Florida Property Tax Elimination: Your Top Questions Answered

📺 Watch the full video version here: https://youtu.be/YiBavfdjTSI?si=eG6BNfWFuUk2nPVP

Holy crap. I thought I covered absolutely everything in last month’s property tax breakdown. Twenty pages, every single angle. I honestly thought I nailed it. But then you all hit me with comments, and some of these questions were really, really good. A few of them sent me back to reread parts of the bill myself, and one or two had me going, "Yeah, okay. I probably should have covered that better."

Today I am going to clarify and answer a few questions, including some stuff I apparently didn’t explain right the first time. Let's break down exactly what this property tax amendment means for your wallet, your home, and your future in the Sunshine State.

Does the 5-Year Wait Apply to You?

This is the one I got asked the most by far: Does the five-year wait apply to me? Here is your answer, and I want you to actually hear it.

Residency. That is it. That is the test. Not when you bought a house. Not when you file your homestead paperwork. Residency.

If you are living in Florida as your permanent home on or before December 31, 2026, you are not a new resident. Period. It does not matter if you close on a house in November. It does not matter if your homestead application does not get filed until March. If you are living here, you are covered.

Say you have been renting in Orlando for eight years and you finally buy in the spring of 2027. You are covered. Full stop because you are already a resident.

Now, flip it. Somebody moves down from New Jersey and buys in March, buys the same week. They are on a different track completely. They start at a flat $50,000 exemption. It sits at $50,000 for several years and then jumps straight to the full amount, the $250,000 plus whatever inflation tacked on by then. It is not a gradual climb. It sits flat, then it jumps.

One more version of this that came up a lot: What if you are already homesteaded right now and you sell and buy again? Maybe you are downsizing, or maybe you are moving across the state. Do you start that five-year clock over? No. You are already a Florida resident. Selling one house and buying another does not reset anything. You are not becoming a new resident just because you changed addresses.

On top of that, you still get portability. Your built-up Save Our Homes savings moves with you to the new address, the exact same way it works today. The five-year wait only applies if you have never established Florida residency before. If you are already here, selling and rebuying is just selling and rebuying. Residency is the lock. Everything else, like your closing date, paperwork, and when you filed homestead, is all just timing.

Are School Taxes Still Untouched?

School taxes, are they still untouched? Yeah. The governor’s pitch back in May made it sound like this was going to cover your whole bill. However, the amendment that actually made it to your ballot does not touch school district taxes at all.

Here is why that is a big deal. For most Florida homeowners, the school portion is the biggest single line on your bill, or close to it. It makes up anywhere from about a third to almost half depending on your county. So, this is not some small exclusion. It is the biggest piece of the pie and it goes completely untouched.

Why did they cut it out? My understanding of this is that school funding is a different animal entirely. It is not just one pot of cash. It is contracts, pension obligations, union agreements, bonds on buildings, and decades of stuff layered on top of each other. You do not just untangle that in a two-day special session. Whatever happens with school taxes someday, that needs to be a fight of its own, not a rider tacked onto a bill that is already moving really fast.

A bunch of you asked the same version of this next one, and it is fair: If the non-school side of your bill is shrinking, won't they just turn around and jack up school taxes to cover it?

Here is the answer. School taxes in Florida are locked in a box. That money can only go to schools. A county or school board cannot raise school millage and then slide the extra to the general fund to cover a police budget or a parks department. So even if school millage does go up, and it can, that money stays in the school system. It does not become a back door to fund everything else that this amendment is squeezing out. Your existing $25,000 school exemption stays exactly where it is, untouched. Once this amendment is fully phased in, you are still getting a school tax bill every single year. There is no version of this thing, as it is written, that gets you to a true zero.

When homesteads start paying less or even nothing on the non-school side, where do the counties and cities find that extra money instead? Hang on to that. We are going to come back to it because it is the biggest thing in this entire breakdown.

Market Value vs. Assessed Value vs. Taxable Value

The next batch of questions were all some version of: Does this mess with my assessed value, my Save Our Homes cap, or my portability? No. None of it. But let's actually break down the three numbers that are on your TRIM notice while we are here because once you know what they are, the rest of this is easy.

• Market Value: It is what the county thinks your house is worth on the open market this year.
• Assessed Value: That is the number your taxes actually come from. If you are homesteaded, it is capped. It can only climb 3% a year, no matter how fast market value is moving.
• Taxable Value: It is your assessed value minus your exemptions, and that is the final number the millage rate gets applied to.

Your house is not getting reassessed because of this amendment. The 3% cap on assessed values for homestead properties, the Save Our Homes cap, stays the same. If your assessed value is sitting way below market value because of years under the cap, it stays there. Nothing resets.

What Is Portability and How Does It Actually Work?

Portability is untouched, too. Since a bunch of you asked what it actually means, let's quickly cover it. Here is the problem that portability solved.

Say you bought your house years ago for $200,000, and thanks to the 3% Save Our Homes cap, your assessed value only crept up to $260,000, while the house is actually worth maybe $450,000 on the market today. That gap between the assessed value and the market value is real money savings you have built up over time. It is the whole reason your tax bill stayed manageable.

Without portability, the second you sell and buy a new house, that gap would disappear. Your new house would get assessed at full market value on day one, and you would be starting from zero. Portability means you do not lose that built-up gap. You get to carry a chunk of it over to your next home and apply it there. So, your new assessed value starts lower than full market value the same way your old one did. You are not losing years of savings just because you moved.

The exact math on how much carries over really gets in the weeds, and maybe that is its own video. But the short version is: Sell one homestead, buy another in Florida, and you bring your savings with you. You do not start over.

How the New Exemption Stacks (Real Example)

Here is how the new exemption stacks on top of what you have. Say your house has a market value of $400,000, but thanks to years under the 3% cap, your assessed value is at $220,000.

Right now, you have a $50,000 non-school exemption. So, your non-school taxable value is at $170,000. Starting January 2027, that exemption jumps to $150,000, taking your taxable value down to $70,000. By January 2028, it is $250,000, which is more than your $220,000 assessed value. So, your non-school taxable value hits zero.

Starting in 2029, that $250,000 number adjusts with inflation every year. It does not just quietly go away or shrink like that old $50,000 one did for the last couple of decades. Market value did not move. Assessed value did not move. The exemption got bigger. That is what knocks your taxable value down, maybe even to zero.

What Happens to Senior, Veteran & Widow Exemptions?

A bunch of you asked about exemptions you already have. Let's do a quick round:

• Senior Exemptions: It stays and stacks right on top of the new amount.
• Veteran Exemptions: This includes the 100% disabled veteran exemption, which is completely untouched. Nothing is added, and nothing is taken away.
• Widow and Widower Exemptions: Same deal, completely unchanged.

If you are already at or near zero from a stack of existing exemptions, this amendment does not take a thing away. It just adds a bigger non-school exemption underneath whatever you have already got.

One thing though, especially if you are already paying close to nothing: Being fully exempt protects you from property tax increases. It does not necessarily protect you from everything a county might do to try to replace that money.

Is Full Property Tax Elimination Actually Real?

Is this actually a path to wiping out property taxes completely, or is that just talk? Here is where the bill actually stands.

The amendment does include language telling the legislature to eventually build a procedure that could push the non-school exemption all the way to 100% of your home's value, which means full elimination of the non-school side. That language is real, and it will be in the Constitution if this passes.

But here is what is also true: There is no procedure yet. There is no timeline, and there is no funding mechanism attached to any of it. It is an order to build something, but nothing is built. So, if somebody tells you full elimination is a lock, that is not right. The mechanism does not exist yet. If somebody tells you that it is a complete lie, that is not right either. The constitutional language is genuinely there.

The honest answer is this is a door the legislature is required to eventually open. Right now, nobody, including me, can tell you when or how far it actually opens.

The Truth About Lottery Money and Insurance

I want to knock both of these out because neither one is part of this amendment.

First, the lottery. What happened to all that lottery money that was supposed to cover the schools? Quick version: Every dollar of net lottery revenue goes to education by law, but it is less than 8% of what the state spends on education in a given year. It was never close to covering the whole thing, and this amendment does not change that math at all.

Second, insurance. I get it, and I am not blowing you off, but we can hold two thoughts at once. Insurance is a real problem, and property taxes are a real problem. This breakdown is about property taxes.

Where Do Counties Find the Money They're Losing?

When homesteads start paying less or even nothing on non-school taxes, where do the counties and cities find that money? Let's be straight about what this amendment is not. It is not the end of city and county revenue. Homesteaded properties are a big chunk of the local tax base, but they are not the whole thing. Commercial property, second homes, and rentals all keep paying in, and none of them get this new homestead exemption.

Cities and counties do not drop to zero, but they do take a real hit on the homestead side. They have basically three moves they can make:

Move 1: Fees

Watch this one closely. Cities and counties can create brand new fees, and those fees are not shielded by Save Our Homes or by your exemption. Here is the limit, though: The fee collected for one thing cannot get swept anywhere else. They cannot charge you $300 for stormwater and then quietly use it to fund the library. But what they can do is create a brand new library fee that did not exist yesterday, fully dedicated to libraries. That is completely legal.

Each fee has to stand on its own, but there is nothing stopping a county from rolling out several new ones, each one airtight by itself. Fees are flat. A $300 fee hits a $150,000 house the exact same way as a $1.5 million house. Property taxes scale up with value, but fees do not. That is the part that did not make it on the yard sign.

Move 2: Assessed Values

Can a county just decide your house is suddenly worth more to claw back the money? No. If you are homesteaded, Save Our Homes still caps your assessed value at 3% a year. That is not changing because of this. If you are not homesteaded, you are under the new 5% cap instead of the old 10%. Either way, nobody is reassessing your house just to chase the shortfall.

Move 3: Millage Rates

Can those go up? Yes. This is where it depends a lot on what your house is worth. If your non-school taxable value is already at zero because the new exemption fully covers your assessed value, raising millage on a zero still gets the county zero from you. Zero times zero is still zero. You are shielded from this one completely.

But if your house is worth more than $250,000, you still have taxable value left over after the exemption, and that is the part any mill hike lands on. For some of you, that could just eat back some of the savings you just gained. For others, if millage climbs enough, you could end up paying more than you do right now, even with the bigger exemption.

Millage rates are not unlimited. The Florida Constitution caps county, municipal, and school millage at 10 mills each. That is existing law, and this amendment does not touch it. It is the wall that stops any of those from hitting 20 or 30 mills. But most jurisdictions are nowhere near that 10-mill wall. What actually limits year-to-year increases is a rolled-back rate formula that takes a supermajority vote or a public referendum to get around. That is a real check, but it is a procedural one, not the constitutional wall. Procedural checks get cleared when there are enough votes for it.

Your Move

Put that all together, and here is the real picture. Your county's most likely move is not jacking up assessed values. They legally cannot. It is some mix of new fees built for specific purposes, plus millage moves on whoever still has taxable value, on top of whatever they could dig out cutting into their own budgets.

That is exactly why it actually matters if you show up to your city and county commission meetings. The budget hearings happening in your town over the next year decide what gets cut and what fees show up. This amendment does not make that call at all; your local commission does. That fight is a lot closer to your front door than the November vote is.

If you are moving to Florida after January 1, 2027, and establishing residency for the first time, remember you start at a $50,000 exemption, it sits for several years, and then it jumps to the full amount. Real relief once it kicks in, just not on day one. If you are an investor or landlord, the 5% annual cap on non-homestead property kicks in starting January 2027, slowing how fast your taxable value climbs. For renters, the legislature "may" provide property tax relief, but "may" means it is discretionary and currently unfunded, a placeholder, not a guaranteed benefit.

Are you planning to show up to county commission meetings in the next year, or is that still someone else's job? Let me know your thoughts.

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