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Our office sits at 150 E. Bloomingdale Avenue in Brandon, and probate is the core of what we do here. If someone in your family has died and left assets in their name alone, you are almost certainly headed to the Hillsborough County probate court. This page explains exactly how that works: where the case is filed, what the court will require of you, how long it takes, what it costs, and when you can avoid the process altogether.
Talk to a Brandon probate attorney.
Zoecklein Law, P.A. | 150 E. Bloomingdale Ave., Brandon, FL 33511
813-501-5071 | Request a consultation
Brandon is an unincorporated community in Hillsborough County. It has no courthouse and no probate division of its own. Florida law fixes venue by domicile: under Fla. Stat. § 733.101(1)(a), the venue for probate of wills and granting letters is “in the county in this state where the decedent was domiciled.” A Brandon resident was domiciled in Hillsborough County, so the estate is administered in Hillsborough County.
Hillsborough County is served by the Thirteenth Judicial Circuit. Probate, guardianship, and trust cases are handled by the Clerk of the Circuit Court’s Probate, Guardianship and Trust Department, and the case file lives at the George Edgecomb Courthouse, 800 E. Twiggs Street, Room 204, Tampa. The clerk also maintains a probate counter at the Plant City Courthouse. Written correspondence to the probate department goes to P.O. Box 3360, Tampa, FL 33601-3360, and the clerk’s probate line is (813) 276-8100. Cases are assigned across the circuit’s probate divisions, and the assigned division determines which judge sets your hearings and signs your orders.
You will not be walking a petition up to the counter. Probate filings in Florida are submitted electronically through the Florida Courts E-Filing Portal at myflcourtaccess.com, as required by Fla. R. Gen. Prac. & Jud. Admin. 2.525. That rule is why the practical distance between Brandon and Tampa matters less than most people expect, and why the thing that actually slows a case down is not geography. It is a defective petition, a missing oath, an unserved creditor, or a hearing that nobody asked the division to set.
Florida gives you two real paths through probate, plus one narrow shortcut. Choosing the wrong one is one of the most expensive mistakes a family can make, because the court will not simply convert your case for you.
Formal administration is the full process under Chapter 733, Florida Statutes. The court appoints a personal representative and issues Letters of Administration, which are the document that actually gives that person authority to act. The personal representative then takes possession of estate assets under Fla. Stat. § 733.607, files an inventory under Fla. Prob. R. 5.340, publishes and serves the notice to creditors, resolves claims, pays valid debts and taxes, and distributes what is left.
Formal administration is required whenever the estate is too large for the summary threshold, whenever the decedent owned real property that must be sold or cleared of title defects, and whenever the family is in conflict. If there is any realistic chance of a will contest or a fight over who serves as personal representative, you want a personal representative with letters in hand and a judge assigned.
Summary administration is available under Fla. Stat. § 735.201 when either of two conditions is met: the value of the entire estate subject to administration in Florida, less the value of property exempt from the claims of creditors, does not exceed $75,000; or the decedent has been dead for more than two years. Note the word “or.” The two-year path is widely missed, and it is the reason a long-forgotten asset in a decedent’s name can often be cleared without a full administration.
Summary administration does not appoint a personal representative. The court enters an order distributing specific assets to specific people. That is its strength and its weakness. It is faster and cheaper, but nobody holds letters, so there is no fiduciary with authority to sell property, chase down a bank, or litigate. If you need someone with power to act, summary administration is the wrong tool no matter how small the estate is.
The narrow shortcut applies to very small estates where the only assets are exempt property and the decedent’s final expenses roughly consume what is left. It is a form, not a proceeding, and it does not fit most families.
Attorney’s fees in a Florida formal administration are governed by Fla. Stat. § 733.6171, which sets a schedule that is presumed reasonable for ordinary services, based on the compensable value of the estate:
That schedule is a presumption, not a price tag. Under § 733.6171(5), the court may increase or decrease compensation for ordinary services, or award compensation for extraordinary services, if the facts of the particular administration warrant it. And the Florida Supreme Court has been explicit that a probate fee is not a percentage calculation dressed up as a legal bill. In In re Estate of Platt, 586 So. 2d 328 (Fla. 1991), the Court quashed fees that had been computed solely as a percentage of a $7 million estate, holding that reasonable compensation cannot rest on a fixed percentage of the estate’s value alone and that an independent judicial officer must determine what is reasonable. The Court noted that the persons who bear the cost of the fees are frequently the beneficiaries, who never chose the attorney in the first place.
We quote fees for Brandon probate matters up front. For more detail, see our page on Florida probate attorney fees.
Serving as personal representative is not an honorary title. Fla. Stat. § 733.602(1) puts it plainly: “A personal representative is a fiduciary who shall observe the standards of care applicable to trustees,” and is “under a duty to settle and distribute the estate of the decedent in accordance with the terms of the decedent’s will and this code as expeditiously and efficiently as is consistent with the best interests of the estate.”
That standard has teeth. A personal representative who pays the wrong creditor, distributes early, or lets an asset waste can be surcharged personally. The role includes marshaling assets, filing the inventory, giving notice, evaluating claims, filing final tax returns, accounting to beneficiaries, and distributing under court order. Our page on the personal representative’s duties in Florida probate walks through the obligations in sequence.
This is where Hillsborough estates most often go wrong, and it is worth understanding before you file anything.
Under Fla. Stat. § 733.2121, the personal representative must publish a notice to creditors once a week for two consecutive weeks in a newspaper in the county of administration. Separately, and this is the part people miss, the personal representative “shall promptly make a diligent search to determine the names and addresses of creditors of the decedent who are reasonably ascertainable” and serve a copy of the notice on them directly.
Under § 733.702(1), a claim is barred unless filed by the later of three months after first publication or, for a creditor entitled to service, thirty days after service on that creditor. Separately, § 733.710 imposes a two-year bar running from the date of death.
The interaction of those two provisions was settled by the Florida Supreme Court in Jones v. Golden, 176 So. 3d 242 (Fla. 2015). The Court held that where a known or reasonably ascertainable creditor is never served with a copy of the notice to creditors, the three-month limitations period in § 733.702(1) never starts running at all, and that creditor’s claim is timely if filed within two years of death under § 733.710. The Court grounded that result in due process, following Tulsa Professional Collection Services, Inc. v. Pope, 485 U.S. 478 (1988): a personal representative is constitutionally obligated to give actual notice to creditors who are known or reasonably ascertainable.
The practical consequence for a Brandon family is direct. A personal representative who publishes the notice but skips the diligent search has not closed the creditor window. They have left it open for two years, and they have done it while believing the estate was safe to distribute. The distinction between the two statutes is not academic either. As the Court explained in May v. Illinois National Insurance Co., 771 So. 2d 1143, 1150 (Fla. 2000), § 733.702 operates as a statute of limitations, while § 733.710 is a jurisdictional statute of nonclaim that cannot be waived or extended.
More on this in our discussion of creditor claims in Florida probate.
Probate only reaches assets titled in the decedent’s sole name with no beneficiary designation. A great deal of Florida wealth never touches the process:
Homestead deserves its own note, because it is the asset most Brandon families are actually worried about. Article X, section 4 of the Florida Constitution exempts homestead from forced sale by creditors, and provides that the exemption “shall inure to the surviving spouse or heirs of the owner.” In Snyder v. Davis, 699 So. 2d 999 (Fla. 1997), the Florida Supreme Court held that a testator with no surviving spouse or minor children may devise the homestead, with its protection from creditors intact, to any family member within the class of persons categorized in Florida’s intestacy statute, Fla. Stat. § 732.103. The devisee does not have to be the person who would actually have inherited in intestacy. In that case a granddaughter took the homestead free of the estate’s creditors even though her father, the decedent’s son, was still living.
The corollary matters just as much: a homestead devised to someone outside that class, a friend or a caregiver, does not carry the creditor protection with it. Homestead in Florida is unforgiving of casual drafting. See our page on assets exempt from probate in Florida.
If you believe the will is invalid, or that the case is in the wrong court, the clock is short. Under Fla. Stat. § 733.212(3), an interested person served with a copy of the notice of administration must object to the validity of the will, the venue, or the jurisdiction of the court within three months after service of that notice, “or those objections are forever barred.”
Three months is not a long time to investigate capacity, undue influence, or a suspicious amendment executed late in life. If a notice of administration has landed in your mailbox and something about the will looks wrong, the time to call is now, not after you have thought about it for a season. We litigate these cases. See contesting a will in Florida.
A straightforward, uncontested formal administration in Hillsborough County generally runs somewhere in the range of six months to a year. The floor is set by law rather than by the court’s calendar: the creditor period alone runs three months from first publication, and the estate cannot safely close until claims are resolved. Estates with real property to sell, a federal estate tax return, an unresponsive beneficiary, or a contested issue run longer, sometimes considerably.
Summary administration is far quicker, often a matter of weeks once the petition is complete and all interested persons have joined or been served.
Most of the probate cases we open in Brandon were preventable. A funded revocable trust, correct beneficiary designations, and a properly drafted deed will keep the majority of a typical Hillsborough County estate out of court entirely. If you are reading this page because you just went through probate for a parent and do not want your children to repeat it, that is the right instinct. Our page on how to avoid probate in Florida covers the tools, and our Florida probate overview covers the process as a whole.
Zoecklein Law, P.A. is headquartered in Brandon, at 150 E. Bloomingdale Avenue. Brandon is not a satellite office for us and Hillsborough County is not an away game. Brice Zoecklein, Esq. (Florida Bar No. 0085615) leads the firm’s probate and trust practice, and the firm handles probate administration, contested estates, trust litigation, guardianship, and estate planning.
What that buys you is unglamorous and it is the whole point: petitions drafted so the clerk does not kick them back, creditor searches that are actually diligent, notices served on the people who have to be served, hearings that get set with the assigned division instead of sitting in a queue, and a lawyer who will tell you when summary administration is enough and you do not need to pay for a formal one.
Zoecklein Law, P.A.
150 E. Bloomingdale Ave., Brandon, FL 33511
Phone: 813-501-5071 | Fax: 813-925-4310
Schedule a consultation
In Hillsborough County. Under Fla. Stat. § 733.101(1)(a), venue lies in the county where the decedent was domiciled, and Brandon is unincorporated Hillsborough County. The case is filed with the Clerk of the Circuit Court’s Probate, Guardianship and Trust Department and the file is maintained at the George Edgecomb Courthouse, 800 E. Twiggs Street, Tampa. Filings are submitted electronically through the Florida Courts E-Filing Portal.
In a formal administration, yes, in nearly every case. A personal representative who is not the sole interested person must be represented by an attorney. Summary administration and disposition without administration have narrower exceptions, but the exceptions are narrower than most people assume.
Fla. Stat. § 733.6171 sets a schedule that is presumed reasonable for ordinary services, starting at $1,500 for estates of $40,000 or less and moving to a percentage of compensable value above $100,000. The court may increase or decrease that amount under § 733.6171(5), and In re Estate of Platt, 586 So. 2d 328 (Fla. 1991), makes clear that a percentage of the estate cannot by itself establish a reasonable fee.
Only if the estate subject to administration in Florida, less exempt property, does not exceed $75,000, or the decedent has been dead more than two years. Fla. Stat. § 735.201. If you need someone with authority to sell property or pursue a claim, summary administration will not give you that, because no personal representative is appointed.
The later of three months after the first publication of the notice to creditors or thirty days after service on a creditor entitled to be served, under Fla. Stat. § 733.702(1), with an outer two-year bar from the date of death under § 733.710. But if a known or reasonably ascertainable creditor is never served, the three-month period never begins to run and the claim is timely within two years of death. Jones v. Golden, 176 So. 3d 242 (Fla. 2015).
Protected homestead is not a probate asset available to general creditors, and under Article X, section 4 of the Florida Constitution the exemption from forced sale inures to the surviving spouse or heirs. Snyder v. Davis, 699 So. 2d 999 (Fla. 1997), holds that the protection follows a devise to any family member within the class of intestate heirs under Fla. Stat. § 732.103. A petition to determine homestead status is still typically filed in the probate case.
An uncontested formal administration usually runs about six months to a year. The creditor claim period alone runs three months from first publication, which sets the practical floor. Contested estates and estates with real property to sell take longer.
This page is general information about Florida probate law and is not legal advice. Every estate is different. Reading this page does not create an attorney-client relationship with Zoecklein Law, P.A.