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Market value vs assessed value

Your Florida property tax notice shows several numbers, and homeowners routinely read the wrong one as "what my house is worth". They are different figures, produced differently, for different purposes.

The three numbers on your TRIM notice

Market value (sometimes "just value"). The county property appraiser's estimate of what the property would sell for as of 1 January. It is produced by mass appraisal — a statistical model applied across an entire county — not by anyone visiting your house.

Assessed value. Market value after statutory limitations are applied. This is where Save Our Homes lives.

Taxable value. Assessed value minus exemptions — homestead, senior, veteran, widow and others. This is what your millage rate is actually applied to.

Save Our Homes, and why the gap gets enormous

For homestead property, Florida caps annual increases in assessed value at 3% or the change in the Consumer Price Index, whichever is lower — regardless of what market value did.

Compound that over a decade of South Florida price growth and the arithmetic runs away. A house bought and homesteaded long ago can have an assessed value that is a fraction of what it would sell for, entirely legitimately. Non-homestead property has a separate, more generous cap.

Two consequences worth knowing:

Your assessed value is not a valuation. Quoting it in a divorce, an estate or a negotiation is quoting a tax artifact.

Buying resets it. When a property sells, the cap benefit generally does not transfer, and the new assessment reflects market value. This is why a buyer's tax bill can be several times the seller's on the same house — and it catches people out constantly. Florida's portability provisions let a homesteader carry some accumulated benefit to a new homestead within the state, within limits and deadlines.

When an appeal is worth filing

The question is narrow: is the county's market value higher than what the property was actually worth on 1 January?

Not whether your taxes went up. Not whether your neighbour pays less. Not whether the assessment rose faster than you expected.

And here is the part that saves people money: if Save Our Homes has your assessed value well below market, an appeal may achieve nothing even if the market figure is overstated, because your tax is computed on the capped assessed value. Winning a reduction that still sits above your assessed value changes nothing.

We will tell you which situation you are in before you engage us.

If it is worth filing

Start informally — call the property appraiser's office and ask for a review. Many disputes resolve there at no cost, especially where the county's record for your property is factually wrong about square footage, bedroom count or a feature you do not have.

If that fails, you petition the county's Value Adjustment Board. The deadline is statutory and short, keyed to the mailing date printed on your own TRIM notice. Check the date on your notice and confirm it with your county's VAB office — do not rely on a date from a website, including this one.

What wins is documented evidence that a specific, real condition of your property is not reflected in a mass-appraisal model that never inspected it: deferred maintenance, an unpermitted or defective addition, functional obsolescence, an adverse location factor.

Tax assessment appeals · What is a home appraisal? · Appraisal vs Zestimate

Matt Thoren, State-Certified Residential Appraiser. Not a tax adviser or attorney — for legal or tax advice on an assessment, consult one. 561-853-2129