Florida Statute 732.111
“Dower and curtesy abolished”
What it means
Four words of operative text: "Dower and curtesy are abolished." The centuries-old automatic estates — a widow's life interest in a third of her husband's land, and the widower's counterpart — do not exist in Florida.
What replaced them is a package elsewhere in the code: the elective share (30 percent of a broadly defined elective estate), homestead rights, exempt property, and family allowance. A surviving spouse in Florida is protected by those statutes, not by any automatic common-law fraction.
- Dower and curtesy are abolished — that is the section's entire operative text.
- No Florida spouse takes an automatic common-law share of the other's property at death.
- The modern substitutes: the elective share (§§732.201–732.2135), homestead (§732.401), and exempt property (§732.402).
- On the books since the mid-1970s probate code; old dower releases survive only in historical title chains.
How it plays out
This section matters mostly for what people arrive believing. Older clients — and heirs from states or countries that kept versions of dower — sometimes assume a widow automatically owns a third of everything. In Florida she doesn't; she has the elective share, homestead, and exempt property instead, each with its own filing and deadline. The other place it surfaces is old title work: pre-1976 deeds were drafted around dower, and those releases still puzzle people reading a chain of title today.
Questions people ask
