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Adding Your Spouse to a Georgia House Deed

Adding your spouse to a Georgia house deed usually means a quitclaim deed naming you both as joint tenants with survivorship. Georgia accepts any of four survivorship phrasings, and using one keeps the house out of probate at the first death. Recording costs a flat $25.00 statewide, and a gift deed owes no transfer tax.

By Melissa Breyer, Esq. 15 min read

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That deed does more than add a name. It hands your spouse a real share of the house the day it is signed. You sign it in front of a notary and one other witness. You file a PT-61 form online. Then you record it with the clerk of superior court in the county where the house sits. Recording costs a flat $25.00, and because you are giving your spouse an interest instead of selling it, no Georgia transfer tax is owed.

Georgia law reads a deed with two names on it as tenants in common unless the deed says otherwise in plain terms. Tenants in common means each of you owns half. When you die, your half goes through probate instead of passing to your spouse. That is the opposite of what most couples think they are signing. Most people asking this question are not trying to do anything clever. They just want the house to go to their spouse without a fight, and they want to know whether signing one piece of paper does that.

One more thing changed recently. Since January 1, 2025, a Georgia homeowner who files a deed without an attorney or a title agent has to file it electronically. Walking a deed to the counter is no longer an option for most people doing this themselves.

There is more to this than signing a form. Three ways exist to do it in Georgia, and the state accepts only certain survivorship wording. The costs are flat and small. Your mortgage and your homestead exemption both survive it. Medicaid and creditors are the two places it can bite. And for some families, a trust is simply the better tool.

What Actually Changes When You Add Your Spouse

Adding your spouse to the deed gives them a real ownership interest in the house. It is not a formality and it is not a beneficiary designation. It is a completed gift the day the deed is delivered.

You cannot undo it on your own. Once your spouse is an owner, taking them back off requires their signature on a new deed. If they will not sign, you are looking at a court fight, not a paperwork fix.

With survivorship wording, the house skips probate at the first death. The surviving spouse records a death certificate and an affidavit, and the house is theirs. Without that wording, your half of the house goes through probate like any other asset you owned alone.

It does not change your mortgage. Your spouse becomes an owner of the property. They do not become a borrower on the loan. If you stop paying, the lender still comes after you and still forecloses on the house. Your spouse gets the ownership without the debt obligation, which sounds good until you realize it also means they cannot refinance the loan alone.

It does not change who is responsible for the property taxes or the insurance. Those follow the property. Both owners are now exposed to a lien if they go unpaid.

If you want the full picture of how survivorship ownership behaves in Georgia, our guide to joint tenants with right of survivorship in Georgia walks through it in detail. Our Georgia estate planning guide covers where a deed fits against the rest of a plan.

Three Ways to Add a Spouse in Georgia

There are three realistic paths. They differ in what you promise your spouse about the title, and in how much control you keep.

1. A quitclaim deed. This is the one most Georgia couples use. It transfers whatever interest you have in the house, with no promises about the title behind it. It is short, cheap, and fast. The catch is that it makes no warranty at all. If an old lien or a boundary problem surfaces later, your spouse has no claim against you for it. Between spouses that usually does not matter, because you are both living in the same house with the same problem.

2. A limited warranty deed. This transfers your interest and promises that you personally did not create any title problems while you owned it. It says nothing about what happened before you bought the place. It costs the same to record and takes the same steps. It is worth using when the house was bought recently, when there was a divorce or an estate in the chain of title, or when your spouse is contributing money toward the equity and wants some protection.

3. A deed into a joint revocable living trust. Instead of putting your spouse’s name next to yours on the deed, you both put the house into a trust you control together. The trust owns the house. You are both trustees and both beneficiaries while you are alive. This takes more setup than a quitclaim deed, but it is the only one of the three that also handles what happens if one of you becomes incapacitated, and the only one that lets you say what happens to the house after the second death. See how to put a house in a trust in Georgia for the mechanics.

A general warranty deed is a fourth option on paper, but it is rare between spouses. It makes you personally liable for title defects going all the way back, which is a promise almost nobody wants to make for free.

The Survivorship Wording Georgia Accepts

This is the part that goes wrong most often, and it is the reason a do-it-yourself deed can quietly fail.

Under O.C.G.A. § 44-6-190(a)(2), a Georgia deed naming two or more people creates interests in common without survivorship unless the deed expressly refers to the owners in one of four ways:

  • “joint tenants”
  • “joint tenants and not as tenants in common”
  • “joint tenants with survivorship”
  • taking “jointly with survivorship”

All four work. You do not need one exact magic phrase. The bare words “joint tenants” are enough on their own. A lot of writing on this topic insists the deed must say “joint tenants with right of survivorship” in exactly those words. That is not what the statute says.

Georgia also accepts wording that is essentially the same. Subsection (a)(3) of the same statute covers a deed using “language essentially the same as one of these forms of expression.” That is a safety net, not a plan. Relying on a judge later agreeing your phrasing was close enough is a bad way to protect your house.

If none of that language is in the deed, you and your spouse own the house as tenants in common. Each of you owns an undivided half. When one of you dies, that half passes under the will, or under Georgia’s intestacy rules if there is no will, and it goes through probate to get there. Survivorship ownership is also not permanent on its own. Either owner can sever it during life by recording a transfer of their interest. Our article on the problems with joint tenancy in Georgia covers where that leads, and how to remove someone from a joint tenancy deed covers the mechanics of undoing it.

What It Costs in Georgia

Recording the deed costs a flat $25.00 under O.C.G.A. § 15-6-77(f)(1)(A)(i). That is a statewide statutory fee, the same in Fulton, DeKalb, Cobb, Gwinnett and every other Georgia county. It is not a per page charge and it is not set by your county. A one page deed and a twelve page deed both cost $25.00 to record.

Georgia transfer tax on adding a spouse as a gift is $0. O.C.G.A. § 48-6-2(a)(2) exempts a deed of gift from Georgia’s real estate transfer tax, and a deed of gift is what this is when no money changes hands. You still file the PT-61 form. You just report no consideration, and no tax comes due.

Federal gift tax is $0 too, if your spouse is a U.S. citizen. 26 U.S.C. § 2523(a) allows an unlimited marital deduction for a transfer to a citizen spouse. No gift tax return, and no gift tax.

If your spouse is not a U.S. citizen, that rule does not apply. A capped annual exclusion is used instead. Under 26 U.S.C. § 2523(i) that cap is $194,000 for 2026. Gifts over that amount in one year start eating into your lifetime exemption and require a gift tax return. Putting half a Georgia house into a non-citizen spouse’s name can pass $194,000 easily, so that situation needs its own review before anything is signed.

Our flat fee to handle it is $550. That covers pulling and reading your current deed, confirming the legal description, drafting the new deed with the right survivorship language, walking you through signing and witnessing, filing the PT-61, and recording it electronically. One price, not an hourly rate.

Our full estate planning pricing works the same way across every service. Flat fees, not hourly.

A blank form off the internet is cheaper. What it does not do is check whether your current deed already says something that conflicts, whether the legal description matches what the county has on file, or whether adding your spouse is even the right move for your situation.

The Numbers That Decide This Deed
$25
Flat Recording Fee
No surprise bill at the counter, and no county charges you more because your deed runs longer.
4
Accepted Survivorship Phrasings
Use none of them and the deed splits your house in half instead of passing it to your spouse.
$550
Flat Attorney Fee
You know the full cost before anything is drafted, and no hourly meter runs.

Check These Six Things Before You Sign

Most of the trouble with adding a spouse to a deed shows up years later. These are the six things worth working through first.

1. Your Lender Cannot Call the Loan Due

Federal law blocks a lender from enforcing a due-on-sale clause when a borrower’s spouse becomes an owner of the property. That is 12 U.S.C. § 1701j-3(d)(6), part of the Garn-St Germain Act. You do not need your lender’s permission and you are not hiding anything by not asking.

The protection has a size limit. It applies to a loan secured by residential real property containing less than five dwelling units. A single family home, a duplex, a triplex and a fourplex are covered. A five unit building is not. If the property is a larger multifamily building, read your loan documents before you do anything.

2. Your Homestead Exemption Survives

Adding a spouse who also lives in the home does not cost you the homestead exemption. O.C.G.A. § 48-5-40(3)(H) lets joint owners claim the homestead exemption in all their names. They just have to all live in the home, and the property has to qualify otherwise. Both spouses can be named on it.

What can go wrong is administrative, not legal. Some county tax offices want a fresh homestead application after the ownership changes. Call your county tax commissioner’s office after the deed records and confirm the exemption carried over.

3. Medicaid Treats a Spouse Differently Than Anyone Else

Transferring a home to your spouse is exempt from Medicaid’s five year look back. 42 U.S.C. § 1396p(c)(2)(A)(i) lists a transfer of the home to the individual’s spouse as an exception to the transfer penalty. So adding your spouse does not create a penalty period the way adding an adult child would.

Estate recovery after death is a separate question, and the answer is less comfortable. Ga. Comp. R. & Regs. r. 111-3-8-.02(7) defines Georgia’s recoverable estate to include property passing by joint tenancy and right of survivorship. Do not assume survivorship ownership puts the house out of the state’s reach. If long term care is anywhere on the horizon, this needs a real conversation before the deed is signed, not after.

4. Your Spouse’s Creditors Get a Target

Once your spouse owns half the house, their creditors can reach that half. A judgment against your spouse becomes a lien on their interest in the property. Georgia does not have tenancy by the entirety, which is the ownership form some other states use to shield a marital home from one spouse’s individual creditors. Georgia has joint tenancy with survivorship, and that is not the same protection.

This matters most if your spouse owns a business, works in a field with real liability exposure, or has debt you have not fully untangled.

5. Only Half the House Gets a Basis Step-Up

This one is easy to miss and it can cost real money on a later sale.

When spouses own a home as joint tenants with survivorship, only half of it is included in the first spouse’s estate at death. 26 U.S.C. § 2040(b) treats a home held by a married couple as joint tenants with survivorship as a qualified joint interest, and includes one half of its value in the deceased spouse’s estate. That rule holds only where the two spouses are the only joint tenants, so adding a child to the deed as well takes the house out of it. Only that half gets its cost basis reset to the value at the date of death. The surviving spouse keeps their original, lower basis on the other half.

If the house had stayed in one spouse’s name and passed to the survivor at death, the whole thing would have stepped up. On a house that has appreciated a lot, that difference can mean a much larger capital gains bill when the survivor sells. It is not a reason to never add a spouse. It is a reason to run the numbers on a long held, highly appreciated home before you do.

One thing adding your spouse does not change is the capital gains exclusion when you sell while you are both alive. A married couple filing a joint return can exclude up to $500,000 of gain on the sale of a main home. Only one spouse has to meet the two-year ownership test. Both of you have to meet the two-year use test, which just means you each lived there for periods adding up to two years out of the last five.

So a spouse who is not on the deed does not cost you the $500,000 exclusion, and adding them to the deed does not unlock it. Ownership was never the part that gated it. Two limits go with that: the $500,000 figure depends on filing jointly for the year you sell, and neither of you can have used this exclusion on another home sale in the previous two years.

6. Divorce Does Not Automatically Undo It

A Georgia divorce decree does not by itself convert survivorship ownership back into separate halves. Under O.C.G.A. § 44-6-190(a)(4), either former spouse can record an affidavit in the county’s real property records that converts the joint tenancy into a tenancy in common, without the other person’s cooperation. That affidavit has four required elements, and it is only available if the divorce or annulment order did not already dispose of the property some other way.

There is a bigger divorce question than how to undo the deed. A house you brought into the marriage starts out as your separate property, and Georgia courts do not divide separate property in a divorce. Signing your spouse onto the deed as a gift can change what the house is.

In Lerch v. Lerch, 278 Ga. 885 (2005), a husband recorded a gift deed putting his premarital home into both names. The Georgia Supreme Court held he had shown an intent to turn his own separate property into marital property, and that the entire home, not half of it, had to be treated as marital. The couple’s prenuptial agreement did not save it, because that agreement only covered the husband’s property and the house was no longer his alone.

This is not automatic. The rule turns on what the deed shows you intended, and a court can weigh evidence pointing the other way. But Georgia divides marital property equitably rather than equally, so once a house is marital, what happens to it is up to the judge. Of everything a deed change sets in motion, this is the hardest to walk back.

One more thing worth knowing even if you never change the deed. Any rise in the home’s value that came from either spouse’s own work on it can already be divided in a divorce. Only the part of the increase that came from the market alone stays separate.

The affidavit has to do four things. It has to state that the parties are lawfully divorced or the marriage was annulled. It has to state that the party intends to end the joint tenancy. It has to identify the book and page where the original deed was recorded. And it has to attach a copy of the final order plus a legal description of the property. Miss one and the filing gets rejected.

When a Trust Beats a Deed Change

Adding a spouse to a deed solves exactly one problem well. It gets the house to your spouse without probate when you die first. There are several common situations where it is the wrong tool.

You have children from a previous marriage. Survivorship ownership hands the entire house to your surviving spouse outright. After that, it is theirs. They can sell it, remortgage it, or leave it to their own children in a new will, and your children have no claim. A trust lets your spouse live in the house for life while still directing where it goes afterward.

One of you may face incapacity. A deed does nothing if an owner develops dementia. If the house needs to be sold or refinanced and one owner cannot sign, the other one is headed to probate court for a conservatorship. A revocable trust names a successor trustee who can act without a court.

You are worried about the second death, not the first. Survivorship only covers the first death. When the surviving spouse dies still owning the house alone, it goes through probate then. The deed change delayed probate. It did not remove it.

You want any conditions at all. A deed cannot say “the house goes to my spouse, but if they remarry, it passes to my children.” A deed transfers ownership and stops. A trust is where conditions live.

Our revocable living trust page covers what one includes and what it costs, and our guide to how a revocable living trust works in Georgia covers the mechanics. If the goal is only to skip probate on the house and nothing else, a Georgia transfer on death deed is worth comparing too, because it keeps full control in your hands during your lifetime instead of giving your spouse ownership today.

How the Deed Gets Recorded in Georgia

Draft and Sign the Deed

Pull your current recorded deed and copy the legal description from it word for word. Draft the new deed naming you and your spouse, and include one of Georgia's four accepted survivorship phrasings. Then sign it in front of two people: a notary public and one other witness. Georgia requires both. A deed signed in front of the notary alone can be rejected.

File the PT-61 Form Online

Georgia's real estate transfer tax form, the PT-61, is completed on the Georgia Superior Court Clerks' Cooperative Authority website before the deed is recorded. Report the transfer as a gift with no consideration, which is what makes the transfer tax $0. Print the reference copy that the site generates. It gets filed together with the deed.

Record It Electronically

Record the signed deed and the PT-61 with the clerk of superior court in the county where the house sits, and pay the flat $25.00 recording fee. Since January 1, 2025, a homeowner recording their own deed is a self-filer under O.C.G.A. § 44-2-2(a) and must submit it through electronic filing. O.C.G.A. § 45-17-8(g) also now requires your notary to keep a journal entry for the notarization, including your photo ID details.

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Melissa Breyer

Melissa Breyer

Georgia Estate Planning Attorney

Licensed by the State Bar of Georgia, Bar No. 897967

Melissa Breyer is a Georgia-licensed estate planning attorney focused exclusively on trust-based planning for individuals and families. She personally meets with every client and designs every plan from scratch. No templates. No associates handling your case. Every plan is built for your specific family, your specific assets, and your specific wishes.

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Frequently Asked Questions

A quitclaim deed naming both spouses as joint tenants with survivorship is the most common way to add a spouse to a Georgia house deed. It transfers an ownership interest to the spouse and, when the deed uses one of the four survivorship phrasings O.C.G.A. § 44-6-190(a)(2) accepts, lets the house pass to the survivor without probate at the first death. Recording it costs a flat $25.00 statewide under O.C.G.A. § 15-6-77(f)(1)(A)(i) and adding a spouse as a gift owes no Georgia transfer tax.

Adding a spouse to a Georgia deed does not add them to the mortgage. Ownership of the property and responsibility for the loan are separate. The original borrower remains solely liable for the debt, and the lender can still foreclose on the house if payments stop. A spouse who is on the deed but not on the note also cannot refinance the loan by themselves.

A lender cannot enforce a due-on-sale clause when a borrower’s spouse becomes an owner of the property. Federal law, 12 U.S.C. § 1701j-3(d)(6), blocks it. The protection applies to loans secured by residential real property containing less than five dwelling units, so a single family home, duplex, triplex or fourplex is covered and a larger multifamily building is not.

Georgia accepts four phrasings for survivorship on a deed: “joint tenants,” “joint tenants and not as tenants in common,” “joint tenants with survivorship,” or taking “jointly with survivorship.” Any one of the four is enough, and the statute also accepts language essentially the same as one of those forms. There is no single required magic phrase, and the bare words “joint tenants” work on their own.

A Georgia deed naming two people with no survivorship language creates a tenancy in common. Each owner holds an undivided half interest. When one owner dies, that half passes under their will, or under Georgia’s intestacy rules if there is no will, and it has to go through probate to get there. The surviving co-owner does not receive it automatically.

Adding a spouse to a Georgia deed with no money changing hands owes no Georgia real estate transfer tax, because O.C.G.A. § 48-6-2(a)(2) exempts a deed of gift. The PT-61 transfer tax form is still filed, reporting no consideration. Federal gift tax is also $0 for a transfer to a U.S. citizen spouse under the unlimited marital deduction. A spouse who is not a U.S. citizen falls under different rules and should get specific advice first.

A Georgia homeowner recording their own deed has had to file it electronically since January 1, 2025. State law defines a “self-filer” as a party to the instrument who is not one of eight kinds of professional, including an attorney, a title insurance agent, a licensed real estate professional, a bank, mortgage or loan-servicing agent, a public official, or a licensed land surveyor. A married couple recording a deed between themselves fits that definition, so paper filing at the counter is no longer available to them.

Adding a spouse who also occupies the home does not forfeit the Georgia homestead exemption. O.C.G.A. § 48-5-40(3)(H) lets joint owners claim the homestead exemption in all their names. They just have to all live in the home, and the property has to qualify otherwise. Some county tax offices still want a new homestead application after the ownership changes, so confirm with the county tax commissioner once the deed records.

Holding a home as joint tenants with survivorship means only half of it gets a basis step-up when the first spouse dies. 26 U.S.C. § 2040(b) counts a married couple’s survivorship home as a qualified joint interest, so long as the two spouses are the only joint tenants. That means half its value goes into the estate of the spouse who dies first. Only that half gets revalued at the date of death. The survivor keeps their original basis on the other half, which can mean a larger capital gains bill on a long held, highly appreciated home than if the house had passed entirely at death.

A house deeded into joint names during a marriage can become marital property in Georgia, and that is one of the biggest risks of the change. In Lerch v. Lerch, 278 Ga. 885 (2005), a husband recorded a gift deed putting his premarital home into both names, and the Georgia Supreme Court held the entire home had to be treated as marital property because the deed showed an intent to transform it. The couple’s prenuptial agreement did not protect it, since that agreement covered only the husband’s own property. The result is not automatic, because the rule turns on intent, but Georgia divides marital property equitably rather than in half, so a judge decides what happens to it.

A married couple filing a joint return can exclude up to $500,000 of gain on the sale of a main home even when only one spouse is on the deed. IRC § 121 requires only one spouse to meet the two-year ownership test, while both spouses must meet the two-year use test by living in the home. Adding a spouse to the deed neither creates nor protects that exclusion, because ownership was never the part that gated it. The $500,000 figure does depend on filing jointly for the year of the sale, and it is unavailable if either spouse used the exclusion on another home sale in the previous two years.

Adding a spouse to a Georgia deed does not protect the house from Medicaid estate recovery. Transferring a home to a spouse is exempt from the five year look-back under 42 U.S.C. § 1396p(c)(2)(A)(i), so it creates no penalty period during life. But Georgia elected the expanded estate definition, and Ga. Comp. R. & Regs. r. 111-3-8-.02(7) includes property passing by joint tenancy and right of survivorship in the recoverable estate. Survivorship ownership is not a shield from the state’s claim after death.

A spouse who is added to a Georgia deed brings their creditors with them. A judgment against that spouse can attach as a lien to their interest in the property. Georgia does not recognize tenancy by the entirety, which is the ownership form some other states use to shield a marital home from one spouse’s individual creditors, so joint tenancy with survivorship does not provide that protection here.

Three things set the timeline on a Georgia spousal deed transfer. The first is how fast the current recorded deed and its legal description can be pulled from the county. The second is getting one signing appointment on the calendar with a notary and one other witness, since Georgia requires both. The third is how quickly your county posts an electronically recorded deed, which varies from county to county. The PT-61 form itself is completed online the same day and adds nothing to the wait.

An owner’s title insurance policy usually continues after a transfer between spouses rather than ending, because the policy covers the people named as insured on it. Because a quitclaim deed makes no warranties at all, insurers can handle the change differently from one another, so one call to the company that issued your policy, before the new deed is recorded, settles it for your policy specifically. If you refinance later, the lender will require a new lender’s policy either way.

Removing a spouse from a Georgia deed requires that spouse to sign a new deed transferring their interest back. The original owner cannot reverse the transfer alone, because adding a spouse is a completed gift once the deed is delivered. After a divorce or annulment, Georgia does allow either former spouse to record an affidavit converting survivorship ownership into a tenancy in common without the other’s cooperation, but that changes how the interests are held, not who owns them.

A deed change is the simpler tool when the only goal is getting the house to a spouse without probate at the first death. A revocable living trust is the better fit when there are children from a previous marriage, when incapacity is a real concern, or when the house should pass a particular way after the second death. A deed transfers ownership and stops there, while a trust can carry conditions and name someone to act if an owner cannot.

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