Summary
I’m Tom Mitchell, a partner at Waller & Mitchell. One of the things I do here is I do the tax work for our office. I do have a master’s in taxation, and sometimes I get asked by people, “What is the inheritance tax, and does Florida have one?” Well first of all, the short answer is no, Florida does not have an inheritance tax.
An inheritance tax is actually the tax on a beneficiary’s right to receive an inheritance. It’s levied by the state, and Florida does not have one. Most of the states that have inheritance taxes are in the Northeast and the Upper Midwest: Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts, Ohio, Illinois, for example. The flip side of the inheritance tax is the estate tax.
That’s on a decedent’s right to give away property, and Florida does not have an estate tax either, so you’re in good shape there. However, there is a federal estate tax. Sometimes you may have heard it referred to as the “death tax”. There’s a lot of movement in Congress to do away with it, but for the time being we still have it. But the good news is that the exemption amount, that is the amount that you have to be over before you have to pay the tax, is $5 million per person.
So for a husband and wife, that’s $10 million, but for all us mere mortals, we don’t have to worry about it. This is something for the one-tenth of the one percent (or the one-hundredth of the one percent.) We’re at 5332 Main Street in New Port Richey, Florida. Our number is 727847-2288. Thanks.