No Sales Tax on Commercial Leases in Florida: October 1 Cutoff

Florida’s sales tax on commercial leases ended on October 1, 2025. For any occupancy period beginning on or after that date, tenants renting offices, retail storefronts, industrial warehouses, and self-storage units owe no state sales tax and no county discretionary surtax on their rent. Florida had been the only state in the country imposing this tax, and Chapter 2025-208, Laws of Florida, repealed it in full.¹

What Rent Is Now Tax-Free

The tax that formerly applied under Florida Statutes Section 212.031 to renting, leasing, or licensing commercial real property no longer applies. That covers the standard commercial categories: office suites, retail space, warehouses, and self-storage.¹

If your lease adds common area maintenance charges, property insurance pass-throughs, or real estate tax reimbursements to your base rent, those amounts are also tax-free for occupancy periods on or after October 1, 2025. The repeal reaches everything that would have been part of the taxable rent under Section 212.031.¹

What’s Still Taxable

The repeal only touched Section 212.031. A separate statute, Section 212.03, keeps a 6% state sales tax (plus any applicable county surtax) on several kinds of rented space:²

Motor vehicle parking and storage, including storage of towed vehicles
Boat docks, slips, and marina storage
Aircraft hangar space and tie-down fees
Transient rentals of living or sleeping space for six months or less, such as hotels and short-term vacation rentals

If you lease office space and also pay for dedicated parking, the office rent is tax-free after October 1 but the parking is not. When both sit on a single line of your lease or invoice, ask the landlord to break them out. A bundled charge risks either overpaying tax on the office share or underpaying on the parking share.¹

Nonprofits with a valid Florida Consumer’s Certificate of Exemption (Form DR-14) and government agencies continue to have their own exemption from these remaining taxes.³⁴

Rent That Crosses the October 1 Cutoff

What matters is the occupancy period, not when you cut the check. Rent for space you occupied through September 2025 still carries the 2% state rate and any applicable county surtax, even if the invoice arrives in October or you pay it months late.¹

The rule cuts both ways. If you prepaid October rent back in September, no tax is due on that payment because the occupancy period falls after the repeal date. And falling behind doesn’t erase the old liability: rent for August 2025 paid in January 2026 still owes the pre-repeal tax.¹

Getting a Refund If You Were Charged Tax After October 1

Some landlords have kept billing sales tax past the repeal date, either by mistake or by inertia. If you paid tax on rent for an occupancy period starting October 1, 2025 or later, you’re entitled to that money back, but you have to collect it from the landlord, not from the state. The Department of Revenue points tenants to Florida Administrative Code Rule 12A-1.014, which routes refunds through the party that collected the tax.¹

The steps are straightforward. Contact your landlord in writing, identify the invoices and amounts, and ask for a refund of the tax portion. The landlord then refunds you and, if the landlord has already remitted the tax to the state, files an Application for Refund (Form DR-26S) with documentation showing the tenant refund was issued. Landlords who are still adding tax to current invoices should stop immediately and correct their billing systems, because continuing to collect a repealed tax creates a growing liability to the tenants who paid it.

County Surtaxes Are Gone on Commercial Rent Too

Before repeal, most counties layered a discretionary sales surtax of 0.5% to 1.5% on top of the state rate, pushing the total tax on commercial rent as high as 3.5% in some places.⁵ Both the state tax and the county surtax on commercial rent are gone for occupancy periods beginning October 1, 2025.¹

County surtaxes have not disappeared everywhere. They still apply to the parking, docking, aircraft storage, and transient rental categories under Section 212.03, and to other taxable transactions outside the commercial rent context. The elimination is specific to leases that fell under Section 212.031.

1
Florida Department of Revenue. Tax Information Publication 25A01-04 – Sales Tax on Commercial Rentals Repealed Effective October 1, 2025
2
The 2025 Florida Statutes. Florida Statutes 212.03 – Transient Rentals Tax; Rate, Procedure, Enforcement, Exemptions
3
Florida Department of Revenue. Nonprofit Organizations and Sales and Use Tax
4
Florida Department of Revenue. Sales Tax Exemption Certificates
5
Florida Dept. of Revenue. Discretionary Sales Surtax