How to Remove Someone From a Joint Tenancy Deed in Georgia

The Short Answer on a Georgia Joint Tenancy Deed

Joint tenancy with right of survivorship means two or more people own the whole property at once. When one owner dies, the property goes straight to the owners who are left. No probate. No court. No waiting.

Georgia gives every owner named on that deed a real ownership interest. Nothing in Georgia law lets one owner cancel another owner’s interest. There is no form at the courthouse that erases a name. Paying the mortgage does not do it. Paying for the house in the first place does not do it. Neither does the other person moving out five years ago.

While both owners are alive, only two things take a name off the deed. The owner signs a new deed giving up their share. Or a court ends the co-ownership after the joint tenancy has been broken apart first. Everything else you may have read about changes what the ownership means. It does not change whose name is printed on the record.

That difference matters more than anything else about removing a name. Ending survivorship and removing a name are two different results. People mix them up all the time. For how this kind of deed works in the first place, read about joint tenants with right of survivorship in Georgia.

Which of the Four Situations Are You In?

Start here before you pay anyone to draft anything. The right document depends on which situation describes you. The table maps all four.

Three of these four routes need nothing from the other person. None of those three gets you what most people picture, though. Most people picture one name on the deed and full control of the house.

Situation 1: The Other Owner Agrees to Sign

This is the clean path. It is the only one that gives most people exactly what they want. The owner coming off signs a brand new deed. That deed hands their share to whoever is staying on. The old deed is never edited or cancelled. A new deed replaces it in the county’s chain of title.

Everyone named on the current deed has to sign the new one. If three people are on the deed and only two sign, the third person still owns their share.

This is the same mechanic that created the joint tenancy in the first place. A new deed is also what it takes to go the other direction and add a spouse to a Georgia house deed.

Georgia will not let the clerk record your deed until a PT-61 goes in with it. The PT-61 is the state’s real estate transfer tax declaration. O.C.G.A. 48-6-4 says the transfer tax has to be paid, and the actual consideration has to be shown on a form the state revenue commissioner prescribes and the clerk of superior court provides, before a deed can be filed for record. Georgia runs that form through the state’s GSCCCA website, where you fill it in online and print it to hand in with the deed.

Filing the form and owing tax are two different things. The tax under O.C.G.A. 48-6-1 is $1.00 on the first $1,000 of value, then 10 cents on each additional $100, and it only starts once value passes $100. The statute also measures value without counting a lien that was already on the property and is not removed by the sale. A mortgage nobody is paying off does not get counted. Georgia also exempts any deed of gift from the transfer tax outright, under O.C.G.A. 48-6-2(a)(2). So a co-owner who signs their share over for nothing usually owes no transfer tax at all, and still has to file the form. In our experience, leaving it out is one of the more common reasons a Georgia clerk hands a deed back.

Atlanta Estate Planning drafts and records a deed for a flat $550 per deed. That covers reading the current deed, matching the legal description, preparing the new one, handling the PT-61, and filing it with the right county. The county’s own $25.00 fee is separate.

Two things control how long this takes, and neither one is the drafting. Getting every owner in the same room to sign in front of two witnesses is usually the long part, especially when someone lives out of state. After that, the county clerk’s recording queue decides when the change actually shows up in the public record, and that moves at a different speed in Fulton than it does in a small rural county. Nothing is final until the clerk records it. Do not schedule a closing, a refinance, or a title order around the day the deed gets signed.

The Costs a New Deed Creates That Nobody Warns You About

The filing fee is the small part. Handing someone a share of real estate sets off four other things that cost real money later. Check each one before the deed is signed, not after it is recorded.

The IRS may treat the transfer as a gift. An owner who signs their share over and gets nothing back has made a gift. In 2026 you can give any one person up to $19,000 without filing anything. Over that amount, the person giving the share away files IRS Form 709. The person getting it does not. Actual tax is rarely owed. The amount over the yearly limit just counts against a much larger lifetime exemption. The return still has to be filed.

A share given away during life keeps the old cost basis. Federal law at 26 U.S.C. 1015(a) says the person getting a gifted share takes the giver’s original purchase price as their basis. They do not get today’s value. If they sell later, they pay capital gains tax on everything the property gained since the first purchase. Inheriting the same share after a death works the other way. The value resets at death. In metro Atlanta, where a house bought in the 1990s has multiplied in value, that gap can run into tens of thousands of dollars. It is the same trap covered in problems with joint tenancy in Georgia.

Your homestead exemption can be affected by who is listed on the deed. Georgia’s rule at O.C.G.A. 48-5-40(3)(H) lets joint owners who all live in the home claim the exemption together. The exemption follows people who both own and live in the home, so a person who comes off the deed can lose their claim to it. Counties handle the paperwork differently. Call your county tax commissioner before you record, and plan to re-file the exemption for the new owners.

A new deed can leave your title insurance behind. Many owner policies protect only the people named on the deed when the policy was written. Change the names and the new group may not be covered. Ask your title company whether you need a new policy or an endorsement. Ask before the deed is recorded, not after a claim.

One more warning catches people every time. Signing a deed does not remove anyone from the mortgage. The loan and the title are two separate documents. If both names are on the loan, the person who came off the deed still owes money on a house they no longer own until the loan itself changes.

There is more than one way to actually get off a loan, and only one of them is common. A refinance in the remaining owner’s name alone is what most lenders will do. Some loans can instead be assumed, where the remaining owner takes over the existing loan and its rate, but the lender has to approve it and has to sign a written release of liability for the person leaving. A few lenders handle it as a loan modification. None of the three happens on its own because a deed got recorded. Ask the lender in writing which one is available before anyone signs.

Situation 2: The Other Owner Will Not Sign

This is where most people land after the friendly talk fails. Georgia does have a route here, but it runs in two steps and most articles skip the first one. Skipping it is why people file a case that gets thrown out.

Step one is to sever your own share, and you can do it alone. O.C.G.A. 44-6-190, subsection (a)(3), lets a joint tenant end the survivorship on their own interest by recording a document that transfers all or part of it during their lifetime. In plain terms, you record a deed moving your own share somewhere, even to yourself. Nobody else signs it.

Severing does two things at once. It changes where your share goes when you die, so it passes through your estate instead of automatically to the other owner. And it changes what kind of co-ownership you are in. Once your share is severed, you and the other owner are tenants in common instead of joint tenants. Their name is still on the deed, exactly as it was. Nothing about their ownership changed.

Step two only opens once the severance in step one is recorded. Once severance has converted the ownership to a tenancy in common, O.C.G.A. 44-6-160 lets any one of those tenants in common petition the superior court in the county where the land sits for a writ of partition, and the other owners do not have to agree. The court then either divides the property physically or orders it sold and the money split by share. A tenant in common with a ten percent share can file just as easily as one with ninety percent.

One rule catches people out. Georgia courts have held that this kind of partition is available only to tenants in common, not to joint tenants with right of survivorship. In Vargo v. Adams, decided by the Georgia Supreme Court in 2017, an unmarried co-owner asked a court to divide property he and his former partner held as joint tenants. He lost. The court held that the statutory route was unavailable to him because of how the deed was written. The fairness-based route was closed too, because while a joint tenancy with survivorship is still in place, Georgia opens that one only to divorcing spouses. Once the joint tenancy is severed and the owners hold as tenants in common, both routes are open again. The trial court told him what to do instead: sever the joint tenancy first, and then ask.

So the order matters more than the paperwork. Record the severance first. Then file. A joint tenant who goes straight to court spends money on a case that has nowhere to go. One more limit is worth knowing: the partition statute opens only where no provision was already made, by will or otherwise, for how the land gets divided.

Partition is slow. It is public. Both sides pay lawyers. It forces the issue when nothing else will. That is why it sits behind every buyout that eventually gets agreed to. Our walkthrough of how to get out of a tenants in common agreement in Georgia covers how a Georgia judge picks between dividing and selling once you are there.