Clay County Probate Court: Where to File and What to File

Where the Clay County Probate Court Actually Sits

Clay County probate is heard in the Fourth Judicial Circuit, at the Clay County Courthouse at 825 North Orange Avenue in Green Cove Springs, which the Clerk and the court both call the Judge William A. Wilkes Judicial Complex. Filings go through the Clay County Clerk of the Circuit Court and Comptroller, where probate sits under Civil Court Services and the probate, mental health and guardianship line is 904-278-3707.

Clay has no standalone probate division. One circuit judge hears all of the county’s probate and guardianship inside Division B, which the court captions as civil, probate and guardianship, and the hearings happen in Room 4-077 of the same building. The Orange Park branch at 1590 Park Avenue keeps its own phone and hours, and the Clerk asks that nothing be mailed to a branch at all, because branch mail routes back through the courthouse post office box.

The probate counter is at the Clay County Courthouse, 825 North Orange Avenue, Green Cove Springs, FL 32043, Monday to Friday, 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., 904-278-3707 for probate, mental health and guardianship, with main lines at 904-284-6302 and 904-269-6302. No room number is published for the probate counter. Mail goes to P.O. Box 698, Green Cove Springs, FL 32043, and the Clerk asks that nothing be mailed to a branch office, because branch mail routes back through that box. The Orange Park branch at 1590 Park Avenue answers at 904-541-2784 and keeps the same hours, and the Clerk’s page does not say the branch takes a probate filing over the counter, so call before you drive. Depositing a will costs nothing, and the Clerk wants the death certificate filed with it. For a disposition of personal property without administration the Clerk asks for the original will if there is one, the death certificate, the funeral home statement showing who paid, proof the funeral bill was paid, notarized consents from all heirs, and the statements for the assets being transferred, and the process is unavailable where the estate holds real property. Clay posts $400 to open a formal administration where Duval, in the same circuit, posts $401, so a Fourth Circuit figure quoted as one number is wrong for one of the two counties.

• The clerk’s probate page for Clay County
• Fourth Judicial Circuit judges directory
• Administrative orders of the Fourth Judicial Circuit
• Local probate forms and checklists

One thing worth settling before you go any further. The case belongs in the county where the person was domiciled when they died, and Florida law fixes that rather than letting anyone choose it. If your mother lived in Clay County, her estate is a Clay County case, even if you live in another state and even if a different courthouse would be more convenient for everyone involved. It is the county that decides, not the town, so estates from Orange Park, Fleming Island, Green Cove Springs, Middleburg, and Keystone Heights are all Clay County cases filed with the same clerk. Which division or section then hears the case is a separate question, and the next section answers it.

Parking and Coffee on the Way to the Courthouse

The Clerk publishes the parking on its contact page. Customer parking sits adjacent to the courthouse on the corner of North Orange Avenue and Houston Street, with overflow lots behind the courthouse off Palmetto Avenue. The same page points to Clay Community Transportation, a Jacksonville Transportation Authority service, noting that some routes drop off and pick up near the courthouse and the branch offices. The court keeps its own parking and directions page.

Which Judges Hear Probate Cases in Clay County?

Probate cases in Clay County are heard by the judges the chief judge assigns to the division, and the circuit publishes who they are. Knowing who has the division tells you whose procedures apply to your hearing, and how long a judge has had it tells you how settled those procedures are.

• James E. Kallaher, Division B, captioned by the court as civil, probate and guardianship, hearing in Room 4-077 at the Clay County Courthouse in Green Cove Springs (the court’s own caption for the division, in the judge’s posted procedures, because the assignment order itself is not readable from outside Florida).

The circuit’s judicial directory is the source, read on September 16, 2026. Assignments rotate, usually at the start of a calendar year, so check it before a hearing.

How Busy the Clay County Probate Court Is

The state court system counts every petition filed in the circuit probate division, and the FY 2024-25 figures for Clay County are 626 probate filings, 127 guardianship filings and 0 trust filings, plus 258 Baker Act and Marchman Act cases that the same division carries. The division closed 516 probate cases in the same year. Spread across one judge, that is about 626 new probate cases per judge a year, which is the number behind how long an uncontested order takes to get signed.

Statewide the probate column was 73,282 filings against 141,166 for the whole division in FY 2024-25, so more than a third of what a Florida probate judge signs has nothing to do with an estate. The figures come from the Office of the State Courts Administrator's Statistical Reference Guide, chapter 6, and the next fiscal year's edition usually appears the following autumn.

When the Clay County Courthouse Is Closed

Florida sets nine paid state holidays by statute, and a circuit may close on more. The Clay County courthouse follows the Fourth Judicial Circuit calendar, which adds Presidents' Day, Good Friday, Juneteenth, Yom Kippur and Christmas Holiday to the statutory nine. The practical point is simple. E-filing accepts a document at any hour, but nothing is reviewed, docketed or signed on a day the courthouse is dark, so a petition filed the night before a closure sits until the next business day, and a deadline counted in days runs on regardless.

There is one caution about counting. A Florida deadline stated in days does not pause for a holiday in the middle of it, and only the last day matters. When the final day of a period falls on a Saturday, a Sunday or a legal holiday, the period runs to the end of the next day that is none of those. The circuit posts the calendar on its court holidays page, read on September 17, 2026, and it publishes the following year well in advance.

How a Case Gets Filed in Clay County Today

Florida runs one statewide electronic filing system, the Florida Courts E-Filing Portal, and every circuit court in the state receives filings through it. Attorneys have no choice about it. The rule says attorneys must file through the portal, and no other method is permitted except in the narrow situations the rule itself lists.

A self-represented person is in a different position, and this is the part almost nobody is told. You may elect to register for the portal and file electronically, or you may hand or mail paper to the clerk, who converts it to electronic format for the official court file. Both routes are proper and both land in the same queue. One caution rides along with the choice. Once you elect to file electronically, you cannot go back to paper without the court’s permission.

Registering costs nothing and filing itself costs nothing. What you pay is the statutory filing fee for the case, plus a payment convenience fee that depends on whether you pay by card or by electronic check.

The practical consequence is that a Clay County estate does not require anyone to be in Florida. An out-of-state family can open, run, and close a case from a kitchen table in another state, because the filings, the notices, and the proposed orders all move electronically. The exceptions are physical documents, and there are only a few of them.

Clay sends everything to one judge. All county probate and guardianship sit in Division B with one circuit judge, so there is no rotation, no ZIP code test and no second courthouse to plan around. The order making that assignment is a different story. The circuit publishes no administrative order list of its own and points instead to the Duval Clerk’s repository, which returns no result list to a reader outside Florida, so the evidence for the assignment is the court’s own caption for the division and the judge’s posted procedures rather than an order anyone can pull up. One circuit order does reach probate practice here, and the judge says so in his own document, namely the standing order on motions to compel, which requires a good faith conference and a certificate of it, and which does not let a motion to compel hearing be cancelled once it is on the calendar without the judge’s consent.

Are Clay County Probate Hearings Remote?

Probate hearings in Clay County can be held remotely on Zoom, and the division decides which matters must be in person. No standing probate room or meeting ID is published, and the link comes from the judicial assistant with the hearing confirmation. What decides remote here is the length and the type of the hearing. A non-evidentiary hearing of 30 minutes or less can typically be attended in person or by Zoom, local counsel and out of town counsel alike, and the procedures warn in capitals against booking a short slot for a matter that needs longer in order to get an earlier date or a remote appearance. A non-evidentiary hearing longer than 30 minutes, and any evidentiary hearing at any length, needs a written motion showing good cause with a courtesy copy and a proposed consent order emailed to the court. Parties who are not excused appear in person at a case management conference, which will not be rescheduled, and ex parte matters are in person only.

The division’s remote hearing instructions carry the current links and the dress and conduct rules, which judges enforce on camera exactly as they do in the room.

Where the Original Will Goes

Here is the rule that catches almost everyone, and it is stricter than families expect. Whoever is holding the original will has to deposit it with the clerk of the court that has venue over the estate, within 10 days of receiving information that the person has died. Read that trigger carefully. The clock does not start at the death, it starts when the custodian learns of the death, and the duty belongs to that custodian personally. It does not wait for a lawyer, it does not wait for the family to agree on anything, and it applies whether or not anybody intends to open a probate case. When the will goes in, the clerk also wants the date of death or the last four digits of the deceased person’s Social Security number.

The original itself travels on paper. Whatever a county does about an electronic copy, the physical document has to reach the clerk, and how it gets there is settled county by county rather than statewide. The custodian deposits the original with the Clerk within ten days of learning of the death, and Clay adds two things to the statewide rule. The Clerk wants the death certificate filed with the original will, and there is no charge to deposit one. What matters later is the number. A deposit opens a case of its own, and the judge’s procedures require the petition for administration to say that the will was deposited and to give that case number. Mail goes to P.O. Box 698 in Green Cove Springs and never to a branch office.

Three things families routinely get wrong here are worth naming. Depositing the will is not probating it, so handing the original to the clerk does not open an estate, does not appoint anyone, and does not make you responsible for the debts. It is a filing, not a job. A copy is not a substitute either, because a court can admit a lost or destroyed will but proving one is a separate proceeding with a heavier burden, which is a poor trade for a document that could have been walked to a counter. And sitting on a will is a genuinely bad idea. A custodian can be compelled to produce it, and where the court finds there was no just or reasonable cause for holding it back, Florida awards costs, damages, and a reasonable attorney fee against that person personally.

Two small mercies. If the original goes in attached to the petition, Florida treats it as deposited, so it is not a second errand. And once the clerk has it, the original is kept in its original form for at least 20 years whether or not it is ever admitted to probate. Scanning a will does not replace it.

Which Forms You Actually Need

The honest answer surprises people, so here it is plainly. Florida has an official statewide form set for family law, approved by the Supreme Court and free for anyone to use. It has never built the same thing for probate. The state’s own self-help service says as much, telling visitors that it does not provide any forms related to the probate process and to ask a lawyer which form is needed.

So when you search for the Clay County probate forms, you are looking for something that does not exist as one official packet, which is why the results are a scatter of clerk pages, circuit pages, and companies selling you a template. What actually controls comes from three layers, and you need all three.

• The Florida Probate Rules, which prescribe contents rather than forms. The rule on the petition for administration lists eleven things the petition must state, from the decedent’s domicile to whether the proposed personal representative has been convicted of a felony. A document that satisfies the rule is legally sufficient even if it looks nothing like anyone’s template. The rules do carry a small set of forms of their own, but they are almost entirely guardianship forms, and the rules say outright that those forms are not intended to be part of the rules and are provided for convenience only. The one decedent-estate form actually written into the probate rules is the oath of the personal representative.
• The practitioner form set. Most Florida probate documents you will ever see are built from a numbered probate form set published by a private nonprofit and sold commercially. Lawyers treat it as the standard. It is not court-approved, and nothing obliges a court to accept it.
• The local layer, which is the one that rejects you. Clay runs on one judge’s published procedures, and they are specific enough to plan a case around. Proposed probate, mental health and guardianship orders have gone straight to the judge’s queue through the e-filing portal since March 1, 2022, filed differently from a motion, as a cover letter in PDF together with the proposed order in Word, and a courtesy copy of the motion goes inside that cover letter as extra pages rather than as a separate upload. Hearing time is requested only by email to the judicial assistant, and the motion has to be on the Clerk’s docket first, with its docket number given along with the case number and the time needed. Dates offered are not held until a confirmation email arrives, and the notice of hearing is not filed before that confirmation. A meet and confer comes before any of that. On every Division B motion except injunctive relief without notice, judgment on the pleadings, default, summary judgment and class action maintenance, a certificate of conferral in the form the standing order prints is filed with the notice of hearing, naming the date, the attorneys who took part and the result, and failing to try can cost the hearing or the motion. An order coming out of a hearing is circulated within three working days and submitted within seven, in Word, with exactly one signature line for the judge and the cover letter scanned as a separate document, while hearing notebooks, memoranda and hard copies of cited authority are hand delivered or mailed at least three business days before the hearing. Then come the checklists. The summary administration checklist is completed and e-filed before the order of summary administration is submitted, and it asks for docket numbers rather than for documents, namely the docket number of the order admitting the will, of the death certificate and of the order determining homestead, together with every beneficiary and every other interested person including creditors by name, address and relationship. The homestead checklist is e-filed with the petition, and it carries two traps worth knowing beforehand. The signature page of the proposed order has to contain at least four lines of text and the case number, and where any box on the checklist is left unchecked the filer signs a second certification saying what could not be supplied and why after a diligent search. Bond is its own conversation here. The court publishes a schedule and asks counsel to propose a figure from it in the order appointing the personal representative, starting at a minimum of $18,000 for a gross estate up to $75,000 and for every wrongful death estate, and the court can require a bond even where the will waived one.

So start at the bottom of that list rather than the top. The circuit and the clerk publish what they want on their own forms and checklists page, and half an hour there before you draft anything is the cheapest half hour in the case.

The Administrative Orders That Govern Probate in Clay County

Each circuit adds its own layer on top of the Florida Probate Rules through administrative orders signed by the chief judge and the procedures each division publishes, and that layer is where a petition gets rejected. These are the orders that govern probate practice in Clay County as of September 16, 2026.

• First Amended Administrative Order No. 88-2, Failure to Make Discovery and Sanctions under Florida Rule of Civil Procedure 1.380 (entered July 2020 and recorded in the records of Clay, Duval and Nassau Counties on July 17, 2020). Before a motion to compel or for a protective order is filed, counsel confer in good faith and file a certificate saying so, in the language the order prints, and once a motion to compel is on the calendar it cannot be cancelled without the judge’s consent. The Division B procedures make the order operative in probate as well as civil, and call for strict compliance.

The division also publishes its own procedures, last revised May 2026, and the points a filer most needs are these.

• Proposed probate, mental health and guardianship orders go to the judge’s queue through the Florida E-Filing Portal, not to the Clerk, and have done since March 1, 2022. The submission is filed differently from a motion, as a cover letter in PDF plus the proposed order in Word, with a courtesy copy of the motion added inside that one PDF as extra pages rather than as a separate upload.
• A petition for administration has to state that the will was deposited with the Clerk and give the case number the deposit received. A deposited will gets its own Clerk case number before the estate is opened, which is why the number is easy to lose.
• Hearing time is requested only by email to brewerm@clayclerk.com, copying every other attorney and self-represented party, and the motion has to be on the Clerk’s docket first, with its docket number given alongside the case number and the time needed. Dates offered are not held until a confirmation email arrives, and the notice of hearing is not filed before that confirmation.
• A meet and confer is mandatory before a hearing is scheduled on any Division B motion except injunctive relief without notice, judgment on the pleadings, default, summary judgment and class action maintenance. A certificate of conferral in the form of the order’s own exhibit is filed with the notice of hearing, naming the date, the attorneys who took part and the result, and failing to try it can cost the hearing, the motion, or draw sanctions.
• Orders after a hearing are circulated within three working days and submitted within seven, through the portal, in Word, with exactly one signature line for the judge and the cover letter scanned as a separate document. Hearing notebooks, memoranda and hard copies of cited authority are hand delivered or mailed with a cover letter at least three business days before the hearing.
• The court publishes an estate bond schedule and asks counsel to propose a figure from it inside the order appointing the personal representative, starting at a minimum of $18,000 for a gross estate up to $75,000 and for every wrongful death estate, then $25,000, $35,000, $50,000, $75,000 and a $100,000 minimum above $500,000. A bond can be required even where the will waived it.
• Ex parte matters are heard in Room 4-077 from 9:30 a.m. to 10:00 a.m., in person, with Zoom not permitted, on the nine dates the court published in June 2026, namely July 10 and 24, August 28, September 18, October 16 and 30, November 13, and December 4 and 18. The court asks filers to check the site for changes.
• Guardianship fees carry a rule of their own. Since January 1, 2025, fees and costs for a guardian or a guardian’s attorney incurred more than a year before the petition are not granted unless they were noted in the annual accounting for the year they were incurred, the Clerk audited that accounting, and the court approved it. The court asks for quarterly fee petitions.

The full procedures are on the court’s site, and they change more often than the statutes do.

The Checklist for Opening an Estate in Clay County

This is the sequence for a formal administration, which is the full version. A smaller estate skips most of it, and the section after this one covers that. Each step below happens in this order for a reason, because the later ones depend on the earlier ones being done.

1. Order certified death certificates. The funeral home usually orders them and will ask how many you want. Ask for more than feels sensible, often five to ten, because the court, each bank, each insurer, and the property records all want their own certified copy, and reordering later is slow.
2. Find the original will and deposit it with the clerk. The 10-day clock runs from when the custodian learns of the death, not from when anyone files anything, and it is the one deadline that can already be running while the family is still planning a funeral. Where the original goes in Clay County is above, and it is never just a matter of uploading it.
3. Decide which kind of administration the estate needs. Formal administration is the default. Summary administration and disposition without administration are lighter and cheaper, and they are worth ruling out before you file anything, because you cannot un-file a formal case cheaply.
4. Confirm the county. Venue follows the decedent’s domicile at death, or for someone who lived out of state, a county where they owned property. This is one of the few things in probate that is genuinely hard to fix later.
5. Prepare and e-file the petition for administration, with the local extras. The petition is verified, meaning signed under penalty of perjury, and it has to name every interested person, which is the line that most often comes back to bite an estate later. File it with whatever Clay County adds on top, because that is what a rejection is usually about. The filing fee is $400.
6. File the oath, the address designation, and the designation of resident agent. All three are due before letters issue. The oath is a sworn promise to faithfully administer the estate, and the appointment rests on it. The address designation puts the representative’s street and mailing address on the record. The resident agent designation, signed by the agent accepting the job, is required unless the representative is a corporate fiduciary with a Florida office or a Florida Bar member who lives and keeps an office in Florida, which in practice means nearly every family representative files one and the attorney usually is the agent. These can be folded into the petition or the oath rather than filed separately.
7. Get the order and the letters of administration. Once the petition is in and the will is admitted, the court appoints the representative, sets or waives bond, and confirms the oath and resident agent papers are on file. Letters of administration then issue, and the letters are the thing that carries weight in the outside world. Order roughly ten certified copies at once, because banks, brokerages, and title companies each keep one and many will not accept letters more than 60 to 90 days old.
8. Get an estate tax identification number and open the estate account. This comes right after the letters and before anything else useful can happen, because no bank will open an account for the estate without both.
9. Serve the notice of administration. Florida says promptly rather than naming a day count. It goes to the surviving spouse, the beneficiaries, anyone who may be entitled to exempt property, and the trustee and qualified beneficiaries of certain trusts. Service starts a 3-month clock for the person served to challenge the validity of the will, the venue, or the court’s jurisdiction, and after that those objections are barred. That deadline is close to unextendable, because Florida allows an extension only for estoppel based on a misstatement by the personal representative about the deadline itself, and expressly not for failure to disclose information or for other misconduct. The clock also runs only against people who were actually served, so leaving someone off the list does not save time, it leaves the case open. The same notice starts a 4-month window to claim exempt property and a 6-month window for a surviving spouse to elect against the estate.
10. Publish the notice to creditors, serve the ones you know about, and document the search. The notice runs in a newspaper in the county once a week for two consecutive weeks. An unknown creditor then has 3 months from the first publication, and a creditor who had to be served gets the later of that or 30 days from service. The representative has to make a diligent search for reasonably ascertainable creditors, though Florida does not demand an impracticable one, and a verified statement about that search goes in within 4 months of the first publication, with proof of publication filed within 45 days. One item gets missed constantly. If the person who died was 55 or older, a copy of the notice and a death certificate go to Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration within 3 months of the first publication. And a reasonably ascertainable creditor who was never served keeps a claim for up to two years from the death.
11. File the inventory within 60 days of the letters, then close the estate. The inventory lists each asset at its date-of-death value and is served on the residuary beneficiaries and the surviving spouse. After the creditor period runs and the claims are resolved, the estate distributes and the representative files a final accounting and a petition for discharge. Florida puts a real deadline on that too, generally within 12 months after the letters issued for an estate that files no federal estate tax return. A straightforward case runs 6 to 12 months from letters to discharge, and the creditor window is what sets the floor.

What It Costs to File in Clay County

These are the charges the clerk posts, not anyone’s legal fee.

Posted August 2026. Fee schedules move, so confirm the current charge with the clerk before you file. The reason the number looks the same everywhere is that it is the same number. Florida law sets the base charge for opening a formal administration and adds a small statutory service charge on top, so the entire statewide spread across the ten largest counties is one dollar. Our county-by-county filing fee study has all ten posted schedules.

And then there is the number that dwarfs every line above. Florida publishes an attorney fee schedule that is presumed reasonable and scales with the size of the estate, and it is a ceiling the estate may agree to rather than a mandate. On a $100,000 estate the schedule calls $3,000 reasonable. That, not the clerk’s $400, is what probate costs a family. You can run your own numbers in the Florida probate cost calculator.

When the Estate Does Not Need All of This

Before you open a formal administration, rule out the three lighter paths, in this order.

• No probate at all. Only assets in the deceased person’s sole name with no other instruction go through probate. Life insurance and retirement accounts with a named beneficiary, pay-on-death bank accounts, jointly held property with survivorship, property in a funded trust, and a home that passed under a lady bird deed all move without a court case. Sometimes the whole estate turns out to be in that category. Our page on whether you need probate in Florida walks the test.
• Disposition without administration. For the smallest estates, with no real property and not much more than the final bills, whoever paid those bills can ask the clerk to release what is left. It is a request rather than a case, and it costs $231 here. See how disposition without administration works.
• Summary administration. Available when the probate estate is worth $150,000 or less after exempt property, a threshold raised from $75,000 on July 1, 2026, or when the person died more than two years ago. No personal representative is appointed, and the case can close in weeks rather than months. The summary administration guide has a short qualifier.

One warning about that last figure, because it will confuse you if you go looking. Florida publishes its statutes once a year, and the edition on the official statute site still shows the old $75,000 line. The increase to $150,000 is real, it came from a 2026 session law, and the probate rule on summary administration has already been amended to match. Check the rule rather than the posted statute until the new edition appears.

If none of the three fits, the estate needs a formal administration, and the checklist above is the map.

Doing It Yourself, and Where Families Stop

Florida does not require you to hire anyone to file a document. It does require something else, and this is where most families stop. Under the Florida Probate Rules, every personal representative has to be represented by an attorney admitted to practice in Florida unless the representative remains the sole interested person in the estate, or is a Florida-admitted lawyer appearing for himself or herself in that role. Those are the only exceptions. Read it as the practical test it is. One heir, nobody else with an interest, no creditors, and you may proceed alone. A second sibling, or a creditor, and the court expects counsel regardless of how well everyone is getting along.

The smaller paths are different. Disposition without administration is designed to be done without a lawyer, and clerks routinely help with it. Summary administration sits in between, simple on its face and easy to get wrong in ways that surface years later when someone tries to sell the house.

If you do want counsel for a Clay County estate, our probate attorney page for Orange Park covers what we charge and how the remote process works. And if you would rather do it yourself, nothing on this page is holding anything back. Everything above is the actual sequence.

Frequently Asked Questions

Common Situations

The petition that did not name the will deposit. A Fleming Island family did everything in order, carrying their father’s original will to the Clerk within ten days, taking the receipt home, and filing the petition for administration a month later. The judge’s procedures require that petition to say the will was deposited and to give the case number the deposit received, and that number sits in a file nobody looks at again once the estate has a number of its own. Recovering it took one phone call to the Clerk. Nobody made the call until the submission stalled.

The ex parte matter that could not be done on Zoom. An out-of-state personal representative needed a short ex parte order and asked to appear by video. Division B hears ex parte matters in Room 4-077 from 9:30 to 10:00 in the morning, in person, with Zoom not permitted, on the nine dates the court published for 2026. The next of those dates was weeks away. Reading the posted calendar before the need arises is what turns this into a planned trip.

Sources of Law

Statutes and rules retrieved August 19, 2026. Court, clerk, and filing-fee data retrieved on the dates noted. Local requirements change without much announcement, so confirm the current version at the links above before you file.

• Rules cited are the Florida Probate Rules, current through the opinion issued July 16, 2026, and the Florida Rules of General Practice and Judicial Administration, effective July 1, 2026.
• Filing. Fla. R. Gen. Prac. & Jud. Admin. 2.525(b)(1) (attorneys must file through the portal; no other method permitted except as the rule provides), 2.525(b)(2) (an unrepresented party may elect to file through the portal, and once made the election may not be withdrawn without leave of court), 2.525(c)(1)(A) (a paper document may be submitted to the clerk, who converts it, where filed by an unrepresented party who has not elected). Filings move through the Florida Courts E-Filing Portal, operated by the Florida Courts E-Filing Authority, which states there is no cost to register and no fee to file electronically, apart from the statutory filing fee and a convenience fee based on the payment method.
• The original will. Fla. Stat. §732.901(1) (custodian must deposit within 10 days after receiving information that the testator is dead, with the clerk having venue, supplying the date of death or the last four digits of the social security number), (2) (custodian may be compelled; costs, damages, and a reasonable attorney fee where there was no just or reasonable cause), (3) (an original submitted with a petition is deemed deposited), (4) (clerk preserves the original in original form for at least 20 years; digitizing does not eliminate the requirement). Fla. Prob. R. 5.043 (deposit of wills and codicils; retained in original form).
• Opening the estate. Venue, Fla. Stat. §733.101. Petition, §733.202 and Fla. Prob. R. 5.200 (the eleven required contents). Preference in appointment, §733.301. Nonresident personal representatives, §733.304. Oath before letters, Fla. Prob. R. 5.320 (which also carries the only decedent-estate form written into the rules). Address designation and designation of resident agent with acceptance, both before letters, with the corporate-fiduciary and Florida-Bar-member exceptions, Fla. Prob. R. 5.110. Issuance of letters and bond, Fla. Prob. R. 5.235 and §733.213.
• Notices and claims. Notice of administration served promptly, the persons served, the 3-month objection window for the validity of the will, venue, or jurisdiction, and the estoppel-only extension, Fla. Stat. §733.212 and Fla. Prob. R. 5.240 (exempt property 4 months, elective share 6 months). Notice to creditors published once a week for 2 consecutive weeks, the diligent search for reasonably ascertainable creditors, and notice to the Agency for Health Care Administration within 3 months where the decedent was 55 or older, Fla. Stat. §733.2121 and Fla. Prob. R. 5.241 (proof of publication within 45 days; verified statement of the search within 4 months). Claim deadlines, the later of 3 months from first publication or 30 days from service, §733.702. Two-year bar after death whether or not letters ever issued, §733.710.
• Running and closing. Inventory within 60 days after issuance of letters at date-of-death value, Fla. Stat. §733.604 and Fla. Prob. R. 5.340. Final accounting and petition for discharge within 12 months after issuance of letters for an estate filing no federal estate tax return, Fla. Prob. R. 5.400(c). Attorney required for the personal representative unless the representative remains the sole interested person or is a Florida-admitted attorney appearing in that role, Fla. Prob. R. 5.030(a). Presumed-reasonable attorney compensation, §733.6171.
• Smaller estates. Summary administration, Fla. Stat. §735.201 and Fla. Prob. R. 5.530(a)(7). Reading note. The statute as officially published still shows $75,000, because Florida publishes its statutes annually and the 2026 edition is not yet posted. The $150,000 figure comes from CS/HB 1337 (2026), ch. 2026-57, Laws of Florida, section 7, effective July 1, 2026, and Rule 5.530 has been amended to match. Disposition without administration, §735.301.
• Forms. The Florida Probate Rules place their forms in Part V and state that the forms are not intended to be part of the rules and are provided for convenience only; the Part V set is essentially guardianship forms. The Florida State Courts System’s self-help service states that Florida Courts Help does not provide any forms related to the probate process, in contrast with the Supreme Court-approved family law forms. The practitioner form set commonly used in Florida probate is published and sold by a private nonprofit and is not court-approved.
• Cost. Probate filing service charges, Fla. Stat. §28.2401. Posted Clay County charges read from the clerk’s own schedule, retrieved 2026-08-09; all ten largest counties are documented in our probate cost by county study.
• Caseload. Florida Office of the State Courts Administrator, FY 2024-25 Statistical Reference Guide, Chapter 6, Circuit Probate, tables of filings and dispositions by circuit, county and category, retrieved September 15, 2026.
• Clay County local court layer, retrieved September 16, 2026, from the judicial directory · First Amended Administrative Order No. 88-2. Judge assignments come from the circuit’s assignment orders cited above. The parking and coffee notes are conveniences for visitors, not court information, and the research file with every source is reference/research/probate-court-pilot/clay-county.md.
• Clay County practice, retrieved 2026-08-12: clerk probate page · Fourth Judicial Circuit administrative orders · judges directory · local forms and checklists.

Updated on September 16, 2026. Reviewed by Kevin D. Klagge, Esq., Fla. Bar No. 99502. Attorney Kevin Klagge represents families, businesses, and international clients in estate and tax planning, business structuring, and international law, with a focus on Florida legal tools. He litigates estate and business issues in court. This page is general information about Florida court procedure, not legal advice, and no attorney-client relationship is created by reading it. Court addresses, local checklists, and clerk charges change; confirm them at the official links before you file. We serve Orange Park residents wherever you are, and this is not a Clay County office.