For three years, this blog has made one argument from a dozen angles: the financial case for Florida residency is large, durable, and chronically underestimated. On June 2, the Florida Legislature made the case meaningfully larger — and, for anyone still on the fence about moving, attached a hard deadline to it.
In a special session called by Governor DeSantis, the Legislature passed House Joint Resolution 1-F — the House 75–26, the Senate 30–9 — a proposed constitutional amendment that would raise Florida’s homestead exemption from $50,000 to $250,000 on non-school property taxes, indexed to inflation, with an explicit framework for eliminating homestead property taxes entirely over time. The amendment goes to voters on the November 2026 general election ballot, where it needs 60% approval to pass.
The headlines are about the politics and the size of the cut. The sentence that matters for this blog’s readers is quieter, and it sits in the eligibility rules: the full exemption is reserved for people who are Florida residents on or before December 31, 2026. Move later, and a five-year requirement stands between you and it.
Here is the whole picture — what passed, what it’s worth, what the skeptics are right about, and what the deadline means if a Florida move is anywhere in your plans.
What HJR 1-F Actually Does
The mechanics, from the resolution and the Senate’s own summary:
The super exemption. If voters approve, the homestead exemption on non-school levies rises from today’s $50,000 to $150,000 on January 1, 2027, then to $250,000 on January 1, 2028, growing with inflation every year after. School board taxes are untouched — the exemption applies to city, county, and other non-school levies only.
The residency cutoff. Homeowners who are Florida residents on or before December 31, 2026 get the full super exemption on the schedule above. New Florida residents arriving after that date receive only the standard $50,000 exemption for their first four years; beginning with their fifth year of homestead exemption, they step up to the full $250,000 amount. The resolution calls this the “five-year requirement” — and, starting January 1, 2030, lets a county or municipality shorten it by two-thirds vote of its governing body for a “critical local need.”
The second-home and business provision. The annual assessment-increase cap on non-homestead property — rentals, second homes, commercial — tightens from 10% to 5% beginning January 1, 2027. This is the piece aimed at preventing local governments from recovering the lost homestead revenue by riding up everyone else’s assessments.
The elimination framework. The amendment requires the Legislature to establish a uniform procedure through which counties, municipalities, and school districts can provide additional relief up to full elimination of ad valorem taxes, and authorizes special districts to eliminate theirs by voter approval. This is the part DeSantis describes as making homesteads “completely property tax-free” — not accomplished by this amendment, but constitutionally scaffolded by it.
The guardrails. Cities and counties must direct remaining property tax revenue to a priority list: police, fire, EMS, education, roads and infrastructure, flood control, employee pensions, and bond obligations.
Do New Florida Residents Really Have to Wait Five Years?
A version of this is circulating on social media — “new Florida residents will have to wait five years” — and it is essentially right, with a nuance worth getting correct. It is not a five-year blackout where you get nothing. A new resident (anyone who was not a permanent Florida resident as of December 31, 2026) keeps the standard $50,000 homestead exemption the entire time. What they wait for is the expanded exemption: beginning with their fifth year of homestead exemption, they step up to the full $250,000 amount. The enrolled resolution calls this the “five-year requirement,” and starting January 1, 2030 a county or municipality can vote to shorten it for a local need. So the accurate framing is not “no exemption for five years” — it’s “the small exemption for four years, the large one from year five.” Either way, the date that determines which side of the line you fall on is December 31, 2026.
What It’s Worth
For most homesteaded Floridians, the arithmetic is simple: $250,000 of value exempted from non-school millage — typically somewhere around 12 to 14 mills depending on the county — is worth roughly $3,000 to $3,500 a year, every year, indexed. The Broward and Miami-Dade property appraisers estimate average savings around $1,500 to $1,800 per year across all homesteads; at the $250,000 full exemption, roughly 60% of homesteaded Floridians would owe zero non-school property tax at all.
For this blog’s typical reader — whose Florida home is worth well above the exemption — the percentage relief is smaller but the dollar relief is the same: call it $3,000-plus annually off the carrying cost of the Florida house, stacked on top of everything the income-tax math already delivers. And the elimination framework means the realistic upside case is larger: this amendment is structured as the first ratchet, not the final number.
For snowbirds who haven’t made Florida their homestead — whose Naples condo is a second home — there are two reads. The 5% assessment cap is a genuine improvement over the 10% status quo. But the gap between homesteaded and non-homesteaded treatment of the same house, already wide because of Save Our Homes, is about to get dramatically wider. The amendment is, among other things, a $250,000 argument for finally making the Florida house the homestead — which is to say, for finally making the move real.
The Honest Caveats
Two of them, both real.
It hasn’t passed yet. This is a ballot measure, not law. It needs 60% in November — Florida’s constitutional threshold, which property-tax measures historically clear but which is not a formality. Nothing below should be read as certain; it should be read as a probability-weighted change in the math, with the vote eight weeks before the residency cutoff.
The funding question is unanswered. The Tax Foundation’s analysis puts the local revenue reduction at roughly $4.6 billion in the first year and $8.4 billion in the second, and notes — correctly — that the amendment contains no plan to replace it. Their warning is that the burden doesn’t vanish; it shifts, plausibly toward higher local sales taxes and pressure on the services the guardrail list is meant to protect. Local officials are saying the same thing louder. A reader doing clear-eyed planning should price in some probability that the offset eventually arrives as higher taxes on something else — while noting that the something else (sales taxes, tourist-heavy revenue bases) tends to fall more lightly on the people this blog writes for than property taxes do. The structural point stands either way: Florida keeps choosing tax designs that favor residents over revenue, which is the entire migration thesis.
The Deadline Is the Story
Now the part that converts news into a planning decision.
The residency cutoff means the difference between Florida resident as of December 31, 2026 and Florida resident as of early 2027 is the five-year requirement — four years stuck at the bare $50,000 exemption before the full amount arrives in year five, on the order of $12,000 to $14,000 of foregone relief for a typical high-value homestead, before the elimination framework adds anything. The Legislature built the amendment explicitly to favor people already here and people who arrive this year, and said so in plain language: the relief is “directed towards reducing the cost of living for longtime Florida residents.”
Look at the calendar this creates. The vote is November 3, 2026. The cutoff is December 31, 2026 — about eight weeks later. Anyone who waits for the election result and then begins a move — finding the house, closing, relocating a household, establishing genuine residency — is attempting in eight holiday-season weeks what this blog has spent thirty posts explaining should be done deliberately and documentably. Some people will manage it. Most who try will produce exactly the kind of rushed, thin, December-dated residency file that their former state’s auditors are professionally trained to take apart.
The rational response, for anyone who was already seriously considering the move: make 2026 the year, on the move’s own merits, and treat the amendment as the bonus. The income-tax case was already sufficient — it carried Connecticut, Minnesota, and New York movers long before anyone drafted HJR 1-F. If the amendment passes, the 2026 mover collects the full exemption from day one. If it fails, the 2026 mover has lost nothing — the move was already worth it. The only losing position is the one in the middle: convinced, but waiting.
And the residency that counts is the real kind. A December closing on a condo you visit twice is not Florida residency — not for the homestead office, which requires the home to be your permanent residence as of January 1, and not for the state you’re leaving, which decides whether your move survives with entirely separate machinery. The deadline shortens the calendar; it doesn’t lower the bar. The summer math this blog covered yesterday just acquired a second reason to come back south early.
Where Southbound Fits
Every mechanism in HJR 1-F keys off the same fact this entire field keys off: whether, and when, you genuinely became a Florida resident. The exemption’s December 31 cutoff, the homestead office’s January 1 requirement, your former state’s day-count and domicile tests — all of them are questions about where you actually were and when your life actually moved.
Southbound is an iOS app that documents exactly that, passively. iOS’s significant-location-change system — not battery-draining GPS — records every day as a Florida day or a non-Florida day from the day you install it, with location evidence behind each entry. For a 2026 mover, the record it builds does double duty: it is the day-by-day evidence that your residency predates the cutoff, and it is the audit file your former state will eventually ask about — assembled in real time, with the Departure Budget keeping the 183-day arithmetic visible all year. Everything stays in your own iCloud account — Southbound runs no servers and never sees your location history — and exports as a CSV for your accountant, the property appraiser’s office, or anyone else who eventually asks when Florida became home.
Southbound is on the App Store, free during the early-adopter launch period. If HJR 1-F just moved your timeline up, the first step of the move is the same as it always was: start the record.
This post is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute tax or legal advice. HJR 1-F is a proposed constitutional amendment subject to voter approval in November 2026; its provisions, interpretations, and implementing legislation may change. Work with a qualified tax attorney and CPA for advice specific to your situation.
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Southbound
Published Jun 12, 2026