Sarasota and Manatee County Probate Court: Filing in Florida’s 12th Circuit

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 throughout Florida, in English and Spanish. Last reviewed: 8 August 2026.

In short: Sarasota and Manatee counties sit in Florida’s Twelfth Judicial Circuit, together with DeSoto County and a separate South County division in Venice — four judicial areas, one circuit. Sarasota files at the Historic Courthouse on Main Street or at the South County Courthouse in Venice; Manatee files at 1115 Manatee Avenue West in Bradenton, where the counter closes at 4:30 — half an hour before Sarasota’s. Hearings run through JACS, and many can be set without court approval — but since 3 August 2026, four categories of hearing are back to being in person by default.

Quick reference — Sarasota and Manatee probate

	Sarasota County	Manatee County
Main location	Historic Courthouse, 2000 Main St., Room 102, Sarasota, FL 34237	1115 Manatee Ave. West, Bradenton, FL 34205
Second location	South County Courthouse, 4004 S. Tamiami Trail, Venice, FL 34293	—
Mailing	—	P.O. Box 25400, Bradenton, FL 34206
Phone	(941) 861-7400	(941) 741-4037
Counter hours	8:30 a. m. – 5:00 p. m.	8:30 a. m. – 4:30 p. m.
Formal administration	confirm with the Clerk	$400
Summary administration	confirm with the Clerk	$345 ($1,000+) · $235 (under $1,000)
Disposition without administration	confirm with the Clerk	$231
Caveat / notice of trust	confirm with the Clerk	$41 each
Circuit	Twelfth Judicial Circuit — Sarasota · Manatee · DeSoto · South County (Venice)
Scheduling	JACS — many hearings set without court approval
In person since 3 Aug 2026	DNR · emergency temporary guardianship · final guardianship · injunction against exploitation

One circuit, four judicial areas

The Twelfth Judicial Circuit covers Sarasota, Manatee and DeSoto counties, and it runs a separate South County Probate and Guardianship division in Venice — four judicial areas rather than three counties.

That fourth division is the part people miss. Sarasota County has two probate filing locations, and the Venice courthouse is not an overflow counter — the circuit assigns it its own probate and guardianship division and its own judge. For families in Venice, North Port, Osprey or Nokomis that is a shorter drive and a different courtroom.

Manatee County is a separate county with a separate Clerk. A Bradenton estate is a Manatee County filing; a Sarasota estate is a Sarasota County filing. Probate opens where the decedent was domiciled at death — not where the property is, not where the family lives now. The line between these two counties runs through a metropolitan area people cross without noticing, and filing on the wrong side of it is not a small error.

And DeSoto County is in this circuit too, at Arcadia — smaller, inland, and frequently forgotten by guides that treat the 12th Circuit as a Gulf-coast pair.

Where to file — and the half-hour that catches people

Sarasota County. The Clerk handles probate, wills, guardianship and mental health together at the Historic Courthouse, 2000 Main Street, Room 102, Sarasota, FL 34237. Probate line (941) 861-7400. The South County Courthouse at 4004 S. Tamiami Trail, Venice, FL 34293 takes the same filings.

Manatee County. The Clerk’s Probate and Guardianship department is at 1115 Manatee Avenue West, Bradenton, FL 34205, with mail to P.O. Box 25400, Bradenton, FL 34206. The direct line is (941) 741-4037.

Now the detail worth writing down. Sarasota’s counter runs 8:30 a. m. to 5:00 p. m. Manatee’s runs 8:30 a. m. to 4:30 p. m. Half an hour, one county line — and it is exactly the thing that turns a Friday afternoon drive to Bradenton with an original will into a wasted one.

It is not that Manatee is unusual. It is that none of this is standard. Across Florida, Broward’s probate counter closes at 3:30, Miami-Dade’s Clerk windows at 4:00, Manatee at 4:30, and Sarasota, Tampa and Jacksonville run a full day to 5:00. Four different closing times in one state. Check the county you are actually filing in — and never assume the county next door matches, because here it does not.

What it costs — and two fees nobody else publishes

Florida sets probate filing fees by statute. Under §28.2401, the base is $395 for formal administration, guardianship, ancillary administration, curatorship or conservatorship; $340 and $230 for summary administration above and below $1,000; $230 for disposition of personal property without administration and guardianship of the person only; and $40 for a caveat. Counties add authorised service charges, which is why the numbers at the counter land slightly higher.

Manatee County’s published schedule:

Filing	Fee
Formal administration	$400
Summary administration — $1,000 or more	$345
Summary administration — under $1,000	$235
Disposition of personal property without administration	$231
Opening an estate (general petition)	$231
Petition to admit a foreign will	$231
Guardianship — person only	$235
Guardianship — property only	$400
Guardianship — person and property	$400
Ancillary / curatorship / conservatorship	$400
Caveat / notice of trust	$41 each
Reopening a case	$50
Professional guardian file maintenance	$7.50

Two lines there are unusual. Most Florida clerks publish guardianship as person only and person and property; Manatee publishes a separate “property only” line at $400. And the $7.50 professional guardian file maintenance fee is one I have not found published by any other Florida clerk in this series — small, annual in effect, and relevant if you are engaging a professional guardian rather than serving yourself.

The guardianship audit fee is statutory and applies in both counties. Under §744.3678, the guardian pays the clerk from the ward’s estate, on filing each annual accounting, for auditing it:

Guardianship estate	Annual audit fee
$25,000 or less	up to $20
$25,001 – $100,000	up to $85
$100,001 – $500,000	up to $170
Over $500,000	up to $250

Manatee also charges $85 to audit a verified inventory over $25,000. The court may waive the audit fee on a showing of insufficient funds in the ward’s estate — worth asking about in a small guardianship.

Sarasota’s own schedule was not readable at the time of writing. Budget from the §28.2401 base and confirm the exact Sarasota County probate filing fee with the Clerk before filing. A payment short by a dollar is a rejected filing.

JACS — and what the 12th Circuit does differently

Hearings in the Twelfth Circuit are scheduled through JACS, the Judicial Automated Calendaring System. The circuit’s own position on it is the notable part: many hearings can be scheduled on the court’s calendar without court approval.

Set that against the other Florida circuits and it stands out sharply. Palm Beach funnels every proposed order through OLS and rejects petitions filed without a checklist. Lee County deletes a proposed order submitted without a completed and signed checklist. Broward requires a sworn attorney affirmation before an uncontested matter is processed at all. Miami-Dade requires numbered CC checklists. Sarasota and Manatee let you take a slot.

The trade is predictable. A circuit that lets you self-schedule moves faster when you know what you are doing, and is less forgiving when you do not — because there is no case-management layer reading your petition before the judge does.

What changed on 3 August 2026

Effective 3 August 2026, unless the parties stipulate otherwise, four categories of hearing must be held in person in the Twelfth Judicial Circuit:

1. Do Not Resuscitate order hearings
2. Emergency temporary guardian appointment hearings
3. Final guardianship hearings
4. Hearings on petitions for injunction against exploitation

Every other large Florida circuit has moved the other way — Broward, Palm Beach and Hillsborough run most routine probate matters remotely, and Palm Beach conducts its UMC hearings by Zoom as standard. The 12th Circuit has pulled its four most consequential hearing types back into the courtroom.

What they have in common: each is a proceeding in which someone is about to lose control of their own decisions, their own money, or their own end-of-life care.

Practically: an emergency temporary guardianship in Sarasota or Manatee now assumes somebody appears in person, and out-of-state family who expected to attend a final guardianship hearing by video should plan otherwise. The parties can stipulate to remote — ask early, not the week before.

Is there a Sarasota or Manatee probate checklist?

People search for both, because Miami-Dade publishes numbered CC checklists and Lee County will delete your order without one. So here is the straight answer.

Neither the Sarasota nor the Manatee Clerk publishes a per-petition probate checklist of the kind the Eleventh and Twentieth Circuits require. Both publish department forms; neither imposes a signed certification that must accompany the petition.

Which means the working Sarasota County probate checklist — and the Manatee County probate checklist — is one you assemble from three things:

1. The statutory requirements for your petition type under Chapters 733 and 735.
2. The Clerk’s own department forms for that county.
3. The hearing rules, including the 3 August in-person requirement if guardianship is involved.

That list is shorter than Lee’s and harder to get right, because nothing bounces at the door to tell you a piece is missing. In Lee an incomplete filing is deleted before a judge sees it. Here it reaches the judge.

Guardianship monitoring in the 12th Circuit

Guardianship in this circuit is not filed and forgotten. The Twelfth Circuit runs a dedicated guardianship monitoring programme through its Programs division, sitting alongside the Clerk’s statutory audit of the annual accounting.

Two consequences for anyone considering serving:

• You are audited annually, and separately reviewed. The clerk audits the accounting under §744.3678 and charges for it from the ward’s estate; the court’s programme monitors the guardianship itself. These are different functions and both apply.
• Manatee states the representation requirement plainly: guardianship petitions require an attorney under Florida law. Depositing a will is something a family member can do alone. Petitioning to become someone’s guardian is not.

A guardianship opened at 70 for a ward who lives to 90 is a twenty-year reporting relationship with a court that reviews you every year. That is the number to weigh before petitioning — not the filing fee.

DeSoto County — the third county nobody mentions

The Twelfth Circuit’s third county is DeSoto, seated at Arcadia, inland and east of the coastal pair. Guides that treat the 12th Circuit as “Sarasota and Manatee” simply leave it out.

It matters for the same reason Clay and Nassau matter to Jacksonville: probate opens where the decedent was domiciled, and a family living in Arcadia, Nocatee or Fort Ogden files in DeSoto County even though their hospital, bank and lawyer may all be on the coast. Same circuit, same judges’ rules, different Clerk and a different counter.

Probate records and case search

Sarasota County probate records and Manatee County probate records are both searched through the respective Clerk’s online records system, and both work the same way in the respects that matter.

• Cases are indexed under the decedent’s name, not the petitioner’s. Searching your own name returns nothing.
• A case number beats a name, particularly for common surnames.
• Guardianship files are confidential by statute and will not appear in a public probate search.
• Neither Clerk can tell you what any of it means. Both offices are barred from giving legal advice or helping prepare filings.

One search note specific to this market: a decedent who owned property on both sides of the county line may have an estate in one county and a property-related filing in the other. If a Sarasota probate court records search comes back empty for someone you know owned here, check Manatee — and check the home state, because a great many owners on this coast were domiciled elsewhere.

Depositing the original will

Under §732.901, Florida Statutes, the custodian of a deceased person’s original will must deposit it with the Clerk in the county where the decedent lived within 10 days of learning of the death. That duty applies whether or not anyone intends to open a probate.

Manatee’s procedure is specific: submit the original will to the Probate Department within ten days, and supply either the decedent’s date of death or their Social Security number. No attorney is required to deposit a will — though whether an administration then needs opening is a different question and a different kind of advice.

Guardianship is the opposite. Manatee notes plainly that guardianship petitions require attorney representation under Florida law. Depositing a will is something a family member can do alone; petitioning for guardianship is not.

Who inherits when there is no will — Florida intestate succession

This is the question that brings most families to a probate court in the first place, and Florida answers it by statute rather than by fairness.

The Florida intestate succession chart

Who survives the decedent	Who takes the intestate estate
Spouse, no descendants	Spouse takes the entire intestate estate
Spouse and descendants, all of them joint, and the spouse has no other descendant	Spouse takes the entire intestate estate
Spouse and descendants, where the decedent has a descendant who is not the spouse’s	Spouse takes one-half; descendants take one-half
Spouse and joint descendants, but the spouse has a descendant from another relationship	Spouse takes one-half; descendants take one-half
No spouse	The decedent’s descendants
No spouse, no descendants	Father and mother equally, or the survivor of them
No spouse, no descendants, no parents	Brothers and sisters, and the descendants of deceased brothers and sisters
None of the above	Grandparents equally or the survivor, then uncles and aunts and their descendants — half to the paternal line, half to the maternal; if only one side survives, that side takes the whole
No kindred at all	The kindred of the last deceased spouse, as if that spouse had survived

Sources: §§732.102 and 732.103, Florida Statutes.

Read the third and fourth rows again, because they are the ones that surprise people. A second marriage where either party has a child from a previous relationship cuts the surviving spouse’s intestate share from the whole estate to one half — and it does so whether the children are the decedent’s or the survivor’s. In a market with as many second marriages and blended families as this one, that single rule decides a very large number of estates.

Florida intestate succession and homestead — the part the chart cannot show

The house does not necessarily follow the chart. The Florida intestate succession homestead rules run on their own track: protected homestead descends under a constitutional and statutory scheme separate from §§732.102 and 732.103, and a surviving spouse’s rights in the residence are not the same as their intestate share of everything else.

This is the single most common misreading of intestate succession in Florida. A chart of statutory shares is not a chart of who gets the house — and on this coast, the house is usually the estate.

That is not a technicality in this market. In Sarasota and Manatee the residence is very often the whole estate, which means the homestead determination — not the intestate chart — decides the outcome. It is a determination the court makes, and it is usually the first real question in the case rather than the last.

Exempt property and the family allowance sit on top of all of it as well. A surviving spouse and lineal heirs may take household furnishings, two qualifying vehicles and certain education and benefit funds outside the shares above, plus a family allowance for maintenance during administration.

Why intestate succession in Florida produces so much litigation

Intestate succession in Florida is not a default anyone actually wants. The statute has no idea who was estranged for twenty years, who moved in to provide care, who was told the house was theirs, or which child had already been helped during life. It distributes by relationship, in a fixed order, with no discretion at all.

Three patterns cause most of the disputes on this coast:

• The second marriage. The one-half rule above, arriving as a genuine shock to a spouse who assumed the whole estate.
• The promised house. A caregiving child who was told the property would be theirs, and a will that was never signed. Florida intestate laws do not recognise the promise.
• The absent sibling. Descendants take equally by representation regardless of who did the work.

A will costs a fraction of the litigation this chart generates, and in a county where the median estate is a house, the gap is not close.

Letters of administration

Letters of administration are the order the court issues appointing a personal representative and proving their authority to third parties — the document a bank, a title company or a brokerage will ask for before they speak to you about the decedent’s assets.

Two points that save time:

• Nothing happens before letters issue. A personal representative has no power to sell, sign, close an account or bring a claim until the court has appointed them and the letters are in hand.
• Order more certified copies than you think you need, at the outset. Every institution wants its own, few return them, and going back for more is a separate trip to a counter that closes at 4:30 in Bradenton and 5:00 in Sarasota.

Frequently asked questions

Where is the Manatee County probate court?

The Manatee County Clerk’s Probate and Guardianship department is at 1115 Manatee Avenue West, Bradenton, FL 34205 — mail to P.O. Box 25400, Bradenton, FL 34206. The phone number is (941) 741-4037 and the counter is open Monday to Friday, 8:30 a. m. to 4:30 p. m.

Where is the Sarasota County probate court?

At the Historic Courthouse, 2000 Main Street, Room 102, Sarasota, FL 34237, or at the South County Courthouse, 4004 S. Tamiami Trail, Venice, FL 34293. The probate line is (941) 861-7400 and the counter is open Monday to Friday, 8:30 a. m. to 5:00 p. m.

Is a Bradenton probate filed in Sarasota County?

No. Bradenton is in Manatee County. Both counties sit in the Twelfth Judicial Circuit, but each has its own Clerk and the filing follows the decedent’s county of domicile.

How much does it cost to file probate in Manatee County?

$400 for formal administration, $345 for summary administration of an estate worth $1,000 or more, $235 below that, $231 for disposition of personal property without administration, and $41 for a caveat or notice of trust. Guardianship is $235 for person only and $400 where property is involved.

What is Florida intestate succession?

The statutory order in which an estate passes when there is no valid will — set by §§732.102 and 732.103. The surviving spouse takes the entire intestate estate where there are no descendants, or where all descendants are joint and the spouse has no others; one-half where either party has a descendant from another relationship.

Do Florida intestate laws cover the house?

Not in the same way. Protected homestead descends under its own rules, which can differ from the shares in the intestate succession chart. That determination is made by the court and it is usually the most consequential question in the estate.

Are Sarasota and Manatee guardianship hearings held remotely?

Not the significant ones, and not since 3 August 2026 — emergency temporary guardian appointments, final guardianship hearings, DNR order hearings and injunction-against-exploitation hearings must be in person unless the parties stipulate otherwise.

Talk to a Florida probate attorney

Lorenzo Law handles probate administration, guardianship, trust administration and estate litigation throughout Florida — including Sarasota, Venice, Bradenton and Manatee County — in English and Spanish. Jose M. Lorenzo, Jr. clerked in the probate division of Florida’s Eleventh Judicial Circuit before founding the firm.

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

General information about the Sarasota and Manatee County probate courts, not legal advice; reading it creates no attorney-client relationship. Fees, forms, hours and hearing requirements change — confirm current requirements with the Clerk or the Twelfth Judicial Circuit before filing.

Sources

• Sarasota Clerk of the Circuit Court and County Comptroller — locations; probate, wills, guardianship and mental health
• Manatee County Clerk of Court — Probate and Guardianship; Probate and Guardianship Fees
• Twelfth Judicial Circuit of Florida — Probate and Guardianship Division; JACS; in-person hearing requirements effective 3 August 2026
• §§ 28.2401, 732.102, 732.103, 732.901, 735.201, 744.3678, Florida Statutes
• Chapter 2026-57, Laws of Florida (CS/HB 1337), effective 1 July 2026