For about one in three Florida homes, an appeal cannot lower the tax bill no matter how strong the evidence. We measured all 8,409,573 residential parcels on the 2026 roll. Here is who an appeal actually helps, and how to tell which you are.
A Florida VAB petition disputes one thing: your property's JUST value, which is the county's estimate of what it is worth. But your tax bill is not calculated on just value. It is calculated on TAXABLE value, which comes from ASSESSED value — and for a homesteaded property, assessed value is capped by Save Our Homes (Fla. Stat. s 193.155) at 3% growth a year. After a decade of Florida appreciation, a long-held homestead can sit far below its market value. That gap is a benefit you already have. It is also the reason an appeal may do nothing: reducing just value only reaches your tax bill once it drops BELOW your capped assessed value. Above that line, the cap is already binding, and the bill does not move. You can win a large reduction and save exactly nothing.
We computed the gap between just value and the capped assessed value for every residential parcel on the 2026 roll. That gap is the reduction a petition must achieve before the first dollar of saving appears. The distribution:
Take a genuine parcel from the Hillsborough County roll. The county assesses its just value at $608,998. Its capped assessed value is $459,927. Taxable value after exemptions is $408,516 for county levies. Comparable sales in its neighbourhood support somewhere around $475,000 — a reduction of roughly 22%, which by any standard is a strong result. It would save the owner nothing. Not a reduced amount. Nothing. Just value has to fall below $459,927 before the tax bill notices, and that requires a 24.5% cut. This is one property, not a typical outcome, but the arithmetic is the same everywhere: the question is never how big a reduction you can win, it is whether the reduction clears your own cap.
The single biggest predictor of whether an appeal can help you is not your county, your value, or your neighbourhood. It is whether the property is homesteaded. Non-homesteaded property has its own cap — 10% a year under Fla. Stat. s 193.1554 and s 193.1555 — but that cap applies ONLY to non-school levies. School district millage, typically a third or more of a Florida tax bill, is assessed on full just value with no limitation whatsoever. Any reduction reaches the school portion immediately. There is no threshold to clear.
Comparable sales are not the only evidence that lowers a property's value. Fla. Stat. s 193.011 requires the appraiser to consider the condition of the property, and the standard instrument for that is cost to cure: what it would take to put right a roof at the end of its life, a failed air conditioning system, an original kitchen, active water damage. Those costs reduce what a property is worth ON TOP OF what comparable sales show. The two are additive, not alternatives. That is why 688,497 Florida homes sit in a band where comparable sales alone fall short but a documented condition case does not. On the Hillsborough parcel above, a documented cure of roughly $63,900 — a roof, an HVAC system, water damage and a bathroom deficiency, each priced from published construction cost data — takes the required reduction from unreachable to comfortably achievable, and the annual saving from about $57 to about $1,194. Same house. Same comparable sales. The only thing that changed is that the owner said what was wrong with it.
If you take one thing from this article, take this. When any service asks you to tick the problems with your property, the temptation is to skip the ones that feel minor or embarrassing. Do not. For hundreds of thousands of Florida homes, the defect list is the entire difference between a petition that saves money and one that cannot. An unticked box is not modesty, it is money you do not get back. And every item you do declare has to be genuine and defensible — a petition is a sworn document, and cost to cure that cannot be supported is worse than no cost to cure at all.
Separately from whether an appeal CAN help, there is the question of whether Boards actually grant reductions. Florida publishes this. Every Value Adjustment Board must issue a Tax Impact Notice (Form DR-529), and the Department of Revenue compiles all 67 counties into one file. For tax year 2024, statewide, 32,216 of the 65,437 petitions that reached a decision won a reduction — 49%. Across every petition filed, including those withdrawn, it is 22%. Florida Value Adjustment Boards removed $6.0 billion of taxable value that year. The variation between counties is enormous: Miami-Dade reduced 14,856 of 41,942 residential petitions filed, while Marion County reduced 0 of 310 requested assessments in tax year 2022.
Look at what actually happens to Florida petitions and a different picture appears. In Broward County in 2024, 24,132 assessment reductions were requested — and 18,242 were withdrawn or resolved before the Board ever ruled. In Duval, 5,157 of 5,734. In Hillsborough, 4,759 of 5,655. Outside Miami-Dade, most Florida petitions never reach a hearing at all: they are settled with the Property Appraiser first. A settlement is normally a taxpayer win, and it never appears in the reduction column of any published statistic. So the headline reduction rates understate what actually happens to a well-evidenced petition — the appraiser frequently moves before anyone has to decide anything.
You do not need to guess at any of this, and you should not pay to find out. Enter your address and we read your parcel straight from your county's roll — your just value, your capped assessed value, the exact reduction required before your bill changes, and what that would be worth at your county's millage rate. Every figure is checkable against the TRIM notice in your mailbox, because it comes from the same source. If the arithmetic says an appeal cannot help you, we tell you so and we do not take your money. If your comparable sales fall short but your property's condition could close the gap, we ask about the condition rather than turning you away. That check is free and it happens before any payment. It is the whole reason we loaded 8.4 million parcels in the first place.
Florida gives you 25 days from the date your TRIM notice is mailed. The deadline is satisfied by physical RECEIPT at the Value Adjustment Board, not by postmark — a petition posted on day 25 and delivered on day 27 is late, and there is no remedy. The county filing fee is set by each Board and capped at $50 per parcel by Fla. Stat. s 194.013(1), as amended by HB 7031 effective 1 July 2025; some counties still charge $15. TaxAppeal USA prepares your DR-486, you sign it yourself as s 194.011(3) requires, and we mail it with the filing fee paid, for a flat $89 plus that county fee. No percentage of your savings, ever.
$89 flat fee. You sign it, we file it. You keep 100% of your savings.
TaxAppeal USA is a self-service document-preparation and mail filing service. In every state we serve, including Florida, we are not property tax consultants, agents, or representatives, we do not provide tax or legal advice, and we do not represent customers before any appraisal district, board of equalization, value adjustment board, or review board. Every protest and petition is prepared for the property owner, signed by the owner, and filed in the owner’s name. In Florida we also pay your county’s Value Adjustment Board filing fee on your behalf and mail your petition to the Clerk of the Value Adjustment Board. Your petition is signed by you as the property owner under section 194.011(3), Florida Statutes. TaxAppeal USA does not sign as your representative, does not appear before the Board, and does not present evidence or argument at a hearing.