FLORIDA FIGHTS BACK: DeSantis Signs Historic Property Tax Elimination

While the rest of the country watches their property tax bills climb higher every year and politicians do nothing about it, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and the Republican-led Florida Legislature have just done something the political establishment said was impossible: they voted to dramatically slash and begin eliminating property taxes for homeowners across the Sunshine State, sending the measure to voters in November and daring them to make history.

On June 2, 2026, the Florida Legislature passed a sweeping constitutional amendment backed by Governor DeSantis during a special session in Tallahassee. The final vote was 30-9 in the Senate and 75-26 in the House, almost entirely along party lines, with every single Republican supporting the measure. Three Democrats, to their credit, broke with their party and voted yes. Every other Democrat voted to keep their boots on the necks of Florida homeowners.

The amendment, if approved by 60 percent of Florida voters in November, would raise the homestead exemption on primary residences from its current level of $50,000 to $150,000 starting January 1, 2027. One year later, it would climb again to $250,000 on January 1, 2028, for all non-school taxes, including those from counties, cities, and special districts. For the majority of Florida homeowners, that means their non-school property tax bill would be eliminated entirely. Estimates suggest approximately 60 percent of Florida primary homeowners could see zero taxes on that portion right away in 2027.

That is not a modest reform. That is a revolution. That is a governor and a legislature looking at the generations of politicians who told homeowners to be grateful for incremental reductions and saying we are done with incrementalism. Florida homeowners own their homes. They should not be paying rent to the government every year to keep them.

Governor DeSantis has framed the issue in exactly those terms. Property taxes, he has said plainly, effectively require homeowners to pay rent to the government. You can own your home outright, pay off every last dollar of your mortgage, and the government will still reach into your pocket every single year and demand payment just for the right to keep the home you already bought. DeSantis has been pushing this agenda since early 2025, and the legislature has now delivered it to the voters.

The amendment also carries an even more significant long-term provision that the media has largely buried. Beyond the immediate exemption increases, the measure instructs the legislature to create a schedule that could lead to the full elimination of homestead property taxes over time. This is not the end of the road. This is the first step on a path toward a Florida where primary homeowners owe the government nothing annually just for the crime of owning a home. That is the destination DeSantis has in mind, and he made no secret of it.

The changes go beyond homestead properties as well. The amendment would lower the cap on assessment increases for non-homestead properties, including rentals and commercial properties, from 10 percent to 5 percent starting in 2027. Critics from the left who claim the measure is a gift to wealthy homeowners need to explain how capping rent assessment increases for landlords hurts renters. The math is not complicated.

To protect the one area where there was genuine bipartisan concern, the legislature amended the original DeSantis proposal to exclude school district levies from the exemption increase. This protection for school funding was added in committee on Monday and reflected a good-faith effort by Republicans to address legitimate concerns without gutting the core of the relief package. Schools are funded separately. The property tax relief targets the layers of county, city, and special district taxation that pile up on homeowners year after year.

The legislation moved through a special session with breakneck speed because DeSantis has been laying the groundwork for this fight for well over a year. The governor pressed the issue publicly, repeatedly, and loudly, calling on the legislature to act while the political moment was right and while Florida homeowners were drowning in insurance costs, rising assessments, and a cost of living crisis that has made the Sunshine State significantly less affordable than it was even five years ago.

The projected fiscal impact is enormous. The amendment is expected to reduce local government revenue statewide by more than $8.4 billion annually if approved by voters. That number, predictably, is what the left grabbed onto immediately. Opponents of the plan warned that cities and counties would be forced to cut services, that costs would shift to renters and businesses, and that local governments would face a funding catastrophe if the amendment passed.

Senate Democratic Leader Lori Berman of Boca Raton delivered her party’s position with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, calling the measure a political stunt that threatens to bankrupt local communities, close small businesses, and jack up rental prices even further.

The Miami Springs Republican who sponsored the Senate measure, Senator Bryan Avila, pointed out the obvious in response: the state is experiencing the same inflationary pressures as local governments, and those pressures are falling hardest on homeowners who are being taxed out of the homes they own.

Here is what the Democratic opposition will never say out loud: the 8.4 billion dollars that would be returned to Florida homeowners is not government money. It belongs to the people who earned it, saved it, and used it to buy homes. When the government takes that money annually through property taxes, it is taking something that does not belong to it. When a constitutional amendment proposes to return that money to the people who earned it, the Democrat Party calls it a threat to public services. In other words, your money belongs to the government, and you should be grateful they let you keep any of it.

The procedural path to victory is clear but demanding. The amendment must receive 60 percent support from Florida voters in the November general election, a deliberately high threshold designed to ensure that only amendments with overwhelming public support are written into the state’s constitution. Recent polling suggests strong support among homeowners, and DeSantis has been one of the most effective ballot initiative campaigners in Florida political history.

Florida’s Chief Financial Officer took the stage immediately after the vote to tell voters directly not to believe the doom and gloom predictions coming from government apologists about the impact of the measure. His message was pointed: the people who are warning about catastrophic cuts to services are the same people who have been raising your taxes and spending your money for decades. They are not worried about services. They are worried about their budgets.

The road to November will be paved with opposition money. Local government associations, teachers unions, municipal employee groups, and the entire machinery of the Florida Democratic Party will spend millions to defeat this amendment.

They will run ads about closed firehouses and crumbling roads and schools without supplies. They will find sympathetic local officials to go on camera and describe the catastrophe that awaits if Floridians dare to keep more of their own money.

DeSantis has taken on bigger machines than this and won. He defeated the teachers unions over school choice. He defeated the corporate media over COVID policy. He defeated the woke establishment over education. He has built a governing coalition in Florida that is broad, motivated, and deeply fed up with being told that the price of government is whatever bureaucrats decide it should be.

Newer Florida residents would start with a lower initial exemption under the plan, with eligibility for the full higher exemptions tied to maintaining residency for up to five years. This structure rewards the homeowners who planted roots in Florida and have been paying into the system for years, while still offering meaningful relief to newer arrivals as they build their stake in the state.

Florida is increasingly the model for what conservative governance can look like when it is not afraid to go big. No state income tax. Business-friendly regulation. Education freedom. And now, a direct assault on the property tax structure that has quietly eaten into homeowner wealth for generations.

Other red state governors are watching closely. Texas has been having the same debate for years. If Florida voters say yes in November, the argument for doing the same in Austin, Nashville, and Atlanta gets a great deal stronger.

America was founded on the principle that property rights are sacred. That a man’s home is his castle. That the government’s first obligation is to protect what citizens have earned, not to perpetually extract from it.

Property taxes are the most direct violation of that principle in the American tax code, applied to the one asset most families depend on for their financial security and passed on to their children.

Ron DeSantis and the Florida Legislature have drawn a line in the sand.

On one side is a government that believes it has a permanent claim on your home and the right to bill you indefinitely for the privilege of owning it. On the other side is the America the founders intended, where what you earn and what you buy belongs to you.

In November, Florida homeowners get to vote on which side of that line they want to live on.

Vote yes.