The quitclaim deed is the simplest deed in American real estate law, and the most frequently misused.

It’s simple because it does exactly one thing: it transfers whatever interest the grantor has in a property — and makes no promise whatsoever that the grantor has any interest at all. It’s misused because that second half is invisible to most people signing one. They think they’re getting a house. What they’re actually getting is a signed statement that reads, roughly, “whatever I own here, if anything, is now yours — and I’m not standing behind that.”

Used correctly, a quitclaim deed (often searched as a “quit claim deed” or even a “quick claim deed”) is an efficient, inexpensive, entirely legitimate tool. Adding a spouse to title. Removing an ex after a divorce. Moving property into your revocable trust or your LLC. Clearing up a misspelled name in the chain of title. Transferring a parcel to your adult children.

Used incorrectly, it’s the deed that leaves someone holding a property they can’t insure, a debt they thought they escaped, a capital gains bill their heirs never should have owed, or a Medicaid penalty that arrives five years after everyone forgot the deed existed.

This guide walks the whole process — drafting, execution, recording — and it spends real time on the consequences most quitclaim articles skip entirely. Read the tax section even if you skim the rest.

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First: Understand What You’re Actually Conveying

Deeds differ in one dimension that matters more than any other: what the grantor promises about the title.

• General warranty deed — the grantor warrants clear title against all defects, all the way back through the property’s entire history, and is legally on the hook if a problem surfaces. This is what you get when you buy a house from a stranger.
• Special (limited) warranty deed — the grantor warrants only against defects that arose during their own ownership. Common in commercial deals and bank-owned sales.
• Quitclaim deed — the grantor warrants nothing. No covenant of seisin, no warranty of quiet enjoyment, no obligation to defend against a competing claim. If it turns out the grantor owned 30% of the property, the grantee now owns 30%. If the grantor owned nothing, the grantee owns nothing — and has no recourse.

This is why a quitclaim deed is the right instrument between people who already trust each other and already know the title situation, and the wrong instrument for a transaction between strangers exchanging money.

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Step 1: Confirm the Quitclaim Is the Right Instrument

More quitclaim deeds fail at this step than at every drafting step combined. Not because the deed was drafted badly — because it was the wrong document for the goal.

Good uses for a quitclaim deed

• Adding a spouse to title after marriage
• Removing an ex-spouse pursuant to a divorce judgment or marital settlement agreement
• Transferring into or out of a revocable living trust as part of trust funding
• Transferring to an LLC you own, for rental property held in an entity
• Curative work — fixing a misspelled name, a wrong middle initial, or a scrivener’s error in a prior deed
• Releasing a possible interest — an heir, a former partner, or someone who might have a claim signing away whatever they may hold, to clear a cloud on title
• Gifting property to family — with important tax caveats covered in Step 7

Situations where a quitclaim deed is the wrong tool

Each of these has a better instrument, and using a quitclaim instead creates a problem that is difficult or impossible to unwind later:

• Selling to a buyer at arm’s length. Use a warranty deed. A buyer paying real money is entitled to title covenants and title insurance.
• Estate planning — passing property at death. This is the big one. A quitclaim deed transfers ownership now, immediately and irrevocably. If your goal is “my daughter gets the house when I die,” a quitclaim is a genuinely bad way to accomplish it: you lose control of your own home today, you may trigger gift tax reporting, you destroy the stepped-up basis, and you start a Medicaid lookback clock. Use a Lady Bird deed if you’re in Florida, Texas, Michigan, Vermont, or West Virginia — or a Transfer on Death deed in most other states. Both accomplish the goal while you keep everything.
• Getting your name off a mortgage. A deed conveys title. It does not touch debt. More on this in Step 5, because it deserves its own section.
• Transferring property you’re not certain you own. A quitclaim will happily convey nothing at all.
• Where a court order controls the terms. In divorce, the deed has to match what the judgment or settlement agreement actually requires. Draft the deed to the order, not to what someone remembers the order saying.

If you’re still confident a quitclaim is right, keep going. The remaining steps are mechanical.

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Step 2: Pull the Current Vesting Deed

Every deed is built on the one before it. The vesting deed — the recorded instrument that put the property into the grantor’s name — is your source of truth for three things you must not guess at:

• Exactly how the grantor’s name appears on title. If the vesting deed says “Margaret A. Delacroix,” the new deed says “Margaret A. Delacroix” — not “Maggie Delacroix,” not “Margaret Ann Delacroix.” A name variation creates a title gap someone will have to clear with an affidavit years from now. If the name legitimately changed (marriage, divorce, court order), recite both: “Margaret A. Delacroix, formerly known as Margaret A. Chen.”
• How title is currently held. Sole ownership, joint tenants with right of survivorship, tenancy by the entireties, tenants in common? This determines who must sign. A co-owner who doesn’t sign doesn’t convey, and you’ll have transferred a partial interest by accident.
• The exact legal description — which gets its own step, below.

Getting it: nearly every county Clerk of Court or Register of Deeds publishes Official Records online, free, searchable by owner name. Find the most recent deed conveying the property to the current owner and download the PDF. If the online search is unusable, call the Clerk; certified copies run a few dollars.

Step 3: Copy the Legal Description Exactly

The most common technical failure in DIY deed preparation, in any deed type.

The legal description is the formal identification of the land — a lot and block reference with plat book and page, a metes-and-bounds call, or a section-township-range description. It is not the street address, and it is emphatically not the one-line abbreviated description on your county property appraiser’s website.

Those assessor descriptions are truncated for screen display. They routinely drop the plat book and page reference, the recording county, unit or phase designations, or a portion of a metes-and-bounds call. A deed with a truncated description will usually record without objection — the Clerk doesn’t examine title — and then fail to convey what you meant.

Copy it character-for-character from the recorded vesting deed. Every abbreviation, every comma, the full “according to the plat thereof, as recorded in Plat Book 34, Page 12, of the Public Records of ______ County, Florida.” Read it back against the original twice. Then have someone else read it to you while you check.

If you’re transferring only part of a parcel, stop. That requires a survey and a new legal description prepared by a licensed surveyor, and possibly a lot split approval. It is not a DIY task.

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Step 4: Decide Exactly How the Grantee Takes Title

Naming the grantee is not enough. You have to say in what capacity they take it — and a default rule catches people constantly.

Florida does not presume a right of survivorship between co-owners (Fla. Stat. § 689.15). If you quitclaim your home to your two children and say nothing further, they take as tenants in common — two separate, undivided, freely transferable half-interests with no survivorship. If one child dies, that half goes into their estate and gets probated. If one child is sued or divorces, their half is exposed. If one child wants out, they can force a partition sale of your house.

Your vesting options, and when each applies:

• Sole ownership — one grantee, full interest.
• Tenancy by the entireties — married couples only. In Florida this is the strongest form: creditors of one spouse generally cannot reach entireties property, and the survivor takes automatically. Florida presumes entireties for a conveyance to a married couple, but state the marital relationship expressly (“Robert Kwan and Alice Kwan, husband and wife”) so there’s nothing to argue about.
• Joint tenants with right of survivorship — non-spouses who want the survivor to take automatically. Must be stated expressly. “As joint tenants with right of survivorship, and not as tenants in common.”
• Tenants in common — separate shares, no survivorship. State the fractional shares if unequal.

Get this wrong and you don’t find out until someone dies or gets sued. It is one line of text and it controls everything downstream.

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Step 5: Deal With the Mortgage Before You Sign Anything

This section exists because of one persistent, expensive misunderstanding:

If you quitclaim your interest in a house to your ex-spouse, and your name is on the mortgage note, you are still on the mortgage. You have given away the asset and kept the liability — the worst possible combination. If your ex stops paying, the lender comes after you, the foreclosure lands on your credit report, and you no longer own any part of the property you’re being held responsible for.

The only ways off a mortgage note are: the borrower refinances into their own name, the lender approves a formal assumption and release of liability (uncommon, but worth asking), or the loan gets paid off. A divorce judgment ordering your ex to refinance is helpful in family court — but it does not bind the lender, who was not a party to your divorce.

Sequence matters. Where possible, the refinance closes first or simultaneously. Deeding first and trusting a refinance to happen later is how people end up liable for a house they don’t own.

The due-on-sale clause

Nearly every mortgage contains a clause letting the lender demand full payment if the property transfers. In practice lenders rarely accelerate over a family transfer, and the federal Garn-St Germain Act bars enforcement for several common categories — transfers to a spouse or child, transfers on death of a joint tenant, transfers into a revocable trust where the borrower is a beneficiary, and transfers incident to divorce.

Note what’s not on that list: transferring to your LLC, to a sibling, to a friend, or to a non-relative. Those aren’t protected. If you’re transferring rental property into an entity, read your loan documents and consider calling the servicer first. And if there’s a reverse mortgage on the property, get advice before deeding anything — those accelerate on transfer far more aggressively.

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Step 6: Calculate Documentary Stamp Tax — This Is Where the Money Is

Most people assume a “no money changed hands” transfer is tax-free. In Florida, on mortgaged property, that assumption is wrong by four figures.

Fla. Stat. § 201.02 taxes deeds at $0.70 per $100 of consideration (Miami-Dade: $0.60 per $100, plus a $0.45 surtax on non-single-family property). The catch is the statutory definition of consideration: it includes the amount of any mortgage or encumbrance on the property, whether or not the underlying debt is assumed. Not just cash. The loan balance counts.

How it actually computes

• Unencumbered property, nominal consideration — minimum tax, $0.70. Adding an adult child to a paid-off house: seventy cents.
• Mortgaged property, transfer to a non-spouse — tax on the outstanding balance. A $240,000 mortgage means roughly $1,680. This is the surprise that sends people back to their cars.
• Mortgaged property, transfer between spouses — Florida Department of Revenue guidance treats tax as generally due on half the outstanding balance when one spouse adds the other to an encumbered property. On that same $240,000 loan, about $840.
• Marital home transferred incident to divorce — generally exempt under Fla. Stat. § 201.02(7), where the deed is executed within a year of the dissolution judgment and carries out what the judgment requires. This exemption is why timing and wording matter in divorce deeds.
• Transfer into your own revocable trust — generally no tax where beneficial ownership doesn’t change and no consideration moves.

Never leave the consideration line blank. A blank recital invites the Clerk to assess tax on the full assessed value of the property. State it: “$10.00 and other good and valuable consideration,” or the actual figure if money changed hands.

Recording fees (Florida): about $10.00 for the first page and $8.50 for each additional page under Fla. Stat. § 28.24. A two-page quitclaim records for roughly $18.50 plus whatever doc stamp tax applies.

Outside Florida, transfer tax varies enormously — some states charge nothing on family transfers, some charge a percentage of assessed value, and many counties add their own. Check your specific county before you go, not a state-level summary.

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Step 7: Understand the Four Consequences Nobody Warns You About

These arrive long after the deed is recorded, when they can’t be undone. If you read one section of this page carefully, make it this one.

1. You destroy the stepped-up basis

This is the costliest quitclaim mistake in America, and it’s invisible at signing.

When property passes at death, the recipient generally takes a stepped-up basis under 26 U.S.C. § 1014 — the cost basis resets to fair market value as of the date of death. Sell it the next month and capital gains are computed from that value. Often zero tax.

When property is gifted during your lifetime — which is exactly what a quitclaim to your children is — the recipient takes your carryover basis. Your original purchase price, plus improvements.

The arithmetic: you bought the house in 1989 for $60,000. It’s worth $460,000 today. Quitclaim it to your son now and his basis is $60,000; if he sells after your death he faces gain of roughly $400,000 — potentially $60,000 or more in federal capital gains tax, plus whatever the state takes. Let him inherit the same house instead, whether through a Lady Bird deed, a TOD deed, a trust, or even probate, and his basis is $460,000. Sell immediately, owe essentially nothing.

Same house. Same person. Same outcome. One document choice.

2. You may trigger a gift tax return

Transferring property for less than fair value is a gift for federal tax purposes. The 2026 annual exclusion is $19,000 per recipient. Give away an interest worth more than that and you must file IRS Form 709 for the year — even though, with the lifetime exemption at $15 million per individual in 2026, almost nobody actually owes gift tax. The filing obligation is real regardless. It’s a return most people never learn they were supposed to file.

3. You can lose your homestead exemption and Save Our Homes cap

Florida’s Save Our Homes provision caps annual increases in assessed value at 3% for homesteaded property. On a home held twenty years, the gap between assessed and market value can be enormous — and it’s the reason the tax bill is affordable.

A change of ownership can trigger reassessment to full market value, which can multiply the property tax bill overnight. Some transfers are exempt from reassessment, and portability rules may help — but this depends on specifics and on your county property appraiser’s treatment. Call the property appraiser’s office before recording if the property is homesteaded and has been owned a long time. That phone call is free. The reassessment is not.

4. You start the Medicaid five-year lookback

Quitclaiming property to a family member for no consideration is an uncompensated transfer. If you apply for long-term care Medicaid within five years of the transfer, that gift creates a penalty period — months of ineligibility calculated from the value transferred. On a $300,000 house, that can mean well over a year with no coverage, at a point when nursing care is running $10,000 a month.

This is the sharpest contrast with the deeds built for this purpose. A Lady Bird deed or TOD deed transfers nothing during your lifetime and does not start the clock. A quitclaim starts it the day it’s recorded.

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Step 8: Draft the Deed

With the decisions made, the document itself is straightforward. A recordable quitclaim deed contains:

• Title at the top identifying the instrument — “Quitclaim Deed”
• Preparer’s name and address on the face of the document (required in Florida under Fla. Stat. § 695.26)
• Return-to name and address for the recorded original
• Grantor’s full legal name, marital status, and mailing address, matching the vesting deed exactly
• Grantee’s full legal name, mailing address, and vesting language per Step 4
• Consideration recital — never blank
• Operative granting language — the “remise, release, and quitclaim” phrasing that signals no warranties. This wording is what makes it a quitclaim rather than something else; don’t improvise it.
• The complete legal description
• Parcel identification number from the tax roll
• Grantor signature block with printed name beneath
• Two witness signature blocks with printed names beneath (Florida)
• Notary acknowledgment certificate with venue, physical/online presence indication, identification method, seal, and commission expiration
• Adequate margins — counties reserve roughly the top three inches of page one for the recording stamp

If the deed is being recorded pursuant to a divorce, add a recital referencing the case number and the date of the final judgment. That recital is what supports the § 201.02(7) doc stamp exemption when the Clerk reviews it.

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Step 9: Execute It Correctly

Two separate requirements, frequently confused. One makes the deed valid. The other makes it recordable. You need both.

Validity: two subscribing witnesses (Florida)

Fla. Stat. § 689.01 requires the grantor to sign in the presence of two subscribing witnesses, both of whom sign the deed. Print each witness name beneath the signature — clerks reject deeds over this routinely. Witnesses must actually observe the signing; signing a page later, elsewhere, doesn’t satisfy the statute.

Only the grantor signs a quitclaim deed. The grantee is receiving, not promising, so no grantee signature is required — though some situations (assumption language, a court-ordered settlement) call for one anyway.

Witness requirements vary by state. Texas requires no subscribing witnesses on an acknowledged deed. Michigan dropped its witness requirement in 2002. Draft to your state’s rule.

Recordability: notary acknowledgment

Fla. Stat. § 695.03 requires acknowledgment before a notary public or other authorized officer for the deed to be entitled to recording. The notary takes the acknowledgment under Fla. Stat. § 117.05 — verifying identity with government-issued photo ID and completing the certificate fully and correctly.

Florida permits remote online notarization, which works well for out-of-state grantors — but confirm the RON platform handles the two-witness requirement properly. Not all of them do.

Delivery

A deed isn’t effective until it’s delivered to the grantee with intent to transfer. Signing one and putting it in a safe deposit box “in case something happens” doesn’t convey anything — and litigating whether delivery occurred is exactly as unpleasant as it sounds. Recording creates a strong presumption of delivery, which is one more reason to record promptly.

Step 10: Record It

Record in the county where the property is located — not where anyone lives. Most clerks accept walk-in, mail-in, and e-recording. Bring or send:

• The original executed deed
• Recording fees plus documentary stamp or transfer tax
• Any county-required cover sheet or transfer statement
• A self-addressed stamped envelope if recording by mail

Walk-in recording is typically same-day. Take a certified copy, note the instrument number and book/page, and pull the record online a few days later to confirm the scan is complete and legible.

An unrecorded deed may still be valid between grantor and grantee — but it’s invisible to the world, defeated by a later recorded interest under Florida’s recording statute, and useless for proving ownership to an insurer, a lender, or a title company. Record it.

Step 11: Clean Up Afterward

The step everyone forgets. Once recorded:

• Update the homeowner’s insurance policy to name the current owners. An uninsured named party is a claim denial waiting to happen.
• Notify the property appraiser and re-file for homestead exemption if the ownership structure changed and the new owner qualifies.
• Update the mortgage servicer if applicable — and confirm in writing who remains liable.
• Update the title with any HOA or condominium association.
• Give the grantee a copy of the recorded deed and tell them which county it’s recorded in.
• File Form 709 with your tax return if the transfer exceeded the annual exclusion.

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The Eight Errors That Ruin Quitclaim Deeds

1. Using a quitclaim for estate planning. Kills the stepped-up basis, may trigger Form 709, starts the Medicaid lookback, and hands away control today. Use a Lady Bird or TOD deed instead.
2. Assuming the deed removes you from the mortgage. It doesn’t. Ever.
3. Not calculating doc stamps on the mortgage balance. The $1,680 surprise at the recording counter.
4. Truncated legal description. Copied from the tax roll instead of the recorded deed. Records fine, conveys wrong.
5. No survivorship language. Co-grantees default to tenants in common, and one of them can force a partition sale.
6. Name doesn’t match the vesting deed. Creates a chain-of-title gap someone clears later with an affidavit.
7. Improper witnessing. One witness instead of two, or witnesses who didn’t observe the signing.
8. Never recorded, or never delivered. Signed, notarized, and filed in a drawer conveys nothing anyone can rely on.

Notice that six of the eight are process and drafting failures, not questions of legal judgment. Which is exactly why the right template and a checklist solve most of this.

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So — Should You Prepare It Yourself?

For a lot of situations, yes. Adding a spouse to a paid-off home, funding your revocable trust, correcting a misspelled name, recording a deed your divorce judgment already spelled out — these are documents you can absolutely handle. Everything you need is above. There’s no hidden step.

What you’re buying when you hire this out isn’t legal brilliance. It’s the right language in the right order with nothing left out, plus someone who’s already made the phone calls to the Clerk. That’s a template and a process, and both can be handed to you.

The problem with free forms is that quitclaim templates online are generic to the point of being hazardous. They rarely carry proper vesting language. They usually omit the divorce recital that supports the doc stamp exemption. Many were drafted for a different state’s execution requirements. And none of them warn you about the four consequences in Step 7 — which is where the actual money is.

So we built the two things we’d want if we were standing where you are.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Can I prepare a quitclaim deed myself?

Yes. No law requires an attorney to prepare a deed on your own property. For straightforward transfers between people who agree — adding a spouse, funding a trust, correcting a name — a correct template and careful execution do the job. Consult an attorney if the transfer involves a contested divorce, a beneficiary receiving needs-based benefits, Medicaid planning, a partial parcel, business interests, or property whose title history you can’t fully trace.

How much does a quitclaim deed cost?

Attorney preparation typically runs $200 to $500. Our done-for-you preparation is $225. Doing it yourself costs $37 for the course plus recording — roughly $19 in fees, plus documentary stamp tax, which is $0.70 on unencumbered property and can run into four figures on mortgaged property transferred to a non-spouse. Calculate the doc stamps before you assume it’s cheap.

Does a quitclaim deed remove my name from the mortgage?

No. This is the single most costly misunderstanding about quitclaim deeds. A deed conveys title; it has no effect on the promissory note. You get off a mortgage only by refinance, lender-approved assumption with release of liability, or payoff. A divorce judgment ordering your ex to refinance does not bind the lender.

Quitclaim deed vs. warranty deed — which do I need?

If money is changing hands between parties who aren’t family, use a warranty deed — the buyer needs title covenants and insurability. If you’re transferring between people who already know and trust the title situation (spouses, family, your own trust or LLC), a quitclaim is appropriate and cheaper. The question isn’t which is “better,” it’s whether anyone needs a promise about the title.

Should I use a quitclaim deed to leave my house to my kids?

Generally no, and this is worth being emphatic about. A quitclaim transfers ownership immediately — you lose control today, your children’s creditors and divorces can reach the property, you destroy the stepped-up basis (potentially costing tens of thousands in capital gains), you may owe a Form 709 filing, and you start the Medicaid five-year lookback. A Lady Bird deed (Florida, Texas, Michigan, Vermont, West Virginia) or a Transfer on Death deed (most other states) accomplishes the same goal with none of those consequences.

Can a quitclaim deed be reversed?

Not unilaterally. Once delivered and recorded, the transfer is complete. The only ordinary way back is for the grantee to voluntarily deed it back — which means a second transfer, second recording costs, and potentially second doc stamps. Undoing one over the grantee’s objection requires proving fraud, forgery, undue influence, or lack of capacity in court. Treat the deed as permanent when you sign it, because it is.

Do both parties have to sign?

Only the grantor signs a standard quitclaim deed — the grantee is receiving an interest, not promising anything. Florida additionally requires two subscribing witnesses to the grantor’s signature and a notary acknowledgment. Some circumstances call for a grantee signature anyway, such as assumption language or a court-ordered settlement.

Will I owe taxes on a quitclaim deed?

Potentially four different ones. Documentary stamp or transfer tax at recording, calculated on consideration including any mortgage balance. Federal gift tax reporting on Form 709 if the interest transferred exceeds $19,000 in 2026. Capital gains exposure later for the recipient, because of carryover basis. And a possible property tax reassessment if the transfer disturbs a homestead exemption or assessment cap. None of these are automatic — but none are rare either.

Can I quitclaim property with a mortgage on it?

Yes, and it happens constantly. Three things to check first: whether documentary stamp tax will be assessed on the loan balance, whether the transfer falls within a Garn-St Germain protected category so the due-on-sale clause can’t be enforced, and who remains liable on the note afterward (answer: whoever signed it). Reverse mortgages warrant professional advice before any transfer.

Does the course cover states other than Florida?

Yes. The templates cover all deed types in all 50 states, and the training covers the research, vesting, execution, and recording principles that apply everywhere, with state-specific variations called out — witness requirements, transfer tax structures, and recording standards differ substantially.

I’m a notary. Can I use this to offer deed preparation as a service?

That’s a significant part of who this was built for. The UPL lessons matter most for you — the line between preparing a document at a client’s direction and advising them which document they need is the line your business depends on staying behind. Quitclaims are where that line gets tested constantly, because clients ask “should I just quitclaim it to my son?” and the correct answer is never a yes or a no. The fee calculation and recording modules are built for someone doing this repeatedly. Check your own state’s rules on nonlawyer document preparation before advertising the service.

What format are the templates?

Editable DOCX (Word, Google Docs, or Pages) and print-ready PDF. Delivered instantly after checkout with lifetime access.

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