Florida works for rentals, second homes and vacant land, but not for your homestead.
Works for some owners here, not all. A homestead is capped at 3 percent a year under Save Our Homes, which usually puts taxable value well below market and leaves nothing to win. Non-homestead property is capped at 10 percent instead, that cap doesn’t touch school taxes at all, and it resets the year after a sale. Florida has enormous rental and second-home inventory.
So Florida decides these on market value, which means the evidence is recent sales of genuinely comparable homes. What matters is whether that whole set of sales sits below your assessed value. If those sales bracket your assessment rather than falling under it, boards generally sustain the assessor, because nothing's been clearly disproved.
Now a few things lose almost everywhere. Comparing your assessment to a neighbor's assessment usually isn't admissible where the argument is market value. One sale on its own can be dismissed as an outlier. And the size of your increase, or the size of your bill, isn't evidence about what your home is worth.
25 days from your county's notice, so mid-September in most counties. Miami-Dade September 19, Broward and Orange September 18, Palm Beach around September 15.
Miss it and you generally wait a year, so honestly the date matters more than the paperwork does.
And wherever you are, the single most useful thing you can do today is go find your assessment notice and read the date printed on it. That's what starts your clock, it's usually a much shorter window than people expect, and there's no getting it back once it's gone.
The September date is only the deadline to file. The hearing comes weeks or months later and evidence goes in then.
So we only turn a state on after reading its appeal rules and its actual board decisions, so that what we tell somebody is right rather than generic. That takes a few days per state and it's honestly the reason our answers are worth anything.
In the meantime our free check runs in Washington, Illinois and Oregon. If you leave your email on the check page we'll write to you the day Florida goes live, and not before.
Also, there's one move that has nothing to do with appealing and that a lot of people miss entirely. Most states take exemptions off your bill before any of the value arithmetic happens, starting with a homestead exemption if you actually live in the house, and usually extra ones for owners over 65, for veterans, and for people with disabilities. They're often worth more than an appeal win, they carry forward year after year rather than needing to be re-won, and plenty of people who qualify have never filed for them. Your county assessor's website lists what's available where you live, and it costs nothing to look.
We screened all fifty states and DC on the same two questions. Does winning a lower market value actually lower your bill, or is there a cap sitting in between? And can the evidence even be assembled from public records?
This comes from our own fifty-state screen, which checked each state's cap structure, whether sale prices are public, whether an assessment-based argument exists, and how many appeals actually get filed. Where we quote an appeal count it came from the state or county that published it. If you spot an error, please write to hello@propertytaxbuddy.com and we'll correct it and say what changed.