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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 really matters is whether that whole set of sales sits below your assessed value. If they bracket your assessment instead of falling under it, boards usually side with the assessor, because nothing's been clearly disproved.
Now a few things lose almost everywhere. Comparing your assessment to a neighbor's assessment usually doesn't count where the argument's market value. One sale on its own can pretty easily be dismissed as an outlier. And the size of your increase, or the size of your bill, isn't really evidence about what your home's 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 actually 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.
First, look up your own record. Every Florida county has a property appraiser, and their website shows your home's record and its just value. Each August you'll get a TRIM notice, which is short for Truth in Millage. It shows your value and your proposed taxes, and it's what starts your appeal clock.
Next, know where to file. You can talk to the property appraiser's office informally first, and that's really the quickest way to fix a factual mistake. The formal appeal is a petition to your county's Value Adjustment Board on form DR-486, filed with the county clerk. Each county sets its own filing fee, up to $50 under a 2025 change in state law.
Then bring the evidence that wins here. Florida decides these on market value as of January 1, so the evidence is sales of genuinely similar homes near that date. But honestly, here's the part most guides skip. If your home has a homestead exemption, Save Our Homes caps how much its taxed value can rise each year, so your taxed value's often well below market and an appeal doesn't have anything to reach. Appeals mostly help non-homestead property, and homes in their first year after a sale.
Also, check your exemptions. The homestead exemption takes up to $50,000 off your home's assessed value, and it's what puts your home under the Save Our Homes cap. You'll apply with your county property appraiser.
The September date is only the deadline to file. The hearing comes weeks or months later and evidence goes in then.
We only turn a state on once we've read its appeal rules and its actual board decisions, because that's how we make sure what we tell you is right and not generic. It takes a few days per state, and honestly it's the reason our answers are worth anything.
In the meantime our free check runs in parts of Illinois, Washington, Ohio, Georgia, Colorado, North Carolina and Oregon, and in every town in New Jersey. If you leave your email on the check page, we'll write to you the day Florida goes live, and we won't email you before that.
We've 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 you even put the evidence together from public records?
This comes from our own fifty-state screen, where we checked each state's cap, whether sale prices are public, whether there's an argument based on assessed values, and how many appeals actually get filed. Where we've quoted an appeal count, it's 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.