Can I Use a Quitclaim Deed in Georgia?
Yes. Georgia recognizes quitclaim deeds, and they are used for transfers between family members, adding or removing a spouse, moving property into or out of a trust, handling inherited property, and correcting ownership records. Two Georgia rules decide whether the clerk takes your deed at all. It has to be signed in front of two people — one an official witness such as a notary, the other an ordinary witness — and a PT-61 form has to be filed before the deed can be recorded, including when the transfer is exempt from the tax.
A quitclaim deed passes whatever interest the signer actually holds. It promises nothing about the state of the title, so it does not tell the person receiving it that the property is free of liens or of anyone else's claim. If the signer turns out to hold nothing, nothing is what passes. That is why a quitclaim deed suits a transfer where both sides already know the property's history, and why it is a poor way to buy from a stranger.
🛟 Need a little extra help? If you would rather not prepare the deed entirely on your own, see Need Help With Your Georgia Quitclaim Deed, further down this page, for trusted resources that can help you complete the process with confidence.
⚡ Georgia Quick Facts
- Ownership wording: Georgia gives a married couple no special form of ownership — there is no tenancy by the entirety here. Name two or more people and they take separate shares unless the deed uses one of the exact phrases the statute lists, so if you want survivorship you have to ask for it in those words.
- Transfer tax: $1.00 on the first $1,000 and 10 cents on each $100 after that, which works out at about $1 per $1,000. It applies only where the value passing is more than $100.
- Gifts: A deed of gift is exempt outright. If you are handing property to a relative for nothing, there is no tax to pay — but the PT-61 still has to be filed, because filing it is how the exemption is claimed.
- An existing mortgage: Georgia leaves it out of the sum. A lien already on the property, and not cleared by the transfer, does not count toward the value the tax is worked out on. That is the opposite of what several states do.
- Paper: Unless you file electronically, Georgia wants the original deed, not a copy.
Always confirm current requirements with your clerk of superior court.
What You Need Before Filling Out the Deed
Before you start filling in names, gather what a Georgia clerk will expect to see.
- The current recorded deed, and the deed book and page where it sits
- Grantor's full legal name
- Grantee's full legal name and mailing address
- The ownership wording, if more than one person is taking title
- The complete legal description of the property
- The Georgia county where the property is located
- The name and address of whoever prepares the deed
- An address for the recorded deed to be returned to
- An official witness and one other witness, arranged for the moment of signing
- The PT-61 filing, and the transfer tax if any is owed
- The recording fee
How to Fill Out a Georgia Quitclaim Deed
Step 1: Find the Right Clerk of Superior Court
Georgia records deeds through the clerk of the superior court for the county where the land is located, which is not necessarily the county you live in. There are 159 of them, more than any state except Texas, so it is worth being certain which one covers the property before you set off.
Step 2: Enter the Preparer and Return Address
Put the name and address of whoever prepared the deed on the document, and an address for the clerk to return it to once it has been recorded. If you prepared it yourself, you are that person and your own details go there.
Step 3: Enter the Grantor Information
The grantor is the party giving up whatever interest they hold, and the only one who has to sign. Use the full legal name exactly as it appears on the deed the grantor received. If they took title under a different name — before a marriage, say — put both names on the deed so the county index still connects the two records.
A grantor does not have to be a person. Where the owner is a company or a trust, the deed is signed by whoever that entity has authorized to sign for it.
Step 4: Enter the Grantee Information
The grantee is the party receiving whatever interest passes, and needs a full legal name and a mailing address on the deed. Get the name exactly right, because you will write it twice — once here and once on the PT-61 you file before recording — and a mismatch between the two is the sort of thing that stops a filing. A grantee can be a company, a trust or an estate as readily as a person; where it is an entity, use the name it is registered under rather than the name on its sign. If more than one grantee is named, the next step decides what each of them actually ends up holding.
Step 5: Choose the Ownership Wording Carefully
Georgia will not read survivorship into a deed that does not ask for it. Name two or more people with nothing more and the law treats them as holding separate shares without survivorship: when one of them dies, that share passes under their will rather than to the other owner.
To get survivorship the deed has to use one of the phrases the statute actually names — joint tenants, joint tenants and not as tenants in common, joint tenants with survivorship, or taking jointly with survivorship — or wording essentially the same. Wording that merely sounds similar is a risk worth avoiding, because what turns on it is whether the survivor inherits.
Married couples get no special treatment in Georgia. Many states give spouses a form of ownership of their own, called tenancy by the entirety, which carries automatic survivorship and puts the property out of reach of a creditor chasing one spouse. Georgia does not have it. Spouses who want survivorship have to ask for it in the same words as anybody else, and they get no protection from one spouse's creditors either way.
Step 6: Add the Legal Description
Copy the complete legal description from the current recorded deed, along with the deed book and page it was recorded in. A street address tells a person which house you mean; the legal description is what fixes the boundaries, and one is not a substitute for the other.
Step 7: Sign Before an Officer and One Other Witness
Georgia asks for two attestations, not one, and a deed prepared without knowing that is a deed the clerk will refuse. The grantor signs, an officer attests the signature, and one other witness attests it as well. Both watch the signing.
The officer is usually a notary public, but it does not have to be: a judge of a court of record including a municipal court, a magistrate, or the clerk or deputy clerk of a superior court or a city court will all do. One detail worth knowing if you are away from home — a notary public or a judge of a court of record can attest anywhere in Georgia, while the other officers can only do it in the county where they hold office.
The second witness is an ordinary person and needs no office at all. Use someone with no stake in the transfer. Our Georgia witness requirements page goes through this in more detail, and our Remote Online Notarization by State page covers where online notarization stands.
Step 8: File the PT-61
The PT-61 is Georgia's real estate transfer tax return, and it is filed electronically before the deed is recorded. The clerk is not permitted to record a deed until the tax has been paid and the consideration has been shown on that form, so this is not paperwork you can send in afterwards.
File it even when you owe nothing. Showing the consideration on the PT-61 is how an exemption is claimed in the first place, so an exempt transfer needs the form just as much as a taxable one — arguably more, since without it there is no exemption to rely on. Our Georgia PT-61 guide walks through the filing itself.
Step 9: Record the Deed
Since January 1, 2025, how you record depends on who you are. Georgia calls a party to the deed who is not a Georgia attorney, title insurance agent, licensed real estate broker or agent, bank, mortgage lender or servicer, licensed surveyor, or public official acting officially a self-filer, and a self-filer's deed has to be recorded electronically, through the Clerks' Authority eFile portal. If you are recording your own quitclaim deed, that is you.
The portal works like this. You register an account in your own name, verify your identity by photographing a valid government ID and taking a selfie, upload the signed and witnessed deed as a PDF or TIFF, enter the PT-61 reference number, and pay the fee online. The clerk's office then reviews the filing and accepts or rejects it, and tells you which. Every clerk's office keeps a public terminal for anyone without a computer or camera. The groups exempt from the rule can still hand the original to the clerk over the counter; if an attorney handles the deed, the attorney files it.
Georgia sets no deadline. A deed may be recorded at any time, so there is no date on the calendar you can fall foul of. What can go wrong is somebody else getting there first: an unrecorded deed loses its priority to a later deed from the same seller, recorded by a buyer who did not know yours existed.
Note the last part, because it cuts both ways. Georgia looks at what the later buyer knew. Someone who knew about your deed does not get ahead of you simply by recording sooner. But proving what a stranger knew is far harder than pointing at a date stamp, so record promptly and the question never comes up.
What Will Recording Cost?
Two things arrive together: the clerk's recording fee, which has been a flat $25 for a deed in every Georgia county since 2020, and the state's real estate transfer tax, which for most family transfers turns out to be nothing at all.
The tax is $1.00 on the first $1,000 of value, and 10 cents on each $100 after that — near enough $1 for every $1,000. On a $300,000 transfer that is $300. Nothing is charged unless the value passing is more than $100.
An existing mortgage is left out of the sum, and this is where Georgia parts company with much of the country. The value the tax is worked out on excludes any lien or encumbrance that was already on the property and is not cleared by the transfer. In several states the outstanding mortgage balance is exactly what turns a family gift into a tax bill. In Georgia it is subtracted rather than added.
And a deed of gift is exempt outright. If you are transferring property to a relative for nothing, no transfer tax is due at all, whatever the property is worth. The other exemptions likely to matter here are a transfer between spouses made in connection with a divorce case, and a deed of assent or distribution from an executor, administrator, guardian or trustee — the transfers that happen when an estate is settled.
Exempt still means filing. To claim any of those exemptions, the total consideration has to be shown on the PT-61. The exemption removes the tax; it does not remove the form, and a clerk cannot record the deed without it.
Tax and fee amounts checked against the Official Code of Georgia Annotated on September 2, 2026, and the recording fee against the clerks' published schedule on September 3, 2026.
Georgia Quitclaim Deed FAQ
Where do I record a Georgia quitclaim deed?
With the clerk of the superior court for the county where the property is located — one of Georgia's 159 counties, and not necessarily the one you live in. Since 2025 an owner recording their own deed sends it to that clerk through the Clerks' Authority eFile portal, after verifying their identity, rather than across the counter; the clerk still does the recording. The PT-61 has to be filed before the clerk is allowed to record anything.
Does a Georgia quitclaim deed need witnesses?
Yes, and it needs two different kinds. Georgia asks for an officer to attest the grantor's signature — a notary public, a judge, a magistrate, or a superior or city court clerk — and one other witness besides, who can be anybody. A deed carrying only a notary and no second witness does not meet the statute, and it costs nothing to arrange both before you sign rather than after.
Will I owe transfer tax if I give property to a family member?
Almost certainly not. A deed of gift is exempt from Georgia's transfer tax outright, whatever the property is worth, and an existing mortgage is left out of the calculation rather than added to it. You still have to file the PT-61, because showing the consideration on that form is how the exemption gets claimed.
Does a Georgia deed give a married couple automatic survivorship?
No. Georgia has no tenancy by the entirety, so a married couple is treated like any other two people on a deed. Without the right wording they hold separate shares, and when one dies that share goes wherever their will sends it rather than to the survivor. If survivorship is what you want, the deed has to say so using one of the phrases the statute names.
Where do I get a Georgia quitclaim deed form?
There is no official statewide form. Georgia sets out what a deed has to contain and leaves the drafting to whoever prepares it, so any form meeting those requirements will record. Where a form written for no particular state falls short is the signing block: most states need one signature line and a notary block, so a generic form has no reason to print a line for the second witness Georgia requires, and no reason to leave room for the deed book and page of the earlier deed. If you would rather start from something built for this state, our Quitclaim Deed Help page lists prepared forms and deed preparation services.
Can I get a Georgia quitclaim deed notarized online?
No. Georgia has not enacted online notarization, so a notary commissioned here cannot take your acknowledgment over video. Bills to allow it have been introduced, but none has taken effect. Plan on signing in person, and remember that a Georgia deed needs an unofficial witness as well as the notary, so two people have to be with you either way. Our Remote Online Notarization by State page tracks where this stands.
Official Sources
Georgia's laws are collected in the Official Code of Georgia Annotated, and a citation such as O.C.G.A. § 44-5-30 is an address: the numbers are the title, the chapter and the section. You do not need any of them to follow the steps above.
The sections below are listed by number rather than linked, and that is deliberate. Unlike most states, Georgia does not publish its own code at a web address that stays put — the state's free access point hands each visitor a fresh address that stops working afterwards, so there is nothing durable to point you at for a single section, and a dead link on a page like this is worse than no link. The front door does stay put: the Official Code of Georgia Annotated, published for the state by LexisNexis, opens in a new tab, and typing a section number into its search box brings up the wording. The two Georgia agencies that do publish at fixed addresses are linked at the end.
- O.C.G.A. § 44-5-30 — what a Georgia deed has to be: an original document, in writing, signed by the maker, attested by an officer, and attested by one other witness.
- O.C.G.A. § 44-2-15 — who counts as that officer, and the rule that most of them can only attest in the county where they hold office.
- O.C.G.A. § 44-6-190 — the ownership wording: two or more people take without survivorship unless the deed uses one of the phrases the section lists.
- O.C.G.A. § 44-2-1 — where the deed is recorded, that it may be recorded at any time, and how an unrecorded deed loses priority to a later buyer who did not know about it.
- O.C.G.A. § 48-6-1 — the transfer tax rate, and the rule that a lien already on the property is excluded from the value it is worked out on.
- O.C.G.A. § 48-6-2 — the exemptions, including deeds of gift, and the requirement that consideration be shown on the form in order to claim one.
- O.C.G.A. § 48-6-4 — why the PT-61 comes first: no deed may be recorded until the tax is paid and the consideration is shown on the form.
- O.C.G.A. § 44-2-2 — who is a self-filer, and the rule that a self-filer's deed must be recorded electronically from January 1, 2025.
- O.C.G.A. § 15-6-77 — the clerk's fees, including the flat fee for recording a deed.
- Georgia Department of Revenue — Real Estate Transfer Tax — the department's own explanation of the tax and how it is calculated.
- Georgia Superior Court Clerks' Cooperative Authority — PT-61 eFiling — where the PT-61 is actually filed, and the instructions for doing it.
- Clerks' Authority — eFile Portal — where a self-filer records a deed since 2025, with the identity verification notice and guides.
- House Bill 1292 (2024), as passed — the Act that created the self-filer rule and the identity requirement, on the Legislature's website.
On the figures. The amounts on this page were last checked against the sources listed here on September 7, 2026. Fees and tax rates change, sometimes in the middle of a year, so confirm the current figures with the recording office before you file.