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

Where the Escambia County Probate Court Actually Sits

Escambia County probate is heard in the First Judicial Circuit, at the M.C. Blanchard Judicial Building at 190 West Government Street in Pensacola, where the probate judge keeps chambers on the 6th floor. Filings go through the Escambia County Clerk of the Circuit Court and Comptroller, whose department is captioned Guardianship, Mental Health and Probate, answers at 850-595-4300, and takes mail at P.O. Box 333, Pensacola, FL 32591.

One circuit judge holds all three of the county’s probate and mental health divisions, R, U and T, and has held the two probate divisions since January 3, 2022. A conflict does not move an Escambia probate case to a second probate judge, because there is no second probate judge. A county directive sends the case to the E-Civil division instead, and a further conflict sends it at random to another civil division.

Escambia probate case numbers carry the CP designator, which is how the probate judge’s own example of a document title reads, Jones 18 CP 1111 Order of Discharge.

The probate counter is at the Clerk’s Guardianship, Mental Health and Probate department, 190 West Government Street, Pensacola, FL 32502, Monday to Thursday, 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., and Friday, 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., 850-595-4300. The Friday close is an hour earlier than most Florida clerk offices, so a Friday afternoon errand has to be an early one. Mail goes to Probate, Guardianship, Mental Health, P.O. Box 333, Pensacola, FL 32591-0333. The Clerk publishes no room number for the probate counter, no will-deposit procedure and no deposit fee, and its probate list says only that wills are not filed until the death of the party, so call before you carry or mail an original. A deposited will gets its own case number, and the county’s opening checklist has a line for it.

• The clerk’s probate page for Escambia County
• First Judicial Circuit judges directory
• Administrative orders of the First 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 Escambia County, her estate is a Escambia 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 Pensacola, Pensacola Beach, Cantonment, Molino, Brent, Ferry Pass, Bellview, and Gonzalez are all Escambia 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

There is no free public parking at the M.C. Blanchard Judicial Building. The court’s record for the building lists limited free parking along Spring Street near the courthouse, metered public parking along the Baylen Street and Government Street sides, and accessible parking behind the courthouse off the Spring Street entrance. Building hours run Monday to Friday, 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., which is longer than the Clerk’s Friday counter. The court keeps its own parking and directions page.

If you are dropping off an original will or sitting through a morning calendar, coffee within a short walk is Maker’s Cafe & Espresso Bar at 422 South Palafox Street, Pensacola, about a four minute walk, 0.2 miles east on Government Street and south on Palafox from the public entrance. Hours are Monday to Saturday, 7:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., and the cafe is family run. Fosko Coffee Barre at 8 South Palafox Place is about 0.3 miles. OpenStreetMap also lists a cafe inside the courthouse itself, at unit 23015, but nothing else reachable confirms that it is open, so do not count on it.

Which Judges Hear Probate Cases in Escambia County?

Probate cases in Escambia 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.

• W. Joel Boles, Divisions R, U and T, which the county directive groups as the Probate and Mental Health Divisions, with chambers on the 6th floor of the M.C. Blanchard Judicial Building, assigned January 1, 2025 for all three divisions, and January 3, 2022 for the two probate divisions (ECAD 2024-03, with ECAD 2021-06 behind the 2022 date).

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 Escambia County Probate Court Is

The state court system counts every petition filed in the circuit probate division, and the FY 2024-25 figures for Escambia County are 1,261 probate filings, 139 guardianship filings and 1 trust filings, plus 1,313 Baker Act and Marchman Act cases that the same division carries. The division closed 1,117 probate cases in the same year. Spread across one judge, that is about 1,261 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.

How a Case Gets Filed in Escambia 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 Escambia 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.

Escambia sends every probate case to the same bench. One circuit judge presides in Divisions R, U and T, so there is no ZIP code test, no rotation and no second courthouse to plan around. The routing rule worth knowing is what happens on a conflict. A recusal or a disqualification moves the case out of probate to the E-Civil division, which has been a different judge since June 15, 2026, and a further conflict sends it at random to another civil division. What changes then is not the law of the estate. What changes is the practice you spent the first month learning.

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 the Clerk’s probate page says plainly that a will is not filed until the death of the person who made it. Escambia publishes no room number for the probate counter, no deposit procedure and no deposit fee, so call 850-595-4300 before you carry or mail an original. Keep the number the Clerk gives you, because a deposited will gets its own case number and the county’s opening checklist has a line asking for it.

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 Escambia 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. Escambia runs on three checklists and one email address. A county directive in force since June 1, 2018 requires an Opening Formal Administration checklist with the petition for administration, a Summary Administration checklist with the petition for summary administration, and a Closing Formal Administration checklist with the petition for discharge. Each one is a certification form signed line by line, and the opening checklist makes the filer certify that the original will was filed and that the will is self-proved or backed by a witness oath. Then comes the part that catches people who read the directives and stop there. A 2021 directive routes proposed orders through the e-filing portal and says so expressly for parties under the Florida Probate Rules, except where the presiding judge directs otherwise. The probate judge directs otherwise. Proposed orders in probate and guardianship cases are emailed in Microsoft Word to the division inbox, titled with the case name, the case number and the name of the document, and the judge’s published example reads Jones 18 CP 1111 Order of Discharge. Hearing time is requested from the judicial assistant by email once the motion is on file, with every party on the request, and every motion and every order has to carry the case number and the correct division. Two rules from the 2021 directive ride along after that. A proposed order sent electronically carries no certificate of service, and in a case with a self-represented party the attorney serves the signed order within five business days, files a certificate of compliance, and ends every proposed order with the service paragraph the directive prints.

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 Escambia 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 Escambia County as of September 16, 2026.

• ECAD 2024-03, Circuit and County Court Division Assignments (signed April 4, 2024, effective January 1, 2025). Section E, the Probate and Mental Health Divisions, assigns one circuit judge to preside in Divisions R, U and T, which is the whole of the county’s probate bench.
• ECAD 2018-05, Mandatory Checklists, Probate Divisions (signed May 23, 2018, effective June 1, 2018 until further order). Requires the Opening Formal Administration checklist with the petition for administration, the Summary Administration checklist with the petition for summary administration, and the Closing Formal Administration checklist with the petition for discharge. All three are certification forms, and the court posts the order as a scanned image.
• ECAD 2021-03, Submission and Distribution Requirements for Orders in Civil Proceedings (June 21, 2021). Applies by its own terms to parties under the Florida Probate Rules. Proposed orders go through the portal except where the presiding judge directs otherwise, metadata is stripped, a proposed order sent electronically carries no certificate of service, and where a party is self-represented the attorney serves the signed order within five business days and files a certificate of compliance. The court posts the order as a scanned image.
• ECAD 2021-06, Miscellaneous Escambia County Court Operations, Jimmy Ryce, Tobacco Cases, and Probate and Guardianship Recusal Process (signed December 14, 2021, effective January 3, 2022). Names Divisions U and T as the probate divisions and sets the conflict route. A recusal or disqualification sends the case to the E-Civil division, and a second conflict sends it at random among the remaining civil divisions.
• ECAD 2026-05, Judicial Assignment, Division E-Civil (signed June 12, 2026, effective June 15, 2026). Puts a newly appointed circuit judge in Division E-Civil, which is where a conflicted Escambia probate case lands, so the destination of a recusal changed hands in the middle of 2026.
• AO 2025-27, Appointment of First Judicial Circuit Administrative Judges (July 1, 2025, running to June 30, 2027). Names the administrative judge for each of the circuit’s four counties, which matters because the Escambia directives that govern probate are signed by that judge rather than by the chief judge.

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

• A checklist opens every probate case and closes every formal administration, and the three forms sit on the circuit’s probate page as Word files, one for opening a formal administration, one for summary administration and one for closing.
• Proposed orders in probate and guardianship cases are emailed in Microsoft Word to esc.divu.eserve@flcourts1.gov, titled with the case name, the case number and the name of the document. The judge’s own example reads Jones 18 CP 1111 Order of Discharge, which is also where the CP designator shows up.
• Hearing time is scheduled through the judicial assistant, kimberly.eaton@flcourts1.gov, after the motion is filed, and the request has to include every party.
• Every motion and every order carries the case number and the correct division, because one judge holds three of them.
• A conflict takes the case out of probate altogether. The county directive sends it to the E-Civil division, and a second conflict sends it at random to another civil division, so the order routing above stops applying.

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 Escambia 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 Escambia 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 Escambia County adds on top, because that is what a rejection is usually about. The filing fee is $400 to $401.
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 Escambia County

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

Posted August 2026. The Escambia Clerk’s own fee schedule could not be opened from outside Florida on September 16, 2026, because the Clerk’s site answers 403 to automated requests and the Internet Archive was down that day. A search result carrying text from that schedule showed $400.00 for a formal administration and $345.00 for a summary administration of $1,000 or more, which is the statutory schedule and what the rest of the First Judicial Circuit posts. The ranges above run from those figures to the highest total any Florida clerk posts. Confirm by phone at 850-595-4300 before you file. 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 to $401, 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 to $232 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 Escambia County estate, our probate attorney page for Pensacola 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.

What Changed at the Escambia County Probate Court This Year

Court practice changes without much announcement. These are the developments in the last year that affect a Escambia County probate filer, each with its source.

• August 18, 2026. AO 2026-28 assigned a senior judge, the former E-Civil judge who signed the probate recusal directive, to the circuit through December 31, 2026. Source.
• June 12, 2026. ECAD 2026-05 put a new judge in Division E-Civil effective June 15, 2026. E-Civil is the division a conflicted Escambia probate case goes to, so the destination of a recusal changed. Source.
• May 1, 2026. ECAD 2026-04 assigned another newly appointed circuit judge to Escambia Divisions B and F, which are criminal divisions and do not touch probate. Source.
• April 24, 2026. The Governor made twelve judicial appointments, two of them to the First Judicial Circuit, filling the vacancies that produced the two Escambia assignment directives above. Source.
• January 1, 2025. The current division assignment took effect and the probate bench did not change hands. The same judge has held Divisions U and T since January 3, 2022. Source.

Frequently Asked Questions

Common Situations

The order that went to the portal and waited. A Pensacola family finished an uncontested summary administration and uploaded the proposed order through the e-filing portal, which is what the county’s own directive on proposed orders describes. Weeks passed. The probate judge takes proposed orders in probate and guardianship cases by email in Word at the division inbox, and the directive itself allows the presiding judge to direct that route. The order was correct and the family had followed a written rule. Sending the same document to the division inbox is what finally moved it.

The Friday afternoon will delivery. A son left work early on a Friday with his father’s original will, reached 190 West Government Street at 4:20 p.m. and found the counter closed. Escambia closes at 5:00 p.m. Monday to Thursday and at 4:00 p.m. on Friday, an hour earlier than most Florida clerk offices. The will went in on Monday, well inside the ten days, and the Clerk gave it a case number of its own, which the county’s opening checklist asks for when the estate is filed later.

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 Escambia 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.
• Escambia County local court layer, retrieved September 16, 2026, from the judicial directory · ECAD 2024-03 · ECAD 2018-05 · ECAD 2021-03 · ECAD 2021-06 · ECAD 2026-05 · AO 2025-27. 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/escambia-county.md.
• Escambia County practice, retrieved 2026-08-12: clerk probate page · First 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 Pensacola residents wherever you are, and this is not a Escambia County office.