“Save Our Homes” Portability – How Does Work?
Homestead exemptions get talked about a lot, and rightfully so, but what about “Save Our Homes” in Florida? That refers to the 3% cap which limits the degree to which your homestead property’s assessed value can increase each year. The longer you own your home with property values increasing, the more valuable this is. Many of us have also heard about its “portability,” but what does that actually look like and how does it apply when moving it to a new property?
Let’s say you’ve owned your primary home since 2013, and purchased it for $300,000. By now, in 2025, the market value and assessed value could easily be $650,000. However, with the homestead and save our homes cap in place, the assessed value increases have been capped at 3% per year. That means that at the most, the current assed value could only have grown to about $410,000. When you’re talking about taxes, basing them on $410,000 is a lot better than basing them on $650,000.
The assessed value is then decreased even more with the homestead exemption, which subtracts another $25,000 from the assessed value ($50,000 in some categories), to arrive at the taxable value. The taxable value is what the property tax bill is based on, but I’ll try not to get too into-the-weeds on that, and we’ll stick mainly with talking about assessed value.
So, with the example above, your 2025 tax bill is based on an assessed value of $410,000 instead of $650,000 since you’ve owned your home for so long. Pretty great, right? But what if you move? That’s where the portability comes in, and this is how it applies. The difference between the market value and the assessed value ($650,000-$410,000 = $240,000) is what you’re allowed to take with you to your new property to apply to the new property’s tax bill.
Therefore, if your new house has a market value and assessed value of $800,000, once you declare it your new homestead and apply the portability, the assessed value of the new property will adjusted down by that $240,000, taking the assessed value from $800,000 down to $560,000.
Hopefully that helped make this less complicated. Questions? Always here to help. Just Reach out!
