Can a Non-US Citizen Get the Florida Homestead Exemption?

What the Florida Constitution Actually Requires

Start with the constitution, because everything else on this subject is downstream of one sentence in it. An owner of Florida real estate is exempt from a portion of the property tax where the owner maintains on that property the permanent residence of the owner, or of another person legally or naturally dependent upon the owner.

Read that again and notice what is missing. Citizenship is not in it. Immigration status is not in it. Days spent in the state are not in it. The sentence asks one factual question, which is whose permanent residence the property is.

Notice also that the sentence offers two ways to answer. The Florida Supreme Court has held that those are two separate and independent means of qualifying, stated as alternatives to one another. So an owner has two doors, and only needs one of them to open.

The reason this matters more than it sounds is a change made in 1968. Before that year, Florida required an owner to reside on the property and make it a permanent home. When Florida rewrote its constitution in 1968, the requirement that the owner reside there was taken out. The implementing statute kept a version of the old words for another forty-four years, which is where the trouble came from.

The Case That Settled It

In 2003 David and Ana Andonie bought a condominium in Key Biscayne. They were citizens of Honduras, living in the United States lawfully on temporary visas issued by the Department of Homeland Security, and they moved into the condominium with their three minor children. All three children had been born in Florida, which made them United States citizens.

The family claimed the homestead exemption. The Miami-Dade property appraiser said no, pointing at the statute, which required an owner to have legal title and who resides thereon before claiming the exemption. On the appraiser's reading, two people holding temporary visas could not satisfy that, so the exemption failed regardless of who slept in the bedrooms.

The family won in the circuit court, won again in the Third District, and won a third time in the Florida Supreme Court in 2012. The court held that the constitutional text permits every owner of Florida real property to apply for and receive the tax relief where the owner has maintained on the property the permanent residence of another legally or naturally dependent on the owner. Because the constitution says that, the extra requirement in the statute could not stand, and the words and who resides thereon were held invalid and unenforceable.

Two details in the opinion do a lot of work. The first is that the legislature is allowed to regulate the manner of proving the right to the exemption and is not allowed to narrow the class of people entitled to it. The second is the court's own statement that the dependent ground applies irrespective of the owner's citizenship or place of residence, because those requirements were removed from the constitution.

The court also drew a boundary around what it decided, and an honest page has to carry it. The result depended on proof that the property was the permanent residence of the owners' dependent minor children, and on evidence that those children had no impediment, legal or otherwise, to living there permanently. That last clause is the live issue in a harder case, and it is where a real analysis of your family starts.

One practical footnote. The statutory phrase the court struck is no longer in the current version of the statute, so a reader comparing today's text against a 2012 opinion will not find the words that were fought over.

Three Different Homestead Rules That Do Not Move Together

Florida uses the word homestead for three different protections, in two different articles of its constitution, and they are governed by different tests and different cases. Nearly every article written about non-citizens and Florida homestead treats them as one subject, which is how confident wrong answers get published.

The first is the property tax exemption, which reduces the taxable value of your home and caps how fast the assessment can rise. That is the rule the Andonie case decided.

The second is protection from creditors, which stops a forced sale of your home to satisfy most judgments. That protection lives in a different article and has its own line of cases. The leading older decision involved a Canadian citizen who was in Florida as a tourist and claimed a Fort Myers house as his homestead in bankruptcy. Even in deciding against him, the Florida Supreme Court said something people miss, which is that the head of a family need not reside in the state or intend to make the property his own permanent residence, so long as he intended to make it his family's permanent residence.

A Florida appellate court took that further in a 2011 case. A family had left Venezuela in 2005 after a kidnapping attempt on their son, who had been born in Miami and was a United States citizen. When creditors of the father's estate went after the house, the court held that the family's registered status and their reasons for coming were enough to show intent that the family reside permanently in Florida. In the middle of that opinion is the sentence worth memorizing, which is that eligibility for the homestead exemption depends on the intent of the homesteader rather than that of the immigration service.

The third protection is the set of restrictions on who can inherit the home, and it is the one that quietly ruins plans. That rule is covered further down, because it applies to you no matter how the first two questions come out.

For the tax rule in general, see the Florida homestead exemption guide. For the shield against creditors, see Florida homestead creditor protection.

Where Immigration Status Still Decides the Answer

An honest page has to say where the law is against you, so here it is.

On ground one, your own permanent residence, immigration status carries real weight. In 1963 the Florida Supreme Court considered a Cuban refugee seeking political asylum and held that a person residing here on a temporary visa does not have the legal ability to determine his own future status, and so cannot legally convert a temporary residence into a permanent home. A 2006 decision from the Second District applied the same reasoning to the tax exemption and found that owners holding only temporary visas could not form the intent to become permanent residents.

Those cases have never been overruled, and a careful lawyer does not pretend otherwise. What has changed is their reach. They are now best understood as decisions about ground one, the owner's own residence, because the Supreme Court has since held that ground two does not require the owner to reside there at all. That is why the Andonie family's temporary visas did not sink their claim.

The middle ground is genuinely unsettled, and that is worth knowing before anyone promises you an outcome. A Florida appellate court has said the older bankruptcy decisions ignore that eligibility depends on the homesteader's intent rather than the immigration service's, and a federal bankruptcy judge in Florida has declined to make official immigration status the whole test, while still accepting that a person living here illegally or on a plainly temporary visa such as a tourist or business visa cannot form the necessary intent. Pending asylum applications and other statuses that leave someone here indefinitely have been treated more favorably than a visa with an expiration date on its face.

The practical translation is short. A green card makes ground one easy. A dependent living in the home makes ground two strong whatever your own status. A temporary visa with no dependent in the house is the hard case, and it is the one where the specific facts and the specific status decide it.

What Additional Circumstances Have Actually Worked

Every case is different, and on a temporary visa alone the claim is not made out. Additional circumstances have to be shown, and this is where most advice goes wrong, because it tells you to pile up Florida connections. Two decided cases show that piling them up does not work.

A couple from Switzerland owned a home in Charlotte County. They were living in the United States legally. They had lived and worked in the county for at least five years, they held Social Security numbers and Florida drivers' licenses, they paid federal income tax, and they had gone to the trouble of recording a Declaration of Domicile. In 2006 the Second District held that because they held only temporary visas, they could not form the intent to become permanent residents, and the exemption was denied. Two decades earlier a man had lost the same argument after twenty years of residence in the United States, ten years in Florida, and six years working for a local government.

So the additional circumstances that matter are not a longer list of Florida connections. What has actually moved the answer is evidence going to the nature of the status itself, meaning proof that the stay is open-ended rather than dated.

The case that won on that ground is worth knowing about. A man in Miami had a political asylum application pending, which put him in the status immigration lawyers abbreviate as PRUCOL, permanently residing under color of law. He was denied the exemption and he appealed. In 1998 the Third District held that an applicant for political asylum whose application is pending on the taxing date is a permanent resident for homestead exemption purposes, and it reversed with instructions to enter judgment in his favor. Two things carried it. The court had expert testimony in the record on the current state of United States immigration law, and it concluded that immigration policy had changed so much that the visa in the 1963 case would no longer be temporary at all. The question was thought important enough that the court certified it to the Florida Supreme Court.

A federal bankruptcy judge in Florida drew the same line in 2019, on the creditor side. That court refused to make a green card the bright-line test, and then said where the line actually falls, which is that an immigrant cannot form the intent to reside permanently while living here illegally or under a temporary visa such as a tourist or business visa with an expiration date. The debtors in front of that judge had no green cards, and they were residing here indefinitely while their asylum application was pending, which the court found was not the same thing at all.

Put the cases together and the useful list is short.

• A status with no fixed end date beats a long list of Florida ties. A pending asylum application has won. A visa with an expiration date on its face has lost, repeatedly, even alongside decades of residence.
• A filed application for permanent residence is affirmative evidence. In the creditor case where a Venezuelan family kept the protection, the couple had applied for permanent residence before the husband died, and the court counted it.
• A reason for being here that points one direction. That same family had left after an attempted kidnapping of their son, which made an intention to stay credible rather than convenient.
• Expert testimony on your own immigration status. This is the one nobody expects. The owner who won put an immigration expert in the record, and the court relied on that testimony to hold that the older cases had been overtaken.

None of that produces a guarantee. A court weighing these circumstances is making a factual finding about one household, which is why two families holding the same visa can get different answers. It is also why the record you build before you file matters more here than anywhere else in Florida homestead practice.

If You Live Abroad and Your Child Lives in the Home

This is the situation the dependent ground was built for, and Florida law says so in an unusually direct way.

The statute begins by disqualifying an owner who is receiving or claiming a property tax exemption or credit in another state where permanent residency is a condition of getting it. That is the anti-double-dipping rule, and on its own it would end the conversation for a great many cross-border families.

Then the very next sentence takes it back for one group. The disqualification does not apply to an owner who holds title to Florida real estate and maintains on it the permanent residence of another person legally or naturally dependent on the owner. So a parent living and taxed abroad, whose dependent child lives permanently in the Florida house, is exactly who the exception describes.

Two cautions before anyone relies on that. The dependent's residence has to be genuine and provable, and the person for whom it is maintained needs to be free to live there permanently. And a homestead exemption is one exemption per family unit, so a household cannot collect it twice inside Florida.

If part of your planning is to make Florida your own permanent home rather than only your child's, the Florida declaration of domicile is the recorded evidence of that, and it is the first document a former state's residency audit asks to see.

What the Property Appraiser Asks For

Everything above is the law. What follows is the administrative layer, and the distinction matters more here than almost anywhere else in Florida practice.

You apply on Form DR-501, the application the Department of Revenue prescribes, filed with the county property appraiser by March 1. The appraiser's office decides intent as a question of fact, and Florida law gives a list of items it may weigh, including where you are registered to vote, where your vehicles are registered, the address on your tax returns, and where your dependents attend school. No single item on that list controls the outcome.

County offices publish their own checklists, and for a non-citizen those usually ask to see immigration documents along with the ordinary proofs. Florida law also asks for the Social Security number of the applicant and of the applicant's spouse, and an application missing it is treated as incomplete rather than as a judgment on the merits.

Here is the part worth being clear about. A county checklist is that office's position, not the rule. When an appraiser's flyer says a green card is required, that is an administrative practice speaking, and the Florida Supreme Court has held that the constitution reaches further than the statute the appraisers were reading. An owner whose paperwork does not fit the boxes on a form has a filing problem to solve and a record to build, which is a different thing from being ineligible.

So build the record and keep your appeal rights. A denial has to state the specific statutory requirements relied on and the specific facts, and it has to tell you that you may appeal, and a notice that fails to do those things is defective. There is a petition to the value adjustment board with its own short deadline running from the mailing of the notice. Filing carefully the first time is much cheaper than an appeal, which is the honest argument for having someone who has read the cases prepare the application.

The Rule That Undoes Non-Citizen Plans

Ask a non-citizen owner about Florida homestead and you will hear about the tax break. Almost nobody has heard about the third rule, which is the one most likely to break a plan.

Florida restricts how homestead property can be left when the owner dies leaving a surviving spouse or a minor child. A will that gives the home to the wrong person is simply void as to the home, and Florida's own default rules take over instead. Those restrictions apply to every owner of Florida homestead property, whatever passport the owner holds and wherever the owner lives. Immigration status buys no exemption from them.

The reason this hits cross-border families harder is that their plans are usually written somewhere else. A will drafted in Caracas, São Paulo, Bogotá or Tel Aviv does what the law of that place allows, and then meets a Florida constitutional restriction it was never designed for. A minor child in the house makes it sharper still, because Florida bars leaving the homestead away from a minor child at all, and that bar defeats several planning tools people reach for, including a deed that would otherwise avoid probate.

The rest of the cross-border picture sits alongside it. A non-citizen spouse does not get the unlimited marital deduction the way a citizen spouse does, which is what the qualified domestic trust exists to solve, and the estate tax exemption for someone who is not domiciled in the United States is far smaller than the figure most people have in mind. Those are the subjects of estate planning for non-US citizens and US estate tax for a non-resident alien.

For the restrictions themselves, see who you can leave your Florida home to and homestead and the surviving spouse.

What It Costs to Get This Right

The consult is free and it is where this gets sorted out. You do not need to have your status figured out first, and you do not need to bring documents to the first conversation.

Reviewing your situation and telling you which ground fits, then preparing the application and the supporting record, is quoted as a flat fee at the consult, because the work depends on your status and on who lives in the house. Where the answer is an estate plan built for a cross-border family, the plans are posted, at $1,200 for an individual will plan and $3,200 for an individual trust plan. A Florida declaration of domicile is a flat $350. Government charges, including county recording and the notary, are additional and passed through at cost. Posted fees are honored for 90 days from September 2026.

Frequently Asked Questions

Common Situations

The family whose children were born here. A couple on temporary work visas own the house their two American-born children live in, and the appraiser's website tells them a green card is required. The second ground was written for exactly this family, and the question that decides it is whether the children's permanent residence in the home can be shown and whether anything stands in the way of their living there. That is a record to assemble, not a door that is closed.

The parent who never moved. A father in Bogotá owns the Miami condominium his daughter lives in while she finishes university, and he pays property tax in Colombia. He assumes a Florida tax break is for residents. Florida's own statute carves out the owner who houses a dependent here, and whether his daughter still counts as dependent on him is the fact the whole claim turns on.

The will that could not do what it said. A widow on a visitor visa owns a Florida home with a twelve-year-old son living in it, and her will from her home country leaves the house to her brother. Florida will not let the homestead pass away from a minor child, so the will fails as to the house whatever her status. The tax exemption was never her real problem.

Sources of Law

• Fla. Const. art. VII, §6(a): "Every person who has the legal or equitable title to real estate and maintains thereon the permanent residence of the owner, or another legally or naturally dependent upon the owner, shall be exempt from taxation thereon ... upon establishment of right thereto in the manner prescribed by law." The requirement that the owner reside on the property was removed in the 1968 revision. Art. VII, §6(b) (one exemption per family unit).
• Fla. Const. art. X, §4(a) (exemption from forced sale) and art. X, §4(c) (restrictions on devise where there is a surviving spouse or minor child). Separate doctrines from the tax exemption in art. VII, §6, with their own tests.
• Garcia v. Andonie, 101 So. 3d 339, 351-52 (Fla. 2012): art. VII, §6(a) "permits every owner of Florida real property to apply for and receive ad valorem tax relief where it is sufficiently demonstrated that the owner has maintained on that property the permanent residence of another legally or naturally dependent on the owner"; the two grounds are "two separate and independent means" of qualifying (at 344); the "and who resides thereon" element of §196.031(1) is "invalid and unenforceable as a legal element of entitlement" (at 345, 347); the dependent ground applies "irrespective of the owner's citizenship or place of residence" (at 345-46); the legislature may regulate the manner of establishing the right but "cannot substantively alter or materially limit the class of individuals entitled to the exemption" (at 345), citing Sparkman v. State, 58 So. 2d 431, 432 (Fla. 1952). The owners were citizens of Honduras holding temporary visas. The holding is expressly limited to proof that the property was the permanent residence of the owners' dependent minor children who had "no impediment, legal or otherwise, to residing permanently on the property." Affirming De La Mora v. Andonie, 51 So. 3d 517 (Fla. 3d DCA 2010).
• Fla. Stat. §196.031(1)(a) (permanent residence of the owner "or the permanent residence of another or others legally or naturally dependent upon him or her"; the phrase struck in Andonie no longer appears in the current text); §196.031(6) (an ad valorem exemption or credit claimed in another state where permanent residency is required disqualifies the owner, and "[t]his subsection does not apply to a person who has the legal or equitable title to real estate in Florida and maintains thereon the permanent residence of another legally or naturally dependent upon the owner").
• Fla. Stat. §196.015 (intention is a factual determination by the property appraiser; the enumerated factors; no single factor is conclusive); §196.011(1)(a) (March 1 application on the form prescribed by the Department of Revenue) and §196.011(1)(b) (Social Security number of the applicant and the applicant's spouse; omission renders a timely application incomplete); §196.012(17) (definition of permanent residence; a residence established in a foreign state or country is presumed to continue until a change is shown); §196.193(5)(b) to (c) (a denial notice must state the specific statutory requirements and the specific facts relied on and must state the right to appeal); §194.011(3)(d) (petition to the value adjustment board on or before the 30th day following the mailing of the notice). Form DR-501 is the Department of Revenue's prescribed application.
• The forced-sale line, a separate doctrine: Matter of Cooke, 412 So. 2d 340, 341 (Fla. 1982) (Canadian citizen present as a tourist; "although it is not necessary that the head of the family reside in the state or intend to make the property in question his permanent residence, he must establish that he intended to make this property his family's permanent residence"); Grisolia v. Pfeffer, 77 So. 3d 732, 735 (Fla. 3d DCA 2011) (family that left Venezuela after a kidnapping attempt on their United States citizen son; "eligibility for the homestead exemption depends on the intent of the homesteader rather than that of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services"; the decedent and widow "were registered aliens legally allowed to reside in the United States under their temporary visa").
• The owner's-own-residence line, each opinion read in full 2026-09-08: Juarrero v. McNayr, 157 So. 2d 79, 81 (Fla. 1963) (a former resident of a foreign country "here under the authority of nothing more than a temporary visa" "has no assurance that he can continue to reside in good faith for any fixed period of time in this country," and so "cannot 'legally,' 'rightfully' or in 'good faith' make or declare an intention which he has no assurance he can fulfill"; the same passage notes that one "in this country with a permanent visa" may make the declaration); Alcime v. Bystrom, 451 So. 2d 1037, 1037-38 (Fla. 3d DCA 1984) (twenty years' United States residence, ten years in Florida and six years in local government employment did not suffice, "because he is an alien without a permanent visa"); DeQuervain v. Desguin, 927 So. 2d 232, 233 (Fla. 2d DCA 2006) (Swiss owners residing legally, five years in Charlotte County, holding Social Security numbers and drivers' licenses, paying federal income tax and having filed a Florida Declaration of Domicile, "however, they held only temporary visas. Thus, they could not form the requisite intent to become permanent residents for purposes of the homestead exemption"); Raheb v. DiBattisto, 513 So. 2d 717 (Fla. 3d DCA 1987), and the earlier Raheb v. Di Battisto, 483 So. 2d 475 (Fla. 3d DCA 1986).
• The status-is-not-temporary line, each read in full 2026-09-08: Lisboa v. Dade County Property Appraiser, 705 So. 2d 704, 705-08 (Fla. 3d DCA 1998) (whether "an applicant for political asylum whose application is pending as of the relevant taxing date, is a 'permanent resident' for purposes of Florida's homestead exemption from ad valorem taxation," answered "in the affirmative" on the record and "the expert testimony presented below on the current status of United States immigration law"; "the immigration policies of the United States have changed considerably since Juarrero was decided" and "Mr. Juarrero's visa today would not be of a temporary nature"; status of one "permanently residing under color of law"; summary judgment for the appraiser reversed with instructions to enter judgment for Lisboa; the question certified to the Florida Supreme Court as one of great public importance), citing Dep't of Health & Rehabilitative Servs. v. Solis, 580 So. 2d 146 (Fla. 1991). In re Mendoza, 597 B.R. 686, 692-93 (Bankr. S.D. Fla. 2019) (rejecting "the broad conclusion reached in those cases that invariably require a green card"; agreeing that "an immigrant legally cannot form an intent to permanently reside in Florida if the immigrant is living in Florida illegally or under a temporary visa, such as a tourist or business visa with an expiration date," while the debtors before it "were residing here indefinitely pending a determination granting or denying their Asylum Application").
• Constitutional and statutory text retrieved 2026-09-08; every quoted passage from an opinion was read from the opinion text on 2026-09-08.

What I Have Learned About This Question

In 14 years of law practice, the homestead question I am asked most by families who were not born here arrives already answered, and answered wrongly.

I have a few take-home points.

The first is the source of the wrong answer. Somebody read a county website, or a form, or a well-meaning summary of a form, and treated it as the rule. A property appraiser publishes a checklist because an office has to process thousands of applications the same way, and that checklist is that office's administrative position. The Florida Supreme Court has told us the constitution reaches people the statute the appraisers were reading did not cover. When those two conflict, the constitution is the one that decides the case.

The second is that people bring me the wrong question. The tax exemption is worth real money every year, so it is what they ask about. Meanwhile the same family has a home they cannot leave the way their will says, because Florida restricts a homestead when there is a spouse or a minor child, and that restriction never asks about anyone's visa. I would rather spend the free half hour on the problem that voids a document than on the one that costs a few thousand dollars a year.

Practice pointer. Assemble the record for the ground you are actually claiming, before March 1, and keep it. Where the claim rests on a dependent living in the home, the proof is about that person's life, meaning school enrollment, medical care, and the address on their own documents, rather than about the owner's paperwork.

Avoid filing a bare application and hoping. A denial that states the specific requirement and the specific facts is the beginning of an appeal with a short deadline, and an application that went in thin gives you very little to appeal with.

An honest limit belongs here. Where the owner is here on a temporary visa and no dependent lives in the home, the law is genuinely unsettled, the older cases still carry weight, and the outcome turns on the particular status and the particular facts. Anyone who quotes you a confident yes on those facts is selling certainty that the case law does not contain.

Kevin D. Klagge, Esq., admitted in Florida since 2012. General information rather than advice on your situation.

Updated on September 8, 2026. Reviewed by Kevin D. Klagge, Esq., Fla. Bar No. 99502. Attorney Kevin Klagge represents families, businesses, and international clients in estate and tax planning, business structuring, and international law, with a focus on Florida legal tools. He litigates estate and business issues in court. General information about Florida law, not legal advice, and no attorney-client relationship is created. Do not send confidential information until we have agreed to represent you.