Will.com / Living trust / Massachusetts
MA · Revocable Living Trust
Massachusetts living trust requirements.
Skip probate, keep your estate private, and stay in control while you're alive. Document generation isn’t currently available in Massachusetts while we review its rules for online legal document services. The signing requirements below still apply.
Requirements at a glance
Signing a Massachusetts living trust
No formal execution requirements beyond settlor signature; notarization strongly recommended when funding real property
Proving your Massachusetts trust without handing it over
When a bank, brokerage, title company, insurer, or transfer agent asks to see your trust, Massachusetts law lets your trustee give them a short certification of trust instead (M.G.L. c. 203E §1013). It states that the trust exists, who the trustee is, and what the trustee may do. It leaves out who inherits and what each person receives, so your beneficiaries stay private.
Tenancy by the entirety
Massachusetts recognizes tenancy by the entirety. It's a form of co-ownership available only to married couples. Neither spouse can convey or encumber the property acting alone, and at the first death it passes to the surviving spouse by survivorship, outside probate. Under Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 209, §1, property held that way is also beyond the reach of a creditor of one spouse alone while both spouses are living. When you transfer such property into a revocable trust, you may lose whatever entireties protection it carries unless your trust is drafted to preserve it.
Funding Massachusetts real estate into the trust
To transfer Massachusetts real estate into your trust, you sign a new deed conveying the property from yourself to yourself as trustee, then record the deed with the Registry of Deeds for the county or district where the property is located (several Massachusetts counties are split into registry districts, and the deed must go to the district that covers the land). The trust does not control real estate unless the deed transfer is recorded.
Document generation isn’t currently available in Massachusetts.