Living will requirements in Florida

Which document is this, really

Florida asks you to think in terms of two documents, not one. The first is the Living Will, sometimes called a declaration, which sets out the medical treatment you do and do not want if you are ever unable to speak for yourself. The second is the Designation of Health Care Surrogate, which names the person who can make health care decisions on your behalf. Both live inside the same chapter of Florida law, the Health Care Advance Directives chapter, but they are separate instruments with their own execution rules and their own optional forms.

The two are not interchangeable, and neither one substitutes for the other. Florida’s statute for each document says the printed form it provides “may, but need not be” used, so you are free to word either document your own way as long as you meet the signing requirements below. Naming a decision-maker inside the Living Will itself is not how Florida structures the choice; the Designation of Health Care Surrogate is the dedicated document for that.

This is exactly the pairing Myend’s Healthcare Directive prepares for Florida: a Living Will for your treatment wishes, and a Designation of Health Care Surrogate for the person you trust to carry them out.

Who can make a Florida advance directive

Florida asks that you be a competent adult, which its age-of-majority statute sets at 18. Chapter 765 itself does not print a number; it defines the person making either document, the principal, only as “a competent adult.” Competence here is a practical standard, not a diagnosis you need in hand before you sign: you understand what each document says, what it does, and what it means to name someone else to decide for you, at the moment you sign it.

Signing it so it counts

Florida runs two signing ceremonies, one for each document, and the rules do not carry across between them. Read each one on its own.

The Living Will

1. 1You sign

   You sign the Living Will, or ask someone to sign it in your presence and at your direction if you are physically unable to sign it yourself.

2. 2Two witnesses sign

   You sign in the presence of two subscribing witnesses. Florida asks only that one of the two is neither your spouse nor a blood relative; the other can be almost anyone, including your physician or a member of the treating facility’s staff. The Living Will section, unlike the surrogate section, does not spell out that the witnesses have to be adults, so two adults remain the safer choice.

3. 3No notary

   Florida does not mention a notary anywhere in this section. Two witnesses make the Living Will valid on their own.

The Designation of Health Care Surrogate

Naming your surrogate, the person Florida law lets you appoint to make health care decisions on your behalf, is a separate signing, on its own paper, and Florida asks for the same basic shape, here spelled out as two subscribing adult witnesses, and no notary. The statute adds one more rule that applies only here: the person you are naming as surrogate cannot also serve as one of your two witnesses to that same document. As with the Living Will, one of the two witnesses must be neither your spouse nor a blood relative.

Florida also allows either document to be signed through its Remote Online Notarization platform, with your witnesses appearing by video rather than in the room. If fewer than two witnesses are physically present with you when you sign, the platform has to ask screening questions and give you a notice about vulnerable adults, and the remote session does not count if you are, in fact, a vulnerable adult under Florida law. For most people, signing both documents the ordinary way, in person with two witnesses, stays the simpler path.

Naming your surrogate

The Designation of Health Care Surrogate is where you name your surrogate, and Florida law opens that role to any competent adult. Chapter 765 does not disqualify a treating physician, a facility employee, or any other class of person from serving as your surrogate, unlike most states. The only restriction that attaches to the surrogate is the one already mentioned: the person you name cannot also witness the document that names them.

When it takes effect

The two documents switch on separately. Your surrogate’s authority begins once your attending physician determines, and documents in your medical record, that you lack the capacity to make your own health care decisions.

Your Living Will’s instructions about life-prolonging procedures take a further step: your primary physician and at least one other consulting physician must each separately examine you and document, in your medical record, whether you have a terminal condition, an end-stage condition, or are in a persistent vegetative state, before life-prolonging procedures can be withheld or withdrawn under it.

If you are pregnant

Florida’s pregnancy rule is a limit on what your surrogate can decide, not a rule that suspends your own Living Will. If you are pregnant, your surrogate cannot consent to withholding or withdrawing life-prolonging procedures from you before the pregnancy reaches viability, unless you have expressly given your surrogate that specific authority in writing, or a court approves it.

Viability here borrows its meaning from Florida’s abortion statute. Once the pregnancy has passed that point, or once you have put the authority in writing yourself, this restriction no longer stands between your surrogate and your own instructions.

Changing or cancelling it

You can amend or revoke your advance directive at any time, as long as you are still a competent principal, in any of four ways: a signed and dated writing, physically cancelling or destroying the document, telling someone out loud that you revoke it, or signing a new advance directive that is materially different and dated later than the old one.

A revocation takes effect once you have told your surrogate, your physician, or your facility about it; nobody who did not actually know about the change is held responsible for having missed it. That makes telling people the whole point: a signed revocation sitting in a drawer at home protects nobody until your surrogate and your physician actually hear about it. One more automatic rule applies to the Designation of Health Care Surrogate specifically: if your surrogate was your spouse, a divorce or annulment ends their authority on its own, unless your document says otherwise.

Making sure it is found

Florida does not appear to run a state registry for either document. The safeguard that does not depend on a state system is copies: give one of each document to your surrogate, your physician, and the hospital you are most likely to use, and keep the signed originals where your family knows to look.

If you signed your advance directive in another state, Florida law says it is validly executed here as long as it complied with the law of the state where you signed it, or with Florida’s own law.

A document nobody can find works the same as no document at all. The most common failure is not a missing signature, it is paperwork sitting at home while the decision is being made at the hospital. Naming your surrogate and then telling them plainly where both documents live closes most of that gap without any state registry to lean on.

This is not a POLST

Florida’s medical order program is generally known as Florida POLST, for Physician Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment. It is a different kind of document from either the Living Will or the Designation of Health Care Surrogate. A POLST is a set of specific medical orders, signed by a clinician together with someone already facing serious illness, meant to travel with that person between hospital, nursing facility, home and ambulance. Myend prepares the Living Will and the Designation of Health Care Surrogate. It does not, and cannot, produce a POLST, because that has to come from a treating clinician.

What is different about Florida

Florida hands you two documents, then asks the same simple thing of each: two witnesses, no notary, and almost no restriction on who either witness can be.

Florida is a two-document state through and through, and it does not split the signing rules between them. Both the Living Will and the Designation of Health Care Surrogate ask for the same two witnesses and skip the notary entirely, which is an unusually consistent pairing for a state that keeps its documents separate. Several states that keep two documents give them different rules: Missouri wants witnesses on one and a notary on the other, and North Carolina wants two witnesses and a notary on both.

What sets Florida apart further is how little either witness rule restricts. Most states keep the treating physician and facility staff off the witness list. Florida’s chapter never does, for either document; the only outside limits are that one witness cannot be your spouse or blood relative, and the surrogate cannot witness their own designation. Florida also opens the surrogate role itself to any competent adult, with no bar on a physician or facility employee serving in that role either.

Florida also lets either document be signed with your witnesses appearing by video through its Remote Online Notarization platform, under heightened safeguards when fewer than two witnesses are physically present: screening questions, a notice about vulnerable adults, and no remote session at all if you actually are one.

None of this makes Florida a difficult state to plan in. It is a state that keeps two documents apart, asks the same modest formality of both, and leaves the rest to your own judgment about who you trust.

Common questions

Sources and review