Florida politicians have mused about completely eliminating property taxes through an amendment to Florida’s Constitution on the ballot in November 2026.
To help understand what kind of impact eliminating property taxes would have for students, educators and school communities, we are taking a Deep Dive into property taxes and school funding in Florida.
Public schools in Florida are primarily funded through a combination of state and local funds. State funding for schools is largely derived from sales taxes, and local funding is largely derived from property taxes.
In total, local funding accounts for around 46% of the Florida Education Finance Program (FEFP)1, the main funding mechanism for public schools in Florida. However, that does not mean that each district’s share of FEFP funding is 46%.
Instead, the local share of funding can be as low as 10% and as high as 90%2. Where districts land on this spectrum of funding is determined legislatively through a process known as required local effort (RLE).
In brief, RLE attempts to balance how school districts are funded by determining how much revenue the county can afford to contribute to the FEFP through property taxes.
In counties with higher property values, a larger share of FEFP funding is required to come from property taxes. In counties with lower property values, the state picks up a greater share of FEFP funding.
To illustrate how this works in practice, we’ll compare two neighboring Panhandle counties. Holmes and Walton Counties share a border; however, in many respects they are worlds apart.
Just over 3,000 students are enrolled in the Holmes County School District3 where the median household income is less than $50,0004. Nearly 40% of all land is agricultural5, and the total value of property that is subject to property taxes for schools is $748 million6.
Next door in Walton County, there are 12,000 students enrolled in the school district7. The median household income is nearly $80,0008. Less than 5% of the land is agricultural9, and the total value of property that is subject to property taxes for schools is nearly $50 billion10.
To put it another way, Walton County has nearly four times as many students as Holmes County, but its tax base is 65 times larger.
As a result, the RLE for these two counties looks very different. Schools in Holmes County are funded almost exclusively by the state11, and schools in Walton County are funded almost exclusively by local property taxes12.
Obviously, the impact of eliminating property taxes would be quite different in these two counties. In Holmes County, eliminating property taxes would translate to a loss of around $1,000 per-student. For Walton County, the loss would be around $10,000 per student.
Even fiscally constrained counties like Holmes that rely very heavily on state funding would face immediate, negative consequences from eliminating property taxes.
In the coming months, the legislative proposal relating to property taxes will come into better focus. When it does, we’ll provide an updated analysis of what is at risk for Florida’s students, educators, and school communities. In the meantime, we wanted to provide you with information on how much your local school district is funded by property taxes so you can begin to understand the ramifications if that revenue were to go away.
Want to know what your county would be facing if property taxes are eliminated? Hover over any county on the map below to see the following:
The Florida Education Association is the state’s largest association of professional employees, with more than 120,000 members. We are affiliated nationally with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the National Education Association (NEA) and the national AFL-CIO.
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