Florida Amendment 3, Explained: What It Saves You and What It Costs Your City

On November 3, Florida votes on Amendment 3. It would raise the homestead exemption by $200,000 over two years, and it needs 60% of the vote to pass. Almost every number you have heard about it is attached to a different version of it — which is why two people who actually work with the numbers are worth an hour of your time.

We had both of them on the South Florida Mortgage Report on the same morning.

Marty Kiar is the Broward County Property Appraiser. He ran the plain wording of the amendment against the real 2025 tax roll — actual values, actual rates, actual collections — and produced a city-by-city study of what it saves owners and what it costs local government.

Chip LaMarca is the state representative who voted to put it on your ballot. He also told us the bill is not how he would have written it, and he brought six years of city budget data to explain why he voted yes anyway.

What Amendment 3 actually does

Strip the campaign language off it and it is an increase in the homestead exemption, phased over two years, with a second provision most people have not heard about.

One thing it does not do is protect public safety from being cut. Kiar was direct about that: the amendment says a local government can spend money on police and fire. It does not say police and fire are safe if that government suddenly has less.

How we got here: one tweet

The origin story is shorter than you would expect.

About a year and a half ago, a man in North Florida got angry about his property tax bill and posted that Florida should get rid of property taxes altogether. The governor retweeted it. That was enough to start a statewide conversation.

The Florida Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank in Tallahassee, ran the arithmetic on actually doing it. Eliminating all property taxes — residential, commercial, tangible personal property — would pull roughly $55 to $60 billion a year out of local government. That is the money that pays for schools, roads, bridges, police, fire, parks and libraries. To replace it, the state would need a sales tax somewhere around 12% to 15%.

Then they asked Floridians whether they wanted that trade. About 70% said no — every party, every region.

So the conversation narrowed from all property taxes to homesteaded property only. The Legislature met in special session from June 1 to June 3 and put this amendment on the November ballot.

Kiar’s numbers, run against the real 2025 roll

This is the part that makes the episode worth an hour. Kiar took the plain wording of the amendment and applied it to 2025, the last year with a complete set of values, rates and collections. No projections, no assumptions about growth. Just: if this had been law, what would have happened?

Broward has about 425,000 homesteaded parcels.

Keep those three rows separate. They get mixed up constantly, and mixing them is how people end up quoting a number that is not on the ballot. The judge who threw out the original ballot title was making a version of the same complaint.

Two things explain why the cities land so differently. One is how much of a city is homesteaded. The other is how much commercial property it has to lean on. Pembroke Park is mostly mobile homes and commercial, so it barely notices. Cooper City and Parkland are bedroom communities with almost no commercial base, so they take it full in the face.

And the more expensive your home, the more you save. A $40 million house on the Intracoastal saves considerably more than a house in Plantation. Kiar made that point himself.

The Tamarac math, which is the whole argument in one paragraph

This was the line we pulled to the front of the episode, and it is the clearest illustration of what city managers are worried about.

Parkland is the same shape at the far end. It puts about 60% of its property tax money into public safety. Under full elimination it would lose 75.5% of its revenue, while the average Parkland homeowner saved nearly $8,000. Kiar’s honest answer on that was that he does not know how anyone fixes it.

The other side of it: Chip LaMarca’s six-year look back

LaMarca votes yes, and he is not arguing with Kiar’s figures. He says he relies on them. He is arguing about a different number entirely: what cities have been spending.

He represents seven cities and pulled their budgets from 2019, before COVID, against today.

His point is about where that money came from. Fort Lauderdale has not changed its millage rate in 20 years. Its taxable property value went from about $39 billion in 2019 to about $63 billion today — up 62%. Pompano Beach went from $13.5 billion to nearly $23 billion. Lighthouse Point went from $2.4 billion to nearly $4 billion.

Nobody voted to raise the rate. The base grew, and the revenue grew with it.

That is the case, and it is a fair one to put. He also does not pretend it lands evenly:

Asked how he would have written it, he said $25,000 a year for eight years, instead of $200,000 over two. Give cities eight years to adjust and they are out of excuses. He did not get the pen.

Why the Property Appraiser won’t tell you how to vote

Kiar has deliberately taken no public position on Amendment 3, and his reason is the most quotable thing in the episode.

So he brought data instead, and he has been taking it to rooms all over the county. He told us his Tamarac town hall drew 300 people and the Lauderhill one drew 400. He has never had town halls that size.

His full fiscal impact study, covering every city in Broward, is here: Broward County fiscal impacts, Amendment 3 (PDF). It is his office’s work, and it is worth having whichever way you are leaning.

What they both agree on

They disagree on the vote. They agree on almost everything underneath it.

• Public safety gets cut last. It is the most important thing local government does and, as LaMarca put it, the quickest way to get unelected.
• The honest conversation is about efficiency, not waste. Shared fire districts, consolidated 911, contracts with the Sheriff’s Office, moving nonprofit grant-making to community foundations. LaMarca pointed at Lazy Lake — an incorporated municipality of 38 people that gets its police, fire and 911 from somewhere else already.
• It is going to be close. LaMarca called it “passes at 62, fails at 58.” Kiar said legitimate polling has it at 62 to 64, and 64 is usually the ceiling.

History backs the caution. In 2018 an extra $25,000 exemption failed with about 58% of the vote. In 2022 a cost-of-living adjustment to the second exemption passed with about 61%. Sixty percent is a real wall. LaMarca noted the amendment that created the 60% threshold passed with about 51%.

The bill that does not exist yet

This is the part Kiar said genuinely worries him, and it does not get discussed anywhere else.

When the Legislature puts a constitutional amendment on the ballot, it normally passes an implementing bill alongside it — the document that says how the thing actually works. This time there isn’t one. If Amendment 3 passes, the details get written afterward, by whoever is in the room.

And the post-2028 language hands that room a lot of authority. It can set a slow schedule tied to inflation. Or it can move to eliminate homestead property taxes outright, minus schools, without going back to the voters at all.

Nobody on the episode claimed to know which. Both said the same thing: it depends entirely on who is in Tallahassee when it gets written.

The renters question, and the non-homestead cap

The provision nobody talks about is the assessment cap on non-homestead property dropping from 10% to 5%. Broward has 298,181 non-homesteaded parcels. Applied to 2025, the county would have collected about $26 million less — roughly 1.5%.

That is a much smaller number than the homestead side, and it works differently. The homestead change reduces what a city collects. The non-homestead cap does not reduce anything — it just slows how fast the taxable value climbs. Still going up. Going up at 5% instead of 10%.

LaMarca’s view is that this pushes back on the argument that renters get nothing: the owner of an apartment building is taxed less than they otherwise would be. He was also honest about the limit of that argument. Nothing guarantees a landlord passes it through.

The ballot title a judge threw out

The amendment was originally titled Save Our Homes from Excessive Property Taxes. A judge struck it and replaced it with language closer to what the amendment technically does.

We asked LaMarca — a yes vote — whether the title oversold it. He did not defend it:

What this means if you are buying a home

Here is the part that is our job, and it is the thing we expect people to get wrong most often.

If it passes, nobody’s payment changes the day of the vote. An existing homeowner sees it at their next escrow analysis, after the exemption is actually applied to the property.

On the buying side it is stricter than that. When we write a pre-approval, we underwrite off the tax bill that exists on that property today. We do not get to credit a buyer for an exemption that is not on the property yet, and no lender does. So Amendment 3 does not make anyone qualify for more house the day after the election.

And if you are relocating to Florida, the calendar matters. You have to be a resident on January 1, 2027. Arrive after that and you wait five years for the full benefit — which means your bill can be meaningfully higher than your neighbor’s on an identical house, at the identical rate, for years.

There is a related trap that already exists, with or without this amendment: the tax figure on a listing is the seller’s capped assessed value, and it resets on sale. We wrote about that, and about how to challenge an assessment you think is wrong, in our guide to disputing your Broward property assessment.

If you are an agent, this is the useful bit

When a client sends you a number about Amendment 3, find out which scenario it came from before you answer. The $150,000, the $250,000 and the full-elimination figures are three different things, and they are being quoted interchangeably in the same conversations.

The other one worth knowing: the savings number your client cares about and the city-budget number in the news are not in tension. Both are true at the same time. That is the entire reason this vote is close.

Capital Partners Mortgage Services, LLC · 1515 N. University Dr., Suite D102, Coral Springs, FL 33071 · (954) 271-2024 · NMLS #2332376 · nmlsconsumeraccess.org · Equal Housing Opportunity. This article is educational commentary and is not tax, legal, voting or financial advice, and is not a commitment to lend. Statements and figures attributed to Marty Kiar and to Rep. Chip LaMarca are their own, made on our program on September 14, 2026, and are not endorsements by or positions of Capital Partners Mortgage Services. The fiscal impact study linked above is the work of the Broward County Property Appraiser’s office. Property tax outcomes depend on your specific property, exemptions and local millage rates, and any figures cited here are illustrative of 2025 data rather than a projection of your bill. Confirm all dates and requirements with your county Property Appraiser and read the full amendment text before voting.