Best Surrogacy Agencies in Florida

1. Family Makers Surrogacy — Atlanta, GA, serving Florida. $60,000 first-time base, $85,000–$95,000 total. All case coordinators are former surrogates. Our only Florida partner.
2. Our other three partners don't take Florida surrogates — Family Tree prefers CA, AZ and NV; NewGen works an 18-state Western and Northeastern list; Simple Surrogacy is Texas-centered.
3. Five national agencies evaluated — Circle Surrogacy, ConceiveAbilities, American Surrogacy, Hatch, Surrogacy4All. Not partners; how to check them yourself is below.

Based on partner agencies' published rates, checked Aug 2026. Base and total are separate figures; total includes allowances and contingent fees that depend on your journey.

What Florida actually offers a surrogate

Florida is one of the oldest surrogacy-statute states in the country. The legislature wrote gestational surrogacy into law in 1993 as Florida Statutes §742.15, years before most states had anything on the books. Thirty-plus years of the same statute means Florida family courts are not improvising when your file lands on the desk.

The statute is built around a married intended-parent couple. §742.15 calls them the "commissioning couple," and they have to be legally married to each other before the contract is signed. That is a rule about them, not about you — nothing in the statute says the surrogate has to be married. Single Florida surrogates qualify with our partner agency, and we say so on the Florida process guide too, because the opposite claim used to appear on this site and it was wrong.

The second thing to know is the court timing. Florida has no statutory pre-birth order. §742.16 gives the intended parents an expedited petition to affirm their parental status, filed within three days after the birth. Some Florida circuits will grant a pre-birth order in practice, but it isn't guaranteed anywhere in the state and it isn't something you should assume. In day-to-day terms this changes very little for you — the hospital paperwork and the birth certificate get sorted in the days after delivery instead of months before — but it is the single biggest way Florida differs from California, and any agency that tells you Florida issues routine pre-birth orders is either careless or selling.

Third: no state income tax. Federal tax still applies to the taxable part of your compensation, but Florida takes nothing, which is worth real money against a state like California.

Fourth: clinics and travel. Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Orlando, Tampa and Jacksonville all have IVF programs that handle gestational surrogacy. We don't name specific clinics on this page — your intended parents choose the clinic, not you, and we'd rather publish nothing than the wrong list. Florida also draws intended parents from outside the US, which is worth knowing if you have a preference about who you carry for; ask the agency what share of its current Florida matches are international rather than trusting a number on a website.

What Florida doesn't have is a deep bench of agencies that will pay you well and pass a vetting bar. That's the honest part of this page.

Florida compensation: base vs. total

Base is the number to negotiate on and the number to compare across agencies. It's the part you're guaranteed once you're pregnant. Total is base plus the contingent layer, and the contingent layer is real money — but it's money you only see if your journey includes the events it pays for. Any agency that leads with the total and buries the base is doing it on purpose.

The Florida partner agency

Family Makers Surrogacy is the only agency in our partner network that takes Florida surrogates. It's headquartered in Atlanta and works Florida as part of its Southeast coverage. It passed our full vetting: published pay, former surrogates in every coordinator seat, an expense structure that leaves you at $0, and a consistent third-party review record across three platforms.

Why our other three partners aren't on that table

A one-row comparison table looks like a page hiding something, so here is the coverage in full. These are the agencies' own stated markets, from the data that drives our matching:

• Family Makers takes Florida surrogatesAccepts applicants from every state except Texas, Louisiana, Nebraska and New York. Florida is a named primary market.
• Family Tree Surrogacy Center does notStates it prefers California, Arizona and Nevada. San Diego-based.
• NewGen Families does notWorks a stated 18-state list across the West, Mountain states and Northeast. Florida isn't on it.
• Simple Surrogacy does not treat Florida as a marketAbout 70% of its surrogates are in Texas, then Midwest and Central states. It's our Texas partner, not a Florida one.

Family Makers Surrogacy

Why Family Makers for Florida: the agency sits in Atlanta rather than in-state, which sounds like a drawback and mostly isn't — your appointments happen at a Florida clinic and your coordinator works by phone. What matters more is that Florida is one of its named primary markets rather than a state it will "consider," and that its highest first-time package in our network is available to you here. Every case coordinator is a former surrogate who completed a journey with the agency, per the agency; the owner came to it as an intended parent.

Compensation structure: $60,000 first-time base, $95,000 published first-time total. Experienced surrogates start at a $70,000 base and $105,000+ total. Base pay arrives in 8 equal monthly installments starting within 5 days of viable heartbeat confirmation. Family Makers states the installments complete before a full-term delivery — eight monthly payments from a heartbeat at roughly seven weeks lands at the very end of the pregnancy, so ask for the schedule in writing and pin down the final installment date before you sign. If you lose the pregnancy, payments are pro-rated to the day of loss. If a transfer doesn't take, medication and transfer fees are still paid. You pay $0 out of pocket; approved expenses are reimbursed.

Communication: the agency states a one-hour response time during business hours, check-ins two to three times a month during quieter phases and as needed during active ones, and an emergency contact list with cell numbers for every case manager and the owner. Counseling is free monthly with ongoing therapy included, and your partner can attend. There's a private Facebook group of around 85 surrogates and in-person reunions.

Intended parents: roughly 70% heterosexual couples and 30% same-sex couples, all US-based. If you specifically want to carry for an international family, this is the wrong agency — Family Makers doesn't do international matches at all.

Surrogate reviews: 4.8 out of 5 across 55 reviews on Google, Facebook and OVU.com, checked Aug 2026. In our coding, 40% mention full-journey support, 40% the team's knowledge, 35% communication and 31% being first-timer friendly. What the reviews don't discuss is speed. The agency describes matching as immediate after approval; reviewers describe the preparation phase as slower than they expected. Read "immediately" as a best case, not a plan.

Good fit if: you want the highest first-time package in our network, you're a first-timer who wants a former surrogate as your coordinator, and you like knowing what the next step is before you get there.

Who we would not send here: a surrogate who wants an informal, move-fast process, or one whose main goal is carrying for an international couple. Both are reasonable things to want; neither is what this agency does.

Ask about: the exact date of the eighth installment, the escrow company's name, and what the preparation phase looked like for the last two Florida surrogates they placed.

Florida surrogacy law explained

Florida gestational surrogacy runs on two statutes: §742.15, which governs the contract, and §742.16, which governs the court step after birth. Here's what each one actually says.

Who has to be married (it isn't you)

§742.15(1) requires the "commissioning couple" — the intended parents — to be legally married to each other. Since Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015, married same-sex couples are treated the same as any other married couple; have your attorney confirm how your circuit handles it. The statute's only requirement about the surrogate is that she is 18 or older. It says nothing about her marital status. If you read anywhere that Florida requires surrogates to be married, that's false, and it was false on this site until we corrected it.

The statute also requires a physician's finding about the intended mother: that she can't physically carry a pregnancy to term, or that doing so would pose a risk to her health or the baby's (§742.15(2)). That's the intended parents' paperwork, not yours, but it explains why Florida matches take a bit of medical documentation up front.

What the statute says about your money

§742.15(4) frames payment as reasonable living, legal, medical, psychological and psychiatric expenses connected to the pregnancy. Florida agencies structure compensation packages within that framework. It is not the same thing as a statute that says "compensation is enforceable, full stop," and you should not accept that summary from anyone. Ask a Florida attorney to walk you through how your specific contract handles payment and what protects it — that conversation is paid for by the intended parents and is worth having before you sign.

The court step happens after the birth

§742.16 is an expedited petition to affirm parental status, filed by the intended parents within three days after the birth. The court holds a short hearing, issues the order, and the birth certificate is amended to name them. Florida's statute does not provide a pre-birth order. Some circuits grant one in practice; your attorney will know what yours does. Either way, this is the intended parents' filing, not yours, and it doesn't change the fact that you were never the child's legal mother under a gestational agreement.

Single and unmarried intended parents use a different route

They can't use §742.15. The usual Florida path is a preplanned adoption agreement under §63.213 — a real, legal route, but a different one, with different paperwork and a different sequence right after birth. If your intended parents are single or unmarried, ask your attorney to explain how that route protects your compensation, because the answer is not automatically the same as it would be under §742.15.

Other Florida agencies we evaluated

A "best agencies in Florida" page with one partner on it isn't an evaluation, so here are the other agencies you'll run into. These are national agencies that show up in our competitor set for best-surrogacy-agency searches. We ran each against the same public checklist we use for partners. The honest summary: none has been through our partner intake, and for each there's at least one criterion we couldn't confirm from public information — including, in several cases, whether they currently take Florida surrogates at all. That isn't a verdict on their quality. It means we can't vouch for them the way we vouch for Family Makers.

If you're considering any of them, run the five-minute version of our check: ask whether they place surrogates in Florida today, ask for the escrow company's name, ask for first-time base pay in writing, ask whether your coordinator has been a surrogate, and read reviews on two platforms other than the agency's own site. Our agency red flags guide has the full list and the answers that should end the conversation.

Florida surrogate requirements

Two different sets of rules apply to you, and they get mixed up constantly. The statute has one requirement about the surrogate. Everything else on this list is agency and clinic policy, which means it's negotiable at the edges and varies by who you apply to.

• Age: §742.15 requires 18 or older. Family Makers, like most agencies, takes first-timers from 21 to 39 and experienced surrogates to about 42. The 21 floor is agency policy following ASRM guidance, not Florida law.
• Prior pregnancy: at least one healthy full-term pregnancy. This is agency policy — it is not in §742.15, whatever you read elsewhere.
• Currently parenting: at least one child of your own. Agency policy.
• BMI: generally under 32, with some clinic-by-clinic flexibility.
• Non-smoker: including household members.
• Marital status: single or married, either is fine. Florida's marriage requirement applies to the intended parents.
• Residency: Florida residency isn't required by the statute, but it keeps the contract, the clinic and the court in one state, and agencies prefer it for that reason.
• Support system: a partner, family or close friends. Every agency requires one, and they will ask about it in screening.
• Stable housing throughout the pregnancy.

The full step-by-step process — screening, matching, contract, transfer, delivery, and roughly 15 to 20 months end to end — lives in our how to become a surrogate in Florida guide. For the numbers agencies actually screen on, see the surrogate requirements guide.

Florida's no-state-income-tax advantage

Florida levies no personal income tax, so none of your compensation goes to the state. Federal tax still applies to the taxable part, and nobody withholds it for you, so set money aside from each installment. Our surrogate taxes guide covers what's usually taxable, what usually isn't, and how to talk to a CPA about it.

Frequently asked questions

Agencies in other states