Power Play: A series of special reports examining the push to reduce or eliminate property taxes in Florida.
There is talk in Tallahassee of giving new help to homestead property owners, more than 30 years after Florida voters approved a constitutional amendment to restrict increases in real estate tax assessments on owner-occupied residences.
Back in 1992, the pitch to voters was summed up by the amendment’s author, then-Lee County Property Appraiser Ken Wilkinson. He promised that the so-called Save Our Homes amendment would protect older homeowners from being forced to sell their residences because of high property taxes.
Fast forward 33 years. Once again, Sunshine State retirees—known to be regular voters—are being trotted out as legislators weigh giving the Florida electorate another chance to hack away at property taxes.
At a Tampa forum on property taxes in September, Republican Hillsborough County Commissioner Joshua Wostal endorsed a call by GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis to rid Florida of homestead property taxes altogether. “That’s relief for the fixed-income senior citizens,” said Wostal.
But are homeowners of advancing years really in need of new property tax relief? Unless they’re flipping houses and regularly filling out forwarding-address forms at the post office instead of playing pickleball, maybe not.
This population, at least, appears to be surviving Florida’s affordability crisis—thanks in part to Save Our Homes and other property tax-reducing considerations.
Starkly different tax bills
Save Our Homes, which was approved by voters in 1992 and took effect in 1995, limits county assessments on dwellings inhabited by titled owners. Tax valuations cannot go up by more than 3 percent per year or the increase in the urban consumer price index, whichever is less. The cap has reached the maximum 3 percent in nine of those 30 years.
The benefit vanishes when a homestead changes hands. The assessment then shoots up to “just” value, which roughly equates to fair market value.
Save Our Homes shields only the dwellings of permanent residents. There are well over four million of those lucky homeowners in the program now. The owners of non-homestead properties, such as snowbird second-homes or rental apartments or commercial and industrial real estate, are out of luck.
One consequence of Save Our Homes is that it can generate starkly different tax bills for otherwise similar residences, based solely on how long an owner has lived there.
Take, for example, two single-family houses built side by side in 1987 in south Tampa’s desirable Virginia Park neighborhood. The homes are just blocks from H.B. Plant High School, ranked by U.S. News & World Report recently as the Tampa metropolitan area’s top high school.
Both homes have about 2,100 square feet of living space and each is worth just under $600,000, as determined by the Hillsborough County property appraiser. Yet the owners of one of the homes bought in 1995. The other owners acquired their property last year.
The more established residents paid $3,151 in 2024 property taxes while the newer residents paid $4,778, a difference of $1,627, or 52 percent of what the lower-taxed homeowners paid in all. And the lower-taxed house has one more bedroom.
The inequities created by Save Our Homes sometimes fall along generational lines.
“Rising property taxes, along with home prices and insurance, has made homeownership more elusive, especially for younger people,” a Tallahassee-based watchdog group observed in a September report that anticipated the Florida Legislature drafting one or more property-tax reduction measures for voters to consider in 2026.
‘Housing values have skyrocketed’
To illustrate the point, Florida TaxWatch cited census data originally crunched by a University of California, Berkeley housing center.
In 1980, a majority of Floridians had become homeowners by age 30. The age rose to 34 in 2000. By 2021, facing sticker shock from pandemic-era home-price inflation on top of rising residential values since the Great Recession, most Floridians hadn’t achieved homeownership before turning 42.
The Florida Legislature’s Office of Economic and Demographic Research examined more recent census data and found new homeowners have tended to be younger in the past five years, peaking during the pandemic’s remote-work years of 2020 to 2022.
Forty-five percent of those moving into Florida homestead properties during the pandemic were aged 34 and younger. By contrast, those 65 and older made up less than 15 percent of buyers moving into homestead properties from 2020 to 2022.
Save Our Homes has put those young home buyers at an immediate handicap.
“As housing values have skyrocketed in recent years, this has particularly driven up tax burdens for newly purchased homes, which do not have the advantage of years of reduced assessment growth,” recently wrote Joseph Johns, policy analyst at the Tax Foundation, a Washington, D.C. think tank that characterizes itself as non-partisan and pro economic growth. “This can create high burdens for some homeowners even though Florida’s average property tax burdens are low compared to the rest of the country.”
Half-dozen directions
DeSantis and the Florida Legislature have yet to find common ground as they debate property taxes.
The governor wants voters to see one simple proposal on the November 2026 ballot, eventually phasing out property taxes for permanent residents who own their own homes.
His fellow Republicans at the Capitol, who hold majorities in both the House and Senate, are going off in more than a half-dozen directions. House members are kicking around concepts such as doing away with non-school homestead taxes or creating new exemptions to offset the cost of spiraling home insurance.
Home insurance in Florida has been going up, but so have property taxes.
Real estate technology firm Redfin found last year that three Florida cities had experienced some of the biggest jumps in property tax bills in the country since 2019. Jacksonville, Tampa and Miami all made the top five among America’s 50 most populous metropolitan areas.
“Florida was alluring for remote workers during the pandemic because of its relatively affordable housing,” said Redfin senior economist Elijah de la Campa. “Somewhat ironically, the state’s population boom has driven up home prices, and property taxes along with it.
“The cost of owning a home has gone from affordable to unaffordable for a lot of local Florida residents and out-of-towners.”
All of that has slowed the post-pandemic migration to Florida in the last couple of years.
Tax revolt
While older transplants from high-cost states such as California or New York who do make the move might not blanch at their first Florida property tax bill, younger natives are apt to be more unsettled by theirs.
Wilkinson, the retired Lee property appraiser, says northerners boosting Florida home prices was a huge motivation for him to push Save Our Homes.
“The whole purpose of Save Our Homes was to protect the primary homeowner who was being literally taxed out of their homes because of what people were willing to cash out for up north and come to Florida with what they thought were great prices,” said Wilkinson, 81.
When Wilkinson was elected in 1980, Florida lawmakers passed Truth-in-Millage legislation. It required Wilkinson and other appraisers to issue so-called TRIM notices that give property owners a preview of their next tax bill. But the legislation also commanded county officials to assess real estate at between 85 and 100 percent of just value.
That sent county assessments—and resulting property taxes—soaring.
Wilkinson has said he was partly inspired to lead the tax revolt by the plight of his mother. She and other older homeowners were alarmed by their steeper tax bills mandated by the TRIM law.
Homeowners in Wilkinson’s county registered their unhappiness with him. In the decade before the 1992 passage of Save Our Homes, the average Lee assessment went up 12 percent a year. That was four times the maximum that Save Our Homes now allows on homestead properties.
Nevertheless, Save Our Homes passed with only 54 percent approval. Thirty-four counties supported it and 33 were opposed.
Most urban counties, including Broward, Duval, Hillsborough, Miami-Dade, Orange and Palm Beach, came through for Wilkinson, in addition to his home county. Rural north Florida, which leans on a comparatively small real estate tax base for much of its local revenue, mostly went the other way.
Wilkinson prevailed despite opposition from business-backed Florida TaxWatch as well as homebuilders, local government leaders and real estate agents.
Major surgery on property taxes
Since the passage of Save Our Homes, TaxWatch has lamented that non-homestead properties are funding more of local government. State officials estimate about two-thirds of property tax revenue will come from the non-homestead sector this year. Meanwhile, those under the Save Our Homes cap won’t be taxed on an estimated $14 billion of home value in 2025.
TaxWatch now suggests extending to non-homestead properties the same 3 percent cap on assessment increases enjoyed by homestead owners. That would benefit, among others, TaxWatch funders such as Publix Supermarkets, which has extensive commercial real estate holdings throughout Florida.
Retired since 2020, Wilkinson can joke now about the fierce opposition he faced. Dubbed the father of Save Our Homes by Florida news media, Wilkinson says amendment critics preferred to grumble that he was “the bastard’s father.”
“The only people who were opposed to Save Our Homes were those who spend the tax dollars,’ he said.
The Florida League of Cities failed to get the state Supreme Court to remove Save Our Homes from the ballot. The league claimed it could endanger the homestead exemption.
The state’s original homestead exemption—$5,000 off what a county appraiser figured a home was worth for tax purposes—dates from 1934. In 1980, voters raised the exemption to $25,000.
Even after Save Our Homes, Florida lawmakers toyed with other property tax changes.
DeSantis isn’t the first politician to recommend major surgery on property taxes. Back in 2007, as homeowners agitated for easing taxes during a housing bubble, Marco Rubio floated the possibility of abolishing homestead taxes. Rubio, then Florida House speaker and now U.S. secretary of state, wanted to raise sales taxes to fill the void.
The next year, instead, voters upped the homestead exemption to $50,000, although the additional $25,000 of value is still subject to taxation for schools.
Also in 2008, voters expanded the Save Our Homes benefit. Today, homeowners selling their primary residence and buying another anywhere in Florida within three years can carry their Save Our Homes tax savings with them. That has become known as Save Our Homes portability. The change removed a roadblock erected by Save Our Homes for homeowners who were reluctant to move and pay higher taxes on a new place.
“Save Our Homes has accomplished beyond what we had hoped for,” Wilkinson said.
Dire consequences, or not
Is Florida’s current political climate as ripe for a property tax overhaul as in 1992 or 2008?
Perhaps not, according to an October poll of likely voters by the University of North Florida’s Public Opinion Research Lab.
When asked about eliminating property taxes for Florida homeowners, 49 percent either strongly or somewhat supported that proposition while 43 percent were opposed. Unlike the Save Our Homes referendum in 1992, constitutional revisions now require 60 percent approval.
The same poll found that the most important problem facing Florida today is housing costs, including escalating rent. But property insurance is seen as a bigger headache than property taxes, according to the poll.
“With housing costs at the very top of the list of Florida problems, everyone is feeling it,” noted Michael Binder, a UNF political science professor, in analyzing the poll results. “Concerns over housing and all of its associated costs, namely property taxes and insurance, have really come to the forefront over the past few years.”
An earlier poll by the conservative James Madison Institute was more optimistic that curtailing property taxes could meet the 60 percent threshold. Sixty-five percent of registered Florida voters would eliminate or significantly reduce property taxes. Only 15 percent were against that.
The Tallahassee think tank followed those findings with a policy paper echoing an earlier TaxWatch study. Both organizations highlighted that Florida property tax collections are far outpacing population growth and inflation.
TaxWatch reported that Florida’s property levies mushroomed by 108 percent between 2014 and 2024 while population grew by 17 percent and consumer prices by 32 percent.
Those types of statistics are what Florida Chief Financial Officer Blaise Ingoglia has seized on to publicize his DOGE-style reviews of local governments around the state. One Ingoglia target, Manatee County, has seen a 146 percent increase in property tax revenue since 2014. That was sixth-highest in the state. Manatee’s combined inflation and population growth rates only added up to 75 percent.
At the other end of the political spectrum, the Florida Policy Institute has warned of dire consequences if homestead taxes are eliminated.
“While Floridians do need meaningful relief, the reality is that if approved, proposals to eliminate or severely cut property taxes would only make it harder to fund vital services families, seniors, and businesses rely on and need,” Estaben Leonardo Santis, the institute’s research director, wrote in September.
Santis figured that eliminating property taxes on homestead properties alone would cost cities, counties and school districts about $18.5 billion annually. Schools take in between 50 percent and 60 percent of the property tax haul in most counties.
“Services do not come free,” warned Santis. “They must be paid for one way or another.”
In that spirit, local taxing authorities are finding ways around Save Our Homes, according to Wilkinson.
They are imposing what shows up on property tax bills as “non-ad valorem assessments.” These are fees for services such as fire protection that traditionally are funded out of property taxes, he said. These fees usually have little relation to the tax valuation or tax rate assigned to a property.
“You don’t lower property taxes,” said Wilkinson. “You just add on another fee.”
Doug Wheeler, author of the James Madison Institute’s October policy paper, says changing Florida’s tax system will only go so far in making life easier for property owners of all ages.
“These reforms will only succeed if paired with strict spending restraints tied to population or inflation, some sort of growth metric,” said Wheeler, director of the institute’s George Gibbs Center for Economic Prosperity. “Because without fiscal discipline, any relief is going to be temporary.”
Francis X. Gilpin has worked as a Florida journalist for more than 20 years. The Florida Trident is an investigative news outlet focusing on government accountability and transparency across Florida. The Trident was created and first published in 2022 by the Florida Center for Government Accountability, a non-profit organization that facilitates local investigative reporting across the state.
