During most midterm election years, the most talked-about races state by state are candidate races. But in Florida’s 2026 midterm election, taxes seem to be on everyone’s radar. 

Governor Ron DeSantis’ proposed amendment to increase the homestead exemption and save qualifying homeowners is an especially controversial ballot measure, while Okaloosa County’s referendum to extend the half-cent sales tax caused less debate. 

Let’s take a look at the tax-related ballot measures and hear from the community on their pros and cons.

Amendment 3

Every Florida ballot will contain the No. 3 Constitutional Amendment, which would increase “the homestead exemption, for all non-school taxes, to $150,000 in 2027, and $250,000 in 2028, and adjust for inflation thereafter,” according to the ballot text. 

In simple terms, the amendment would increase the portion Florida resident homeowners can deduct from their home’s value before calculating property taxes owed, saving them money and reducing ad valorem revenue for local governments. 

The proposed amendment quickly became one of Florida’s most controversial ballot measures for panhandle communities, where property tax revenue makes up as much as 60% of city governments’ annual budgets.

Some Floridians, like Fort Walton Beach City Council member T. Payne Walker, see the loss of local government revenue as a necessary byproduct of lower property taxes.

“For too long, rising property values have provided local governments with significant and disproportionate tax revenue increases while homeowners and businesses struggle with the rising cost of living,” Walker said. “Amendment 3 represents an opportunity to shift that balance back toward taxpayers.”

However, some locals, like Melissa Ward, director of planning and development for Dunlap & Shipman, P.A., said voting for the amendment would cost taxpayers in the long run.  

“For instance, renters get no benefit whatsoever because the person who is renting that home is not homesteaded,” Ward said. “Therefore, the owner of that home is still paying full-price taxes, and so that means they’re going to raise, likely, the rent, in order to cover other costs. It also means commercial businesses will experience some increase. They will continue to raise prices. So, the cost of living is going to continue to get higher, and so … I don’t think this is an across-the-board level way of reducing the cost of living to all Floridians.”

Ward spent 11 years working for Walton County’s Planning Department and said it gave her a firsthand look at how communities can suffer when they lose property tax revenue.

“That tax money is provided to your local agencies, your government, your city and county operations, and those monies are also divided up into emergency services and transportation needs, and important functions of the county,” Ward said. “We’re looking at estimates right now, and we’re talking about $39 million in the first two years being not provided [in Walton County] … so your emergency services could see a hit of $2 million, and that means people who are out there every day putting their life on the line for fires, life, safety issues and all of that. … That hit is going to be to them, as well as to the county who has to provide those services.”

However, Walker said local governments are already overspending taxpayer money, and have an obligation to cut costs. 

“I recognize that some local government officials are concerned about losing revenue,” he said. “But the first responsibility of elected officials should be to the taxpayers they represent, not to preserving or expanding government budgets.”

Ward said she understands that local governments must be good stewards of taxpayer money, but she thinks the proposed amendment targets taxes necessary for Floridians’ quality of life.

“They’re [local government] not automatically going to go in and start cutting jobs first thing, but they are going to cut non-essential programs down or out,” Ward said. “When you do that, then there are services that individuals may not have available to them. For instance, the county supports certain types of transportation for people who can’t get to medical appointments. And so, is that a program that gets cut? We don’t know because we don’t know what that budget’s going to look like.”

Should Amendment 3 pass, local governments would either have to cut services or find new revenue sources. 

Walker said he worries governments would simply find new ways to tax residents. 

“We the People must remain vigilant and keep a watchful eye on our local elected representatives to ensure they don’t simply replace reduced property tax revenues with new taxes, fees, special assessments, or other creative methods of extracting more money from taxpayers.”

On the other hand, Ward said the ballot language implies local governments will have no choice in the matter.

“You have to be able to weigh that balance if you’re going to take away the money that funds these services,” she said. “Then you have to figure out a way to fund them, and the current amendment bill three does not provide a funding mechanism to put that back in. It’s framed as a way to be more careful with budgeting, and we all should be. Nobody’s saying that’s not the case, but it is concerning what will happen to the local government.”

Half-cent referendum

Likely less controversial than Florida’s Amendment 3 is an Okaloosa County surtax referendum which has already been in place since 2018. 

According to the ballot language, the Okaloosa County Referendum, titled “Save Okaloosa’s Future,” would reauthorize “An Existing One-Half Cent Surtax Funding Essential Improvements And Infrastructure.”

Okaloosa County Public Works Director Scott Bitterman said since voters first approved the surtax, it has funded numerous infrastructure projects and safety initiatives, identified in the county’s 2019 Needs List.

“All of the projects on that list have either been completed, or they’re in some stage of design or construction,” Bitterman said. “… The needs list included public safety items. That included our tower system. We have a really robust communications tower system now that we didn’t have back in 2018, so when the hurricane [Isaias] came through a couple of weeks ago, that tower system allowed all of our emergency responders, whether they be in a city or county— we all have radios now that we can communicate with anybody … so it covered that huge public safety component of the emergency communication equipment.”

Bitterman said the surtax also addressed transportation needs which improve residents’ day-to-day lives.

“One that I shouldn’t leave off of there are the dirt-to-pave projects. We paved about 200 miles of what used to be dirt roadway and stabilized them and put an asphalt cap on them.”

If voters decide not to extend the surtax another decade, Bitterman said Okaloosa County won’t be able to respond to crises and requests efficiently. 

“For example, if we have a roadway pipe that collapses, we won’t be able to respond as quickly, but we’ll still get to it,” he said. “But then, as far as expanding the system, if we have a need that pops up, let’s say that a stormwater issue surfaces that, you know, hasn’t been an issue before, we wouldn’t be able to quickly respond to that.”

The county would have to look for new revenue sources to fill the gap. 

“We would look for grant funds,” Bitterman said. “We would try to come up with other funding sources. We could always look at things like issuing an actual tax for stormwater. A lot of communities have a specific revenue stream for stormwater.”