There’s been a lot of talk about the proposed homestead exemption increase, but the Tampa Monitor wanted to evaluate what that would actually look like for the City of Tampa. Everything in this post is only the City of Tampa’s slice of your tax bill — the 6.2076 mills that fund city services. Schools won’t be touched and the county has their own headache.
Here’s the short version of what’s on the ballot in November: a constitutional amendment to change the homestead exemption — currently $50,000 — to $150,000 in the first year and $250,000 in the second. A separate piece of the same amendment cuts the cap on how fast non-homestead properties (rentals, commercial buildings, second homes) can be assessed, from 10% a year to 5%, starting immediately.
To figure out what that means for the city, I downloaded the latest Hillsborough County Property Appraiser’s parcel data — every property inside the Tampa city limits, all 137,886 of them — and did the math (and by did the math I used existing and new scripts I’ve cobbled together to parse the data — see bottom of post for link to source).
The short version
| Category | Year 1 ($150K) | Year 2 ($250K) |
|---|---|---|
| Homestead exemption ($M) | 35.1 | 59.8 |
| 5% cap, at 8% growth ($M) | 10.9 | 23.2 |
* Cap figures assume the market grows 8% a year. If the market cools to 5% growth, the cap piece shrinks to a few million; if it runs hot like 2021–22, it’s bigger. The exemption piece doesn’t depend on the market at all — it’s locked in the moment the amendment passes.
- Year one costs the city roughly $46 million. Year two, roughly $83 million a year — every year after that.
- By year two, more than half of Tampa homeowners would pay $0 in city property tax.
- For scale: $83 million is more than the city’s entire Parks & Recreation budget, half of what it spends on Fire, and a third of what it spends on Police.
The rest of this post is just showing the work.
I’ll also note I compared my calculations to ones I saw from Florida League of Cities (document is no longer available) and their estimate using FY25 numbers was $66 million for a $250,000 exemption. My calculations were based on the current tax roll as of 6/1/26 which accounts for the difference in estimates plus the inclusion of the 5% cap.
What the homestead exemption costs, year by year
Tampa has 72,989 homestead properties. Run each one through the new exemption and here’s what comes out, alongside the new 5% assessment cap:
| Category | Today ($50K) | Year 1 ($150K) | Year 2 ($250K) |
|---|---|---|---|
| City homestead tax revenue ($M) | 131.6 | 96.5 | 71.8 |
Currently 5% of homestead properties pay no ad valorem taxes — mostly modest homes whose value sits under the current exemption. In year one it becomes 35%. In year two it’s 55% — over half of every owner-occupied home in Tampa, contributing zero dollars to the city’s operating budget.
| Category | Today ($50K) | Year 1 ($150K) | Year 2 ($250K) |
|---|---|---|---|
| % of homesteads paying $0 city tax | 5.4 | 35.4 | 54.9 |
The part nobody’s talking about: the 5% cap
The exemption gets all the attention because it has a dollar figure you can put on a yard sign. The assessment cap is quieter, and in the long run it might matter more. Non-homestead property — every rental, office, storefront, and warehouse — is two-thirds of Tampa’s tax base. Today its assessed value can rise up to 10% a year; the amendment cuts that to 5%, starting in year one. Unlike the exemption, which is a one-time (well, two-time) hit, the cap compounds. Every year the market grows faster than 5%, the gap between what property is worth and what it can be taxed on gets wider, forever — or until the property sells.
At 8% market growth, the cap costs the city $10.9 million in year one and $23.2 million in year two — it roughly doubles, and it keeps accelerating from there.
Year one is the cheapest this provision will ever be.
And if “8% growth” sounds aggressive: it isn’t for Tampa. In the parcel data right now, 28.8% of non-homestead properties — 18,670 of them — are assessed below their market value, which generally happens when the market grows faster than the current 10% cap. Growth here hasn’t just been above 5%; for thousands of properties it’s been above 10%. The cap costs the most exactly when the market booms and growth accelerates putting more strain on city services. Besides, there’s a reason 5% was picked and it was added to the amendment.
| Category | 2% growth | 5% growth | 8% growth | 10%+ growth |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cap cost, year 1 ($M) | 1.8 | 2.3 | 10.9 | 16.6 |
| Cap cost, year 2 ($M) | 2.7 | 4.2 | 23.2 | 35.6 |
Even if the market goes flat tomorrow, the cap still costs money, because thousands of properties are still being assessed upward toward their boom-era values — and the amendment cuts that catch-up speed in half.
OK, but what does $83 million mean?
A lot is made of the city having a 2 billion dollar budget, so I pulled the city’s own numbers from its OpenGov transparency site (FY2026, general fund — the budget property taxes actually feed, includes operations, capital projects):
- The general fund is about $708 million. So year two of the amendment is roughly 12% of it (the exemption alone is about 8%).
- Police: $249 million.
- Fire: $165 million.
- Parks & Recreation: $71 million. The year-two loss is bigger than the entire parks budget. Even year one is about half of it.
Certainly Parks & Rec isn’t going to be eliminated, but the cuts have to come from somewhere.
About the numbers
This analysis uses the Hillsborough County Property Appraiser’s bulk parcel file (May 29, 2026 snapshot) — 137,886 City of Tampa parcels, 72,989 of them homesteads — with the city’s 2025 operating millage of 6.2076. It models the city’s portion only. Budget comparisons come from the city’s OpenGov transparency portal. Full methodology, scripts, and data are available at github.com/miklb/tampa-homestead-analysis.
If you spot an error, tell me and I’ll correct it.
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