The property tax figure on a listing is almost never what you will pay. Florida caps how fast a homesteaded owner's assessed value can rise, so someone who has owned a home for fifteen years can be paying taxes on a value far below what the house is worth today. When you buy it, that cap resets, and your first bill can be noticeably higher than theirs.
This surprises more buyers than anything else we deal with, including people who have bought homes in other states. Here is how it works and how to get a real number before you commit.
What Save Our Homes does
Save Our Homes is an amendment to the Florida Constitution that voters approved in 1992. For any property with a homestead exemption, it limits the annual increase in assessed value to 3 percent or the change in the Consumer Price Index, whichever is lower. The market value can climb much faster than that, and in Central Florida over the last several years it has. The assessed value, which is what the tax bill is calculated on, cannot keep up.
The longer someone has owned a homesteaded home, the wider that gap becomes. An owner who bought in Oviedo or Winter Park in the early 2000s may be assessed at a fraction of today's market value, and their tax bill reflects that fraction.
What resets when you buy
The cap belongs to the owner, not the house. When the property changes hands, the assessed value is reset to the just value, which in practice means market value, as of the following January 1. Your taxes are then calculated on that number. The seller's bill was the product of years of capped increases; yours starts from scratch.
This is why we tell every buyer to ignore the tax line on the listing. It is accurate for the current owner and nearly meaningless for you.
How to estimate what you will actually pay
Each county's property appraiser publishes the millage rates and, in most cases, an estimator. The rough method is simple: take the price you are paying as the starting assessed value, subtract the homestead exemption you will qualify for, and multiply by the millage rate for that address. The Seminole County, Orange County and Volusia County property appraisers each have the rates and tools on their websites, and the number differs between counties and between cities within a county.
We run this estimate for any home a client is serious about, rather than letting the listing's figure stand in for it. Ask us and we will walk through it for the specific address.
Two things that work in your favor
Homestead exemption. If the home will be your primary residence, you can file for a homestead exemption with the county property appraiser. It reduces the assessed value by up to $50,000 for most homes, and it starts your own Save Our Homes cap, so your assessed value is protected from fast increases going forward. You must own and occupy the home as of January 1, and the filing deadline is March 1 of that year. Miss it and you wait until the next year.
Portability. If you already have a Florida homestead and you are moving to a new one, you may be able to transfer the Save Our Homes benefit you have built up, within limits set by state law, to the new home. This can be worth a great deal to a long-time Florida owner moving within the state, and it is easy to overlook. The property appraiser's office handles the application alongside the homestead filing.
What we've seen
We can use our own home here in Oviedo as the example, because it happened to us. We bought it in 2020. That year, the county's records showed a total market value of $224,539, but the previous owners had lived there for 13 years, and over that time their Save Our Homes cap had built up $91,689 of protection. After the $50,000 homestead exemption, the taxable value was $82,850, and the tax bill was $1,301.07.
The next year, 2021, was our first full year as owners. The market value had risen to $263,725. Our own Save Our Homes cap had only just started, so it covered $9,611 instead of $91,689. The taxable value jumped to $204,114, and the bill was $2,961.30.
Same house. The bill more than doubled, because the cap that had protected the previous owners for 13 years reset the day the home became ours. That is the gap this post is about, and it is why we run the estimate for every buyer instead of pointing at the number on the listing.