Why Florida Governor Ron DeSantis Is Backing Off Abolishing Property Taxes—for Now

Imagine showing up at the polls this November excited to vote for property tax relief, only to find a ballot stuffed with more than half a dozen tax cut proposals, each promising savings in a different way.

One would wipe out certain nonschool taxes on homesteads. Another would slow how fast your assessed value can rise to 3% every three years instead of annually. Another would offer a $100,000 exemption, but only if you keep full property insurance coverage.

That’s the scenario Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis says he wants to avoid. Instead of risking voters canceling one another out by splitting their votes among different proposals, he’s hoping to control the ballot and the narrative with a narrower path forward for property tax relief.

To that end, DeSantis has teased the possibility of a special session in the state legislature to consolidate ideas and advance a single clean amendment—one that keeps the promise big and the question simple, including his most aggressive idea yet: abolishing homestead property taxes.

But the details on the session or what the amendment could look like have yet to emerge. In the meantime, here’s what to know.

DeSantis’ strategy: ‘Juice turnout’ with a single amendment 

At the core of DeSantis’ approach is a straightforward piece of election calculus: In Florida, any constitutional amendment needs 60% support to pass. In his telling, the fastest way to ensure property tax relief fails is to give voters too many competing versions of it.

“If you put multiple possible amendments on the ballot, that means none will pass. Let’s just be clear, because you may like this iteration, you may like that. So even though maybe 60% want property tax relief, your view may be different (on) how do you do it, right? And so that’s a guaranteed way to kill it,” DeSantis said at a press conference announcing an April special session for congressional redistricting.

His solution is consolidation: one amendment, one pitch, one up-or-down choice for voters.

“If you want to get something to pass, you’ve got to go with one vehicle. I don’t think the Senate would put all that stuff on anyways, but you got to go with one vehicle,” he added.

And DeSantis isn’t only arguing that a single proposal would be clearer, he’s arguing it would be politically useful. In the same remarks, he suggested property tax relief could help drive voters to the polls, especially in an election cycle that may not replicate recent high-turnout conditions.

“You may not get the same turnout we got in ’22. People were really excited to vote in ’22—a different context, different environment,” DeSantis said.

“For the legislators to put this on, I think it’ll be really beneficial for them because I think they’ll be able to juice more turnout for their elections. And that’s not the main reason you do it. The main reason is because it’s right substantively. But I do think it does have that added bonus on top of it,” he added.

But he also signaled doubts that lawmakers could pull it together during a regular session, teasing that, if this moves, it may require a dedicated, made-for-this moment in Tallahassee.

“I don’t know that it necessarily is something that you do in the regular session either,” he said. “We’ll see what happens. I think there’s some value in teeing something up that the voters see [and] going up [to Tallahassee] to do this. And then voters can talk to their members about what they want to do.” 

A special session—when the legislature meets outside of its typical schedule to focus on a single specific issue in an accelerated time frame—would give the governor and legislative leaders a cleaner runway. Fewer competing priorities, fewer procedural detours, and more pressure to land on a single, ballot-ready proposal, rather than letting the idea splinter into seven different promises.

Why Florida can't agree on one property tax fix

But there’s a reason why there’s a mishmash of current tax cut proposals before the legislature: Property tax reform is a complex, nuanced issue, especially for a state like Florida.

Currently, Florida’s property tax burden sits in the middle of the pack nationally—ranking 30th, according to the Tax Foundation. That ranking matters more in a state with no income tax, where property taxes carry more of the load. (Texas, another no-income-tax state, ranks 7th.)

But the politics of property taxes aren’t driven by rankings; they’re driven by bills. And in Florida, those bills have been climbing fast. Between 2019 and 2025, escrow payments for property taxes and homeowners insurance rose 70%.

In coastal markets, the pressure is even more acute. All-cash buying during and immediately following the pandemic pushed prices higher, and higher prices eventually flowed through to assessed values and tax bills. One family Realtor.com® interviewed in May 2025 watched their annual property tax bill jump from $15,000 to more than $91,000.

That’s the backdrop to the seven proposals lawmakers advanced during the 2025 legislative session. The proposals span everything from direct cash relief to structural changes in exemptions and assessment limits, and they vary widely in how seriously they grapple with the harder question: how local governments replace the revenue those cuts would erase.

“A lot of voters don’t understand the amendments. That’s just a fact. I mean, they tell me that. Very smart people tell me they don’t understand. So you’ve got to write it in a very clear and concise way where everybody knows, you know, what we’re looking to accomplish here,” he said.

“You also have to have the structure of it right. You’ve got to get the votes, you’ve got to do all that. So we’re doing that. We’re working very hard on it. We have worked very hard on it. We’ve got a lot of great data now to work off of, but we’ve got more work to do,” he added.

In other words: Even if voters agree the system feels unaffordable, getting to a single fix they can understand—and trust—can be harder than passing the sentiment itself. The practical constraints are real, too: There’s no U.S. municipality that truly operates on zero property taxes. And the bigger the promise, the harder it is to find a real world case study.

But DeSantis has been clear about one thing: He's not backing down. “We’re working hard to get it right," he said. "There’s a lot that goes into it because you got to get it passed, right?”