In Southwest Florida the homestead exemption is the small tax break. Save Our Homes is the one worth keeping when you move.

Two Florida property tax breaks live on the same homestead and get mistaken for each other constantly. One is a fixed cut. The homestead exemption subtracts a set number of dollars from the value a county is allowed to tax, and for 2026 that number tops out near $51,000. The other grows on its own, quietly, for every year you stay. Save Our Homes limits how fast the assessment itself can climb, and for anyone who has held a Naples or Fort Myers home through the past few years it is the far larger benefit, and the one that decides whether the next move is affordable.

Confuse the two and the mistake is expensive in exactly one direction: people guard the small number and give away the big one.

What is the difference between the homestead exemption and Save Our Homes?

The homestead exemption is a fixed dollar amount taken off a home's taxable value, worth up to $51,411 in 2026 for non-school taxes. Save Our Homes is separate. It is a constitutional cap on how much the assessed value can rise each year, and its benefit compounds for as long as you own the home.

Both require a homestead, both are claimed at the county property appraiser, and there the resemblance ends. The exemption is a subtraction that barely moves from one year to the next. Save Our Homes is a widening wedge between two numbers: what the appraiser says your home is worth on the open market, and the lower, capped value it is actually taxed on. In a flat market the wedge is thin. In Collier County over the past several years it has become the most valuable thing on many tax bills.

How much is the Florida homestead exemption in 2026?

For 2026 a homesteaded Florida property gets a $25,000 exemption that applies to every levy including school taxes, plus an additional exemption of up to $26,411 that applies only to non-school levies on assessed value above $50,000. The additional amount now rises with inflation each year, the result of a 2024 constitutional change.

The structure has a gap built into it, and the gap surprises people. The first $25,000 of assessed value is exempt from all taxes. The slice from $25,000 to $50,000 is fully taxable. The additional exemption then picks up again above $50,000. So a home assessed at $75,000 or more receives $25,000 off its school-taxable value and about $51,411 off its non-school-taxable value in 2026, not the flat $50,000 many owners assume.

That additional exemption used to be frozen at $25,000. Florida voters changed it in November 2024, and the state now indexes it to inflation. The Department of Revenue publishes the figure each January: the additional exemption rose from the $25,000 base to $25,722 in 2025, then to $26,411 in 2026, tracking a Consumer Price Index change of 2.9 and 2.7 percent. The implementing bulletin ties it to section 196.031(1)(b) of the statutes. It is a real improvement, and it is small. A few hundred dollars of extra exempt value, taxed at a millage somewhere around 1 percent, is a few dollars of savings a year.

How does the Save Our Homes cap actually work?

Once a home carries a homestead exemption, Save Our Homes limits the annual increase in its assessed value to the lower of 3 percent or the change in the Consumer Price Index. The cap applies to the assessment, not to the tax bill. Millage rates can still rise, so a capped assessment does not guarantee a flat tax.

The rule sits in the constitution and in section 193.155 of the Florida Statutes, and it has run since 1995. The mechanics are worth stating precisely, because the Collier appraiser's own guidance makes the point that owners miss most: market value and assessed value stop being the same number. The appraiser still estimates a market, or just, value every January 1. The assessed value is the capped figure, and once the cap binds, the two drift apart. Your base year is the first year you hold the exemption, and the cap starts the year after.

The 3 percent number is a ceiling, not the actual increase. The Department of Revenue's table shows the cap has landed below 3 percent in most years since 1995, tracking inflation down to 0.1 percent in 2009. It has hit the 3 percent ceiling only in the hot years: 1997, 2001, 2005, 2006, 2008, and then again in 2022, 2023 and 2024. Those recent three are the ones that built the benefit now sitting on Southwest Florida homesteads.

Why did Save Our Homes matter most in Southwest Florida after 2021?

Between 2022 and 2024 the cap held homesteaded assessments to no more than 3 percent a year while the Consumer Price Index ran at 7.0, 6.5 and 3.4 percent, and Collier County market values climbed faster still. Every year the market outran the cap, the wedge between market value and assessed value grew wider.

Picture what that does over three years. A homesteaded owner whose market value jumped by double digits saw the taxable assessment move up by 3 percent, then 3 percent, then 3 percent. The difference did not disappear. It accumulated, untaxed, as Save Our Homes benefit. The Department of Revenue's own figures make the size of the shield concrete: in 2022 the CPI change was 7.0 percent and the cap cut it to 3.0, in 2023 the change was 6.5 percent and the cap again held at 3.0. That is more than three points of assessment growth deferred in each of those years, on top of whatever the local market added beyond the national inflation number.

For a home that has been a homestead since well before the pandemic, the accumulated benefit in a market like Naples can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. It is invisible on a normal tax bill, which shows only the capped assessment. It becomes very visible the moment the owner tries to move, because moving is where the benefit is either carried forward or thrown away.

What happens to your Save Our Homes benefit when you sell?

When a homesteaded property changes ownership it loses the Save Our Homes cap. On the following January 1 the county reassesses it at full just value, and the accumulated benefit resets to zero for the new owner. This is why a buyer's tax bill on a Southwest Florida home is often far higher than what the seller had been paying on the identical house.

The trigger is any change of ownership as defined by statute: a sale, a foreclosure, or a transfer of legal or beneficial title. Some transfers do not count, and the distinction matters to families. A transfer between spouses does not reset the cap. Certain transfers on death do not. A deed correction does not. A straight sale to a new buyer does, and it does so completely.

This is the mechanism behind one of the most common shocks in a hot Florida market. Two identical houses sit on the same street. One has been homesteaded for fifteen years and is assessed far below its market value. The other just sold, was reassessed at that market value, and now carries a tax bill several times larger. Nothing about the houses differs. The difference is entirely in how long each cap has been running, and a sale erases it.

The reset also explains why some longtime owners feel stuck. Before 2008 a move inside Florida wiped out the whole accumulated benefit, so a family that wanted a smaller home in retirement, or a larger one for a growing household, faced a tax bill on the new place calculated from scratch at current market value. The bigger the cap they had built, the more a move cost them, and the stronger the reason to stay put. Portability is the state's answer to that problem, and it is the reason the sell decision and the buy decision now have to be planned together rather than separately.

How does portability move your cap to a new home?

Portability lets a Florida homeowner carry the Save Our Homes benefit, the dollar gap between market and assessed value, from an old homestead to a new one. You may transfer up to $500,000 of that benefit. If you buy a home worth more than the last one, the whole benefit moves; if you buy a home worth less, a proportional share moves.

Florida voters added portability in 2008, and it changed the math of moving inside the state. The constitution sets out two transfer formulas, and they are simpler in numbers than in text.

Consider a longtime homestead the appraiser values at $700,000 and assesses under the cap at $400,000. The Save Our Homes benefit is the $300,000 difference. Move up to a home with a market value of $900,000, and the full $300,000 transfers: the new home begins assessed at $600,000 rather than $900,000. This is the upsizing case, and it moves dollar for dollar up to the $500,000 ceiling.

Now reverse it. Sell that $700,000 home and buy one worth $500,000. Because the new home is worth less, the benefit moves as a proportion rather than in full. The prior capped value of $400,000 is scaled by the new market value over the old, $500,000 divided by $700,000, which lands the new assessment near $286,000. The transferred benefit is roughly $214,000, not the full $300,000. Downsizing keeps a share of the cap, not all of it, and the share shrinks the smaller the new home is.

What is the deadline to port, and how do you claim it?

You must establish a homestead on the new property within three years of January 1 of the year you abandoned the old one, not three years from the closing date. File Form DR-501T with your homestead application, form DR-501, by March 1. Voters extended that window from two years to three in 2020, effective for 2021.

The deadline is the part that costs people the benefit, because it does not run from the sale. The Department of Revenue states it plainly: the three years count from January 1 of the year the old homestead was abandoned. Abandon a homestead in December and the usable window is shorter than it looks. You do not have to sell the old home first, as the Collier appraiser's portability guidance notes; you only have to give up the exemption on it. And portability is not automatic. It is a separate application, filed alongside the homestead application, and if it is not filed the cap does not follow you.

Here is where the number to watch is the $500,000 ceiling, and in Collier and Lee it is not a hypothetical limit. An owner who held a Naples home through the 2021 to 2023 run, and whose market value pulled several hundred thousand dollars above the capped assessment, can be sitting on a benefit at or beyond half a million dollars. Portability moves the first $500,000 and stops. The remainder is lost at the new home's first assessment, taxed at full market value like any other new purchase. The larger the benefit a long-tenured homestead has built, the more of it the cap on the cap quietly leaves behind. For most movers the ceiling never binds. For the long-held, high-value Southwest Florida homestead, it increasingly does, and it is worth modeling before a move rather than after.

Frequently asked questions

Does Save Our Homes lower my taxes or just my assessment? It caps the assessment, not the tax. The Collier appraiser puts it directly: the capped value can hold steady or even fall while the tax still rises if the local millage rate goes up. The cap protects the base the rate is applied to, which is where most of the savings come from over time, but it does not freeze the bill.

Do I have to sell my old home before I can port the benefit? No. You have to abandon the homestead, meaning you give up the exemption on the old property, but you may still own it. The transfer runs off abandonment of the homestead status, not off the closing of a sale.

Can I transfer more than $500,000 of Save Our Homes benefit? No. The constitutional ceiling on a portability transfer is $500,000 of accumulated benefit, whether you buy up or down. Any benefit above that amount does not move to the new homestead and is assessed at market value there.

What happens to the exemption and the cap if I rent the house out? Losing homestead status, including by converting the home to a rental, removes the exemption and ends the Save Our Homes cap. The property is then reassessed at just value on the following January 1, the same reset a sale triggers. Notify the county appraiser if your homestead status changes, to avoid back assessments and penalties.