One of the cool things about having a blog is looking at “the stats.” The stats are the internal analytics of the blog, where I can see how many people have visited, what articles they read, and if they came here from Google or another search engine, what terms they were searching for. It’s always nice to see that people are looking for certain topics, and I hope that my post answers their question. Of course, I also hope that if they are in Fort Lauderdale, Broward County, or elsewhere in South Florida, that they’ll consider hiring me as their attorney too.
Recently though, I have seen a lot of people coming to my blog with using the search term “Florida Estate Tax” or some variant thereof. I can only assume that they want to know if you die in Florida, what is the estate tax, and how much they’ll have to pay.
I’d like to put their mind at ease and say that for anyone dying after 2004, there is no estate tax in Florida.
(If that was your question, you don’t have to read any further. If you’d like a little bit of an explanation, read on).
There used to be a Florida estate tax. The way it worked, is the Florida Estate Tax was known as a “pick up tax.” That is because the Federal Estate tax allowed a tax credit as opposed to a deduction for any state death taxes. The Florida Estate Tax was equal to the maximum amount of the Federal Estate Tax’s death credit. Economically, this resulted in a decedent’s estate paying no more in taxes — just some of it went to the state of Florida instead of the federal government.
As part of the gradual estate tax repeal, the state death tax credit was turned to a deduction. Because there is no more state death credit, there is no more Florida estate tax. Could that change in the future? Possibly. We’ll have to wait and see.
Note: This just means that there is no State of Florida estate tax. The Federal Estate tax still applies.