When a Florida home sells, the property-tax cap resets at the sale price. The Zillow listing shows the seller's number under the Save Our Homes cap. The buyer's first real tax bill — often two to three times higher — arrives in November. A 2026 Florida bill would have required listing platforms to show the buyer's estimate too. It passed the Florida Senate unanimously. Then it died in the House. This is a forensic.
Most Florida buyers find out about the Save Our Homes reset the way you find out about a thrown rod in a transmission — somewhere between Pensacola and the next exit. Their first November tax bill arrives. The number is two or three times what they were quoted on Zillow. They call the county property appraiser's office. The voice on the other end tells them, politely, that this is how the system works.
The system works like this: Florida's Save Our Homes amendment caps annual increases in the assessed value of a homesteaded property at the lower of 3% or the change in the Consumer Price Index. A homeowner who bought a house in 2008 for $260,000 may now have an assessed value somewhere around $390,000, even if the home would actually sell today for $720,000. That capped assessed value is what generates the annual property tax bill the seller pays — and the number a listing platform pulls and displays under "Property Taxes."1
When the home sells, that cap doesn't transfer to the buyer. It evaporates. The county reassesses the property at the new market value — typically at, or close to, the sale price — and the buyer's annual tax bill is calculated against that new number. In a high-tax-millage area like much of South Florida, the gap between what the listing shows and what the buyer pays can run several thousand dollars a year, every year, for as long as the buyer owns the home.2
This is not new. Florida real estate brokers have known about it for decades. The county appraisers know about it. The lenders who run debt-to-income calculations know about it. The buyer is the last person in the chain to find out, and they find out after the closing, by mail, in November.
Every major real estate listing platform — Zillow, Realtor.com, Redfin, Trulia, Homes.com — pulls the seller's current property-tax figure from the county appraiser's website and displays it in a tidy line at the bottom of the listing. None of them, by default, show the buyer's estimated post-sale number. The two numbers are usually wildly different, and the one that matters is the one that isn't shown.
This isn't a complicated math problem. The county property appraiser publishes, every year, a millage rate — the per-thousand-dollars-of-assessed-value tax rate, set by the county commission, the school board, and special taxing districts combined. In most South Florida counties, the total millage runs somewhere between 17 and 22 mills, which is to say roughly 1.7% to 2.2% of assessed value, per year.3
For a homesteaded buyer, the assessed value after sale is the sale price, less a few statutory exemptions (the $25,000 homestead exemption, the additional $25,000 homestead exemption that applies to non-school taxes, and a small set of category-specific exemptions for veterans, widows, and seniors meeting income limits). For a non-homesteaded buyer — a second-home owner, an out-of-state seasonal resident, an LLC — the assessed value is the sale price, period, with no Save-Our-Homes cap going forward.4
A buyer with the millage rate and the sale price can calculate their first-year property tax to within roughly five percent in under a minute. The platforms are not doing this calculation for the buyer. The platforms are showing the seller's number.
A senior couple in their early seventies sells a long-held Boca Raton home and buys a smaller place a few miles inland — a $400,000 single-family home in unincorporated Palm Beach County. The seller of the inland home has owned it since 2010. The Zillow listing displays an annual property tax of $2,800. The buyer assumes that's what they'll pay.
| Sale price | $400,000 |
| Homestead exemption (combined) | −$50,000 |
| First-year taxable assessed value | $350,000 |
| Illustrative combined millage (Palm Beach County range) | 21.0 mills |
| Buyer's first-year property tax estimate | ~$7,350 |
| What the listing showed (seller's capped number) | $2,800 |
| Difference, year one | ~$4,550 |
Note: this is an illustrative example using a representative South Florida millage rate. Actual millage varies by county, by municipality, and by special taxing district. Replace with your specific county's published millage rate at the property appraiser's website before relying on the figure.
The buyer in this scenario is not being defrauded by anyone. The listing platform pulled the public record. The seller did not lie. The agent did not lie. The closing disclosure did not lie. And yet the buyer, on November 1 of their first year of ownership, will receive a tax bill that is roughly two and a half times the number they used to budget the purchase.
The buyer is also typically not the buyer you'd assume. In Florida, in 2026, roughly one-in-three home sales close in cash, and the cash-buyer share runs to two-in-three in the Miami-Dade luxury segment.5 Cash buyers — disproportionately Floridian seniors paying off existing homes, out-of-state retirees rolling proceeds from a northern sale into a Florida purchase, and LLCs buying second homes — never see a lender's debt-to-income worksheet. They never receive a worksheet showing the actual annual tax burden. They learn it in November.
A bill went through the Florida Legislature this year to require listing platforms to show both numbers. The same bill, by the way, would have shielded the agents and platforms from any liability for the estimate's accuracy, which is exactly what an honest disclosure regime requires.6
CS/SB 856 (2026), "Disclosure of Estimated Ad Valorem Taxes," would have required online listing platforms operating in Florida to display, for each residential property listed for sale, an estimated annual ad valorem tax calculated from the sale price using the published millage of the property's taxing jurisdictions — in addition to or alongside the seller's current number. The bill granted licensees and the platforms themselves complete liability protection for the accuracy of the estimate.7
The bill was sponsored in the Senate by Sen. Nick DiCeglie (R-Indian Rocks Beach, District 18), with Sens. Darryl Rouson, Bryan Avila, Lori Berman, Ralph Massullo, Barbara Sharief, and Erin Grall as co-introducers — a deliberately bipartisan coalition. The House companion, CS/HB 827, was filed by Rep. Adam Anderson (R-Palm Harbor, District 57) and Rep. Michelle Salzman (R-Pensacola, District 1).8
The Senate version passed every committee unanimously and then passed the Senate floor unanimously on a 37–0 vote, February 26, 2026.1 The House version cleared its first committee — the Housing, Agriculture & Tourism Subcommittee — by a 14–0 vote on January 29, 2026.9 Both bills were on a clean glide path. Both bills died March 13, 2026, on the final day of the 2026 Regular Session, without ever receiving a House floor vote.
SB 856 filed by Sen. DiCeglie. Referred to Finance & Tax, Appropriations, Rules.
HB 827 filed by Rep. Anderson. Referred to Housing, Agriculture & Tourism Subcommittee → Ways & Means → Commerce.
Senate Finance & Tax 8–0 Favorable under Chair Sen. Bryan Avila.
House HAT Subcommittee 14–0 Favorable with CS under Chair Rep. Jenna Persons-Mulicka. Bill amended in committee. Refers to Ways & Means and Commerce.
Senate Appropriations 17–0 Favorable under Chair Sen. Ed Hooper.
Senate Rules Committee 24–0 Favorable with a Committee Substitute that softened the "complete immunity" language into a broader no-liability/no-cause-of-action protection. The amendment was negotiated with Florida Realtors.10
CS/SB 856 passes Senate floor 37–0. Transmitted to the House the same day. Bill enters House Messages calendar.
HB 827 sits in House Ways & Means without ever being scheduled. Chair Rep. Wyman Duggan agendas no hearing on HB 827. Ways & Means holds five total meetings during the regular session, the last on February 10. HB 827 is on none of them.11
Sine die. The 2026 Regular Session adjourns without a state budget. CS/SB 856 dies in House Messages. CS/HB 827 dies in House Ways & Means.12
The bill had no organized opposition. No corporate filings against it have surfaced in primary sources. The Senate Rules staff analysis recorded no opposition testimony at the committee stage. Florida Realtors, the trade association most often blamed in conversation for blocking buyer-disclosure legislation, supported this bill openly and claimed the licensee-liability amendment as one of their legislative wins of the session (more on that below). The bill did not die by defeat. It died by procedural inaction, in one chamber, at one committee chair's calendar.
Sponsored SB 856; guided it through three Senate committees and floor passage; delivered a 37–0 vote. Sponsorship-side responsibility: fully discharged.
Sponsored HB 827; cleared the first committee 14–0 with a substitute amendment; could not place HB 827 on the Ways & Means agenda. Sponsorship-side responsibility: discharged to the point of his committee assignments.
Chairs the second of HB 827's three committee assignments. Held zero hearings on HB 827 during the entire session. His committee held five meetings total during the 2026 regular session; the last was February 10; HB 827 was not on any of the five agendas. The bill died in his committee, by inaction, on March 13. Committee chair calendars are not accidents.
Third referral on HB 827. Never received the bill because it died upstream in Ways & Means. Procedural responsibility: none — the bill never reached his calendar.
Controls the House Calendar. CS/SB 856 sat in House Messages from February 26 through March 13 without being placed on a Special Order Calendar. Under House rules, Messages bills move to a vote only when leadership directs them to. Leadership in 2026 was consumed by the ~$1.4 billion budget standoff with Senate President Albritton (HJR 201–213 property-tax constitutional amendments dominated House attention). CS/SB 856 was not a priority for House leadership in those final weeks.12
Senate side delivered the bill without obstruction (37–0 floor vote). The House–Senate budget standoff he co-presided over with Speaker Perez is the macro political context that consumed legislative bandwidth in the session's final weeks — but the Senate did its part.
Each chaired the favorable Senate committee vote on SB 856 (8–0, 17–0, 24–0 respectively). No obstruction. The Senate path on this bill is the clean half of the story.
Chaired the 14–0 favorable vote on HB 827 on January 29, 2026. The bill's first House stop was clean. The second stop was where it stalled.
It is tempting, in a piece about a buyer-protection bill that died in the Florida Legislature, to assume the realtor lobby killed it. That assumption is wrong, and the primary sources are unambiguous on this point.
Florida Realtors openly supported CS/SB 856. They did so on the record, with their name attached, in their 2026 Legislative Final Report, which lists "Protecting REALTORS from Liability in New Property Tax Estimator Disclosure" in the section titled Bills that Florida Realtors Made Better. The report states, verbatim:
"Florida Realtors successfully worked with bill sponsors to hold licensees and other information providers harmless from liability for the accuracy of the information. The measure has not yet passed but could still move forward during the upcoming budget process."— Florida Realtors, 2026 Legislative Final Report
Their lead lobbyist on the issue was Trey Goldman, Senior Vice President of Public Policy, appointed July 2025. Their political affairs leadership during the 2026 session was Vice President of Government & Political Affairs Genessa Casanova. Both are publicly identified on the Florida Realtors public-policy contact page; neither is hiding.13
What Florida Realtors did do is negotiate the immunity language. The bill as originally filed contained a "complete immunity for claims" clause for listing platforms and licensees. The Senate Rules Committee adopted an amendment on February 17, 2026 that softened the language into a broader "no liability... no cause of action" formulation that extended the shield to all persons involved in the estimate. From the consumer-protection perspective, this matters only insofar as it answers the lobbying question — the underlying disclosure mandate (showing both numbers) survived the amendment unchanged.
Two structural facts, in combination, are what killed the bill. Neither involves anyone lying about anything.
First, the House Ways & Means schedule. Rep. Duggan's committee was the gating chair on the House side, and the committee was operating on a calendar dominated by the constitutional property-tax-elimination amendments (HJR 201–213) that were Speaker Perez's signature legislative push for the session. Ways & Means, as the House's tax committee, was the central forum for the HJR fight. There was no calendar space — or, more precisely, no leadership-allocated calendar space — for a disclosure bill that was not part of the constitutional package.
Second, the Perez–Albritton budget standoff. The 2026 Regular Session adjourned sine die on March 13 without a state budget, for the second straight year. House Speaker Daniel Perez and Senate President Ben Albritton ended the session with a roughly $1.4 billion budget gap and a constitutional property-tax disagreement that neither chamber would yield on. In the final two weeks of the session — exactly the window in which a Senate-passed Messages bill ordinarily would have been picked up by the House — leadership attention was elsewhere. A modest, bipartisan, unanimously-Senate-passed disclosure bill is precisely the kind of item that gets squeezed out of a session that's already collapsing into its closing standoff.
Florida Realtors, in their own Final Report, predicted the bill would be picked up again in a budget-period special session or rolled into omnibus tax-conforming legislation. As of this writing (May 2026), that conforming legislation has not surfaced. The disclosure mandate, for now, does not exist in Florida law. The listing platforms still show what they showed in 2025.
Cross-link: the broader context of the Florida market — cash-buyer concentration, the post-Surfside condo regime, the insurance crisis — is the territory of a forthcoming editorial on the Florida market specifically. The category-level framing for senior home equity sits in The Silver Tsunami Is Here.
The disclosure isn't there. Until it is, the math is not difficult to do on your own. Three steps, all from public sources, all reproducible.
Every Florida county has one — search "[county] property appraiser." The site publishes the current year's combined millage rate for every taxing jurisdiction (county general, school board, water management district, special districts). Some counties publish a "tax estimator" tool that does the next step for you. Bookmark the tool for the county the home is in.
The basic homestead exemption is $50,000 combined ($25,000 against all taxes and an additional $25,000 against non-school taxes), available to a Florida resident who will occupy the home as a primary residence. If the home will be a second home, an investment property, or held in an LLC, no homestead exemption applies — start from the sale price. Veterans, widows, and income-eligible seniors have additional exemptions; confirm with the appraiser.
If the combined millage is 21.0 and the post-exemption assessed value is $350,000, the first-year tax is $7,350. That number is your real annual property-tax expense — and the number to use in any budget worksheet, any debt-to-income calculation, and any conversation with a partner about whether the home is actually affordable.
A small additional consideration for buyers being shown homes by an agent: ask the agent for a written tax estimate using the buyer's post-sale assessed value and the current millage. Most agents will do this if asked. Some will already have a worksheet ready. An agent's refusal to provide one — or a deflection about how it's the buyer's responsibility, or a reference to the listing platform's displayed number — is itself a signal worth noting.
Every numbered footnote in this editorial points to a primary source where available, or to a clearly-labeled secondary source where a primary source could not be retrieved. Links go to the source documents themselves, not to summaries.
A 20-minute conversation. The actual county millage, the actual sale price, the actual exemptions that apply to your situation, and an honest read on what your annual carrying cost is going to be. No pitch. No call center. With a Boca Raton-based Senior Loan Officer who lives twenty minutes from you and has to show his work.