The amendment is called Save Our Homes. It leaves Save Our Homes exactly as it was.

Florida voters will decide on November 3 whether to write the largest homestead exemption in the state's history into the constitution. The measure reached the ballot through a special session that lasted three days, it carries a name borrowed from a 1992 amendment it does not amend, and the number most often quoted as its price is not the number it costs in its first year.

All three of those things are worth untangling before a ballot arrives in the mail.

The instrument is CS/HJR 1-F, passed in the 2026F special session and titled "Save our Homes from Excessive Property Taxes." The Division of Elections assigned it Amendment 3 on June 16. Like every constitutional amendment in Florida it needs 60 percent of the vote, not a simple majority, and that threshold has killed property tax measures before.

What does Florida Amendment 3 actually do?

Amendment 3 raises the second homestead exemption to $150,000 of assessed value on January 1, 2027 and to $250,000 on January 1, 2028, indexed to inflation from 2029. It applies only to levies other than school district levies. Separately, it lowers the annual assessment increase cap on non-homestead property from 10 percent to 5 percent, also for non-school levies. It directs the Legislature to set a schedule, by general law, for eliminating non-school homestead taxes entirely.

The homestead change is the headline. Today a Florida homestead carries a $25,000 exemption that applies to every levy including schools, plus a second exemption that reached $26,411 in 2026 after the 2024 amendment that indexed it to inflation. Amendment 3 replaces that second exemption with $150,000, then $250,000.

For a Naples homestead assessed at $400,000, the non-school taxable value falls from roughly $348,600 to about $175,000 in 2027 and to $125,000 in 2028. The school-taxable value does not move at all. That distinction does most of the work in this amendment and it is the one the ballot summary states plainly.

Does Amendment 3 change the Save Our Homes cap?

No. The 3 percent annual assessment cap on homesteaded property, adopted in 1992 and known as Save Our Homes, is left in place unchanged. The enrolled resolution reproduces that section of Article VII without amending its operative language.

This deserves emphasis because the naming invites the opposite conclusion. A homeowner reading "Save Our Homes from Excessive Property Taxes" could reasonably assume the measure tightens or extends the cap that has held their assessment increases to 3 percent a year through the price run of 2022 to 2024. It does not. The cap that governs how fast a homesteaded assessment can climb is exactly where it was.

What the amendment does change is the other cap, the 10 percent limit that applies to property without a homestead. That figure drops to 5 percent. It is a real and substantial change, and it benefits landlords, second-home owners and commercial property holders rather than homesteaders.

So the measure carries the name of a homestead protection while its cap provision operates on non-homestead property. Both facts are in the text. Neither is in the title.

How did it get on the ballot, and by what vote?

The Legislature met in special session from June 1 to June 3, 2026. The House passed CS/HJR 1-F on June 2 at 12:29 p.m. by 75 votes to 26. The Senate substituted it for its own CS/SJR 2-F and passed it the same day at 12:57 p.m. by 30 votes to 9. It was filed with the Secretary of State on June 16.

A joint resolution proposing a constitutional amendment requires three fifths of the membership of each house under Article XI, section 1. Both chambers cleared that. Voter approval requires 60 percent under Article XI, section 5(e).

A companion statute, CS/SB 4-F, became Chapter 2026-240 on June 24. Among other things it authorizes the ballot summary to run past the word limit that would otherwise apply, which is why voters will see an unusually long block of text on this one.

What will it cost local governments?

The Revenue Estimating Conference reviewed the impact on June 12 and again on July 10, 2026. Its July estimate puts the statewide non-school revenue reduction at $4.93 billion in fiscal 2027-28, rising each year as the exemption steps up and the caps bind:

The school district impact is zero. That is not an oversight or a rounding artifact. The committee substitute removed all impacts on school taxes, which is why the amendment applies to non-school levies throughout.

Two numbers in circulation need correcting against this table. The figures of roughly $8 billion, and $14 billion including school taxes, come from analyses of the version that existed before the committee substitute stripped the school provisions. They describe a measure that is not on the ballot. And the $11.8 billion figure, which has been reported as the cost, is the recurring or sixth-year number. First-year cash is $4.93 billion, less than half of it.

What does it cost in Collier and Lee?

The Conference published the reduction county by county and entity by entity. For Southwest Florida the recurring numbers are large relative to the size of the governments absorbing them.

Within Collier, the county commission's own share begins at $47.7 million and reaches $134.2 million by fiscal 2031-32. Independent special districts across the county account for $22.6 million. The City of Naples loses $1.36 million and Marco Island $1.07 million.

Within Lee, the county commission begins at $99.9 million and reaches $253.4 million. Independent special districts account for $33.1 million. Cape Coral loses $31.1 million, Fort Myers $10.5 million, Bonita Springs $1.58 million and Sanibel $713,000.

Those figures are revenue reductions, not budget cuts. What follows from them is a political question this newspaper does not answer: a county can absorb the loss, raise millage on the remaining base, or reduce services, and nothing in the amendment chooses among those. What the amendment does do is restrict the purposes for which counties and municipalities may spend property tax revenue, which narrows the third option somewhat.

What does it look like on an actual tax bill?

A worked example makes the two-track structure legible in a way the ballot summary does not.

Take a homesteaded Collier County house with a just value of $600,000 and, because the owner has held it since 2015, a Save Our Homes capped assessed value of $430,000. Under current law that owner subtracts $25,000 from the school-taxable value and roughly $51,400 from the non-school taxable value. School taxes are levied on $405,000. Non-school taxes are levied on about $378,600.

Under Amendment 3 in 2028, the school side does not move. School taxes are still levied on $405,000, because the amendment never touches school levies and the Save Our Homes cap that produced the $430,000 figure is likewise unchanged. The non-school side falls to $180,000.

Millage varies by taxing authority, so the dollar saving depends on where in the county the house sits. The structural point does not. Roughly a third of a Southwest Florida property tax bill is school millage, and that third is untouched. The amendment is a deep cut to two thirds of the bill rather than a shallow cut to all of it, and a homeowner who expects their total bill to fall by the same proportion as their exemption rose will be disappointed.

There is a second-order effect worth naming. Because the exemption is a fixed dollar amount rather than a percentage, it is worth proportionally more on a modest home than on an expensive one. A $250,000 exemption removes most of the non-school taxable value of a $300,000 house in Lehigh Acres and a smaller share of a $2 million house on Gordon Drive. The Conference's county tables capture the aggregate revenue loss; they do not describe that distribution, and no official estimate of it was published.

How does this differ from the 2024 amendment?

Florida voters already changed the homestead exemption in November 2024. That amendment indexed the second exemption to inflation, which is why the figure moved from a flat $25,000 to $25,722 in 2025 and $26,411 in 2026.

The difference in scale is the story. The 2024 change added a few hundred dollars of exempt value a year and saved a typical homeowner a few dollars. Amendment 3 replaces the entire second exemption with a figure roughly ten times larger, in two steps, and then indexes that.

The two also differ in who pays for them. The 2024 indexing was small enough that counties absorbed it without much comment. A recurring $11.8 billion statewide reduction is a different category of decision, and it arrives alongside new constitutional restrictions on what counties and municipalities may spend property tax revenue on.

What happens if you moved to Florida recently?

If you did not establish Florida residency by December 31, 2026, the amendment gives you a smaller benefit for four years. The resolution sets $25,000 against school levies and $50,000 against non-school levies for that period, with the larger exemption arriving in the fifth year.

Here the ballot summary and the resolution text describe the same rule differently. The summary tells voters the amendment ensures "fairness for Florida residents" and refers to maintaining Florida residency for five years. The text sets four years at the lower amount and delivers the full exemption in the fifth. The Senate's own announcement describes it as four years. The Revenue Estimating Conference describes it as four years followed by the larger exemption in the fifth.

These are compatible readings of one schedule rather than a contradiction, but they will produce different answers from different sources, and a snowbird deciding whether to establish domicile before December 31 is exactly the person who will notice. The operative language is in the resolution, not the summary.

For Southwest Florida this clause has unusual weight. Collier County's median age is 66.3 and a large share of its homestead applications come from people who spent decades filing taxes somewhere else. Anyone weighing a move now has a dated reason to weigh it sooner, and the residency test itself is a separate and more demanding question than the exemption schedule.

What the state has published, and what it has not

Florida has built a website for the measure at saveourhomesfl.com. The page states that it "was created by the State of Florida." It does not name the agency responsible, and it does not sit on a .gov domain. It is a state-created site rather than a campaign committee's site, and it should be read as neither an agency publication nor independent analysis.

The Department of Revenue has not published a PT-series bulletin on Amendment 3, which is unsurprising given that nothing takes effect unless voters approve it.

The Conference attached two cautions to its own numbers. It notes that its estimate may understate the reduction unless implementing legislation updates section 196.031 of the statutes, because the enlarged exemption could spill onto contiguous parcels in ways current law does not contemplate. And it treats the amendment's instruction to schedule full elimination of non-school homestead taxes as unquantified, because the procedure does not yet exist.

That second caution is the largest open question on the ballot. The exemption amounts are written into the constitution and can be counted. The elimination schedule is delegated to a future Legislature, and no estimate of it exists because there is nothing yet to estimate.

What this does not settle

Amendment 3 is a tax cut whose size is known through 2031 and unknown after that, financed by revenue reductions at county and municipal level that the amendment does not replace. Whether that is prudent is a judgment for voters. What can be said from the documents is narrower and worth holding onto.

The exemption arrives in two steps, not one. School taxes do not change. The cap that changes is the one on property that is not your home, and the cap the measure is named after does not change at all. The first-year cost is $4.93 billion and the often-quoted $11.8 billion is a later, recurring figure. Collier stands to lose $203 million a year at full effect and Lee $453 million. And if you were not a Florida resident by the last day of this year, your benefit is smaller until your fifth.

Everything above is in the enrolled resolution, the implementing chapter law, and the Revenue Estimating Conference tables. All three are public, all three are linked here, and the ballot summary is shorter than any of them.