Save Our Homes and Portability: Keeping Your Florida Tax Break When You Move

Updated October 3, 2026

Save Our Homes caps how much the assessed value of a Florida homestead can grow each year. Portability lets you take the accumulated savings, up to $500,000, to your next Florida homestead.

How the Save Our Homes cap works

Starting the year after you receive a homestead exemption, your assessed value can rise by no more than 3% or the change in the Consumer Price Index, whichever is lower. Florida's Department of Revenue publishes the cap each year. Market value can climb 10% or 20%; your assessed value cannot.

The gap between market (just) value and assessed value is called the Save Our Homes differential or "SOH benefit." In parts of Florida where prices doubled in a decade, long-time owners pay tax on a fraction of what their home would sell for.

Exceptions to the cap

• Change of ownership resets assessed value to market value the following January 1. Adding a spouse, or transfers between spouses after a death or divorce, generally do not count as a change.
• New construction and improvements such as an addition or pool are added at market value on top of the capped value.
• The recapture rule: if your assessed value is below market value, it still rises each year by the cap amount, even in a year when market value falls, until the two meet.

Portability: moving your savings

When you sell a Florida homestead and buy another one in Florida, you can transfer up to $500,000 of your Save Our Homes benefit to the new home. You must establish the new homestead within three years after January 1 of the year you gave up the old one.

Upsizing: buying a more expensive home

You transfer the full benefit, up to $500,000. Example: your old home's market value is $600,000 and assessed value $320,000, so your benefit is $280,000. If the new home's market value is $750,000, its first assessed value becomes $750,000 − $280,000 = $470,000.

Downsizing: buying a less expensive home

You transfer the same percentage of savings. In the example the old assessed value was 53.3% of market, so a $400,000 new home would be assessed at about $213,333.

How to claim portability

1. Apply for the homestead exemption on the new home (form DR-501) by March 1.
2. File the Transfer of Homestead Assessment Difference, form DR-501T, with the new county's property appraiser, at the same time.
3. If the old home was in another county, the two appraisers verify the benefit with each other. Expect it on your TRIM notice in August.

Couples and split benefits

When joint owners sell and each buys a separate new homestead, the benefit is divided between them. Each owner's share is generally based on how many owners there were, and couples should decide before filing how to split it, because the first filing can lock in the allocation.

Frequently asked questions