The circuit publishes twelve approved checklists covering testate and intestate variants of each.

The enforcement language is unambiguous: petitions filed without the checklist are rejected with leave to refile.

The stated purpose is to ensure compliance with statutory filing requirements and to cut processing time. In practice, the Palm Beach County probate checklists work as a pre-flight inspection — the court is telling you, in advance and in writing, exactly what it will look for. Anyone handling an estate here should pull the applicable checklist before drafting the petition and build backwards from it. It is the most useful free document in Palm Beach probate practice, and it is the answer to the question people search as “palm beach county probate checklist.”

The checklists are completed in OLS, the circuit’s Online Scheduling system, not filed as a loose attachment.

OLS: proposed orders have exactly one route in — and one way to get sent back

This is the second procedural gate in the Palm Beach County probate division, and it is the one that catches practitioners moving in from other counties.

A proposed probate order in Palm Beach County must be submitted through the Fifteenth Judicial Circuit’s Online Scheduling system. It cannot be submitted in person. It cannot be mailed. It cannot be emailed. One route, no alternatives.

Alongside that, the ex parte docket is suspended until further notice, there are no in-person ex parte probate hearings, and UMC hearings are conducted by Zoom.

Proficiency with OLS is not optional

Here is what the rule itself does not tell you. If anything in an OLS submission is missing or non-compliant, it is rejected and goes back for re-review. Nobody fixes it at a counter and nobody calls you about it. It re-enters the queue.

Now put that next to the Clerk’s published six-to-eight week wait for an order and the arithmetic turns unpleasant. A submission that is not right the first time does not cost you an afternoon. It can cost the better part of a second order cycle — which is why, in Palm Beach probate, precision at submission is worth more than speed at drafting.

The judge’s own instructions are part of the standard

The local rules are not the whole of it. Each judge in the Palm Beach County probate court publishes instructions on their own division page, and those instructions bind your submission as firmly as anything in an administrative order. Requirements vary between divisions — how a proposed order is formatted, what has to accompany it, how a matter is presented for signature. An order drafted to satisfy one division’s instructions is not automatically compliant in another.

So before anything goes into OLS, four separate layers govern that single filing in the Fifteenth Judicial Circuit probate division:

1. the Florida Probate Rules and the governing statutes;
2. the circuit’s local rules and administrative orders;
3. the mandatory Palm Beach County probate checklist for that petition type; and
4. the assigned judge’s published instructions on their division page.

Palm Beach is an administrative, procedurally driven court, and it has to be approached that way. A probate attorney in Palm Beach County who has not read all four before submitting is relying on luck — and in a county with this order queue, luck is expensive.

That is the honest case for using probate administration lawyers in Palm Beach County who file here routinely rather than occasionally. The substantive law does not change at a county line: Chapters 733 and 735 read the same in Fort Lauderdale, Miami and West Palm Beach. What changes is the machinery, and in this county the machinery is where estates lose months. Most people looking for probate guidance in Palm Beach County are not looking for someone to explain intestate succession to them. They are looking for someone whose petitions do not come back.

Three circuits, three gates

It is worth seeing how the three big South Florida circuits solved the same problem differently. Miami-Dade‘s Eleventh Circuit publishes numbered CC checklists and routes orders through Court Map. Broward’s Seventeenth eliminated its uncontested motion calendar and ex parte dockets and moved that work into CMS with a sworn attorney affirmation. Palm Beach’s Fifteenth requires a checklist with the petition, funnels every proposed order through OLS, and layers each judge’s own instructions on top. Same objective — stop incomplete filings at the door — three incompatible systems. Practise across the tri-county area and you are running three different workflows; treating them as one is how files stall.

How long probate takes in Palm Beach County — with the court’s own numbers

Most pages answering “how long does probate take in Florida” give you a range and no source. Palm Beach is one of the few counties where the Clerk publishes its own operational numbers, so here they are.

The Clerk’s turnaround: 48 hours to index a new probate case, and 72 hours to docket a filing in an existing case, counted from the next business day.

The wait for a signed order from the probate judge: 6 to 8 weeks. The Clerk advises contacting the case manager if you pass eight weeks.

That second number is the one that should reset your expectations, and it changes how you should plan a Palm Beach estate:

• Every court step in a Palm Beach probate carries a six-to-eight week tail. Not the filing — the order. A summary administration that looks like a two-month matter on paper is realistically longer here, because the Order of Summary Administration itself sits in that queue.
• Sequencing matters more than speed. If a sale of real property needs an order, that order is weeks away from the day you file, and the checklist had better be right the first time — because a rejection with leave to refile does not put you back at the front of the queue.
• A rejected petition costs far more than the drafting time it saves. In a county with a six-week order queue, one avoidable rejection can add two months to a file.

The statutory floor still applies on top of all of this. In a formal administration, the notice to creditors opens a three-month claim period, and no estate closes before it runs. Every estate is different, and we do not promise dates — but as a working expectation in Palm Beach County: a summary administration is a matter of months rather than weeks, a formal administration typically runs the better part of a year, and a contested file is measured in years.

Depositing the original will

§732.901, Florida Statutes requires the custodian of a deceased person’s original will to deposit it with the clerk in the county where the decedent lived within 10 days of learning of the death. There is no fee.

The Palm Beach mechanics:

• The original will cannot be e-filed. It must be hand-delivered or mailed. The mailing address for originals is P.O. Box 4667, West Palm Beach, FL 33402.
• The death certificate can be e-filed — the will and the certificate travel by different routes, which surprises people. Send a certified death certificate with the will if you are mailing both.

The blue memorandum

If a blue memorandum arrives from the court, it did not come from the Clerk. Blue case memoranda are issued by probate case managers employed by Court Administration, on behalf of the Court, and the Clerk’s office cannot help with them or explain them. The number to call is the one printed on the form.

This is small, local, and exactly the sort of thing that tells you whether the person advising you has actually handled a Palm Beach estate. A blue memo is the court telling you something in your file needs attention. Treat it as a deadline, not correspondence.

Palm Beach County probate records and case search

A Palm Beach County probate case search is run through the Clerk’s record search: choose Court Records and search by case number or by the decedent’s name, as a guest or as a registered user.

But Palm Beach restricts what you can see, and this is a real difference from its neighbours. As a guest you get the case name, the case number, the parties and the titles of documents — and that is all. Documents filed in probate cases are not viewable online except by the parties to the case or the attorney of record. Palm Beach County probate records are indexed publicly and read privately.

If you need a document and you are not a party, you request a copy in writing — case number, decedent’s name and the document titles — from the Clerk of the Circuit Court & Comptroller, Attention: Probate Division, P.O. Box 4667, West Palm Beach, FL 33402. Inventories and accountings go automatically only to personal representatives and their attorneys; anyone else asks the attorney or petitions the court.

As everywhere in Florida, probate cases are indexed under the decedent’s name. Searching your own name returns nothing.

Filing from out of state — Palm Beach’s real specialty

More than any other county in this circuit’s neighbourhood, Palm Beach estates belong to people who lived somewhere else for part of the year, or who died domiciled somewhere else entirely while owning a home here. That produces two distinct situations and they are not the same.

A Palm Beach resident who died here goes through ordinary Florida probate in this county.

A decedent domiciled in another state who owned Florida property requires ancillary administration — a Florida proceeding running alongside the home-state probate. The Palm Beach fee is the same $401 as a formal administration, and admitting a will already probated elsewhere is a separate $232 filing.

Out-of-state families ask first whether they have to fly in. The Clerk’s own answer is the reassuring one: in most cases, if the probate action is uncontested, no hearings are required. Filings go by mail or e-filing and UMC hearings are by Zoom. Only the original will and original death certificate must travel physically.

Which points at the real out-of-state probate service question in Palm Beach County: the reason to have Florida counsel on an ancillary matter is not the hearings. It is the checklist, the OLS submission, the homestead determination and the six-week order queue — none of which a home-state attorney is set up to run.

The oath of witness to a will

An unusual Palm Beach detail worth knowing. Where a will must be proved by a witness, the oath of witness to will costs $3.50 and the witness needs valid ID and a copy of the will or codicil.

An out-of-state witness does not have to travel. A clerk in their own jurisdiction can administer and sign the oath under that office’s stamp, and the signed oath is then returned to be filed in the Palm Beach case. For a family scattered across several states — which in Palm Beach is most families — this quietly removes what people assume is an unavoidable trip.

What it costs, and whether you need an attorney

The Clerk’s filing fee is the smallest line. Above it sit attorney’s fees, publication of the notice to creditors, certified copies for every institution, any bond, and appraisals.

Who pays. In a Florida formal administration, attorney’s fees are paid from the estate under §733.6171 — not personally by whoever agreed to serve as personal representative. That misconception stops people from stepping forward who should.

Where representation is required. Palm Beach permits self-represented filing for disposition of personal property without administration and for summary administration only. Florida law requires an attorney for formal administration. The Clerk publishes a free packet for disposition matters, and summary administration templates are available through the circuit’s law library.

Beyond the rule, engage a probate attorney in Palm Beach County if the estate includes real property; if there is a homestead determination; if the decedent was domiciled out of state or was not a US citizen; if there is a blended family; if there are creditors or a mortgage in default; or if anyone has hinted at a contest. A probate attorney serving Palm Beach County who quotes a fee before knowing which of those apply is guessing — and in a county where a single rejected petition can add two months, the value of getting the first filing right is not theoretical.

Frequently asked questions — how long Palm Beach probate takes

How long does probate take in Florida?

It depends on the route. Summary administration is generally a matter of months; formal administration commonly runs the better part of a year; contested matters take longer. In Palm Beach County specifically, add the Clerk’s published wait of 6 to 8 weeks for a signed order to every step that requires one.

How long is probate in Florida if there is no will?

An intestate estate is not automatically slower, but it usually is in practice: heirs must be identified and, where they cannot be located, served in a manner the court accepts. The three-month creditor claim period in a formal administration applies either way.

How long does probate take in Florida with a will?

Having a will does not shorten the statutory floor. What it shortens is the argument. A valid, self-proved will with a named personal representative removes most of what slows an intestate estate down.

How long does Florida probate take from filing to distribution?

In a formal administration, the earliest realistic close is after the three-month creditor period ends and the final accounting and petition for discharge are approved. In Palm Beach, each of those steps carries the order queue on top.

How long does the Palm Beach County probate court take to process a filing?

The Clerk reports 48 hours to index a new case and 72 hours to docket a filing in an existing case, starting the next business day. That is the Clerk. The judge’s order is the 6-to-8 week number.

Where is the probate court in Palm Beach County?

Three locations: Main Courthouse, 205 North Dixie Highway, West Palm Beach; South County, 200 West Atlantic Avenue, Delray Beach; and North County, 3188 PGA Boulevard, Palm Beach Gardens. Assignment is by zip code — the petitioner’s attorney’s office, or the decedent’s last address if unrepresented. The probate phone number is (561) 355-2986.

Talk to a Palm Beach County probate attorney

Lorenzo Law is a Coral Gables firm devoted to probate, estate planning, guardianship, and trust and estate litigation throughout Florida — including Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade, in English and Spanish. Jose M. Lorenzo, Jr. clerked in the probate division of the Eleventh Judicial Circuit before founding the firm.

(305) 224-6811 · 2850 S Douglas Rd, Suite 303, Coral Gables, FL 33134

General information about the Palm Beach County probate court, not legal advice; reading it creates no attorney-client relationship. Fees, forms, local procedures and published wait times change — confirm current requirements with the Clerk or the Fifteenth Judicial Circuit before filing.

Sources

• Clerk of the Circuit Court & Comptroller, Palm Beach County — Probate of Estates; Probate of Estates FAQ; Court Services Fees (Probate)
• Fifteenth Judicial Circuit of Florida — Probate Division; Administrative Order re: probate and guardianship procedures for filing and review of petitions (eff. 23 March 2022)
• Chapter 2026-57, Laws of Florida (CS/HB 1337), effective 1 July 2026
• §§ 732.901, 733.6171, 735.201, Florida Statutes