Nexus studies
Mapping where you have filing obligations and where you don’t. Economic nexus thresholds since Wayfair, plus physical triggers — inventory in a third-party warehouse, travelling salespeople, contractors, trade-show presence.
Tax
Florida has no personal income tax. That fact does a lot of work in conversation and almost none on a balance sheet. Sales and use tax, corporate income tax, tangible personal property, and multistate nexus are all still live.
Overview
Owners who relocate to Florida, or who have always been here, tend to treat state and local tax as a solved problem. It isn’t. The absence of a personal income tax removes one filing. It removes none of the others.
Florida still imposes corporate income tax on C corporations, sales and use tax on most transactions, a county-level discretionary surtax on top of the state rate, and an annual tangible personal property tax on business assets. And the moment you sell into another state, that state’s rules apply regardless of where you sit.
State and local is also where we see the largest unbudgeted assessments. An income tax problem is usually a percentage of profit. A sales tax problem is a percentage of revenue, assessed against years you have already spent, with penalty and interest layered on top and personal liability available to the state in many cases.
What’s Included
Mapping where you have filing obligations and where you don’t. Economic nexus thresholds since Wayfair, plus physical triggers — inventory in a third-party warehouse, travelling salespeople, contractors, trade-show presence.
Taxability determinations by product and jurisdiction, resale and exemption certificate management, and use tax self-assessment on purchases where no vendor collected — the exposure most reviews actually find.
Managing the examination, controlling the sample and the scope, responding to information requests, and negotiating the assessment. We wrote the returns; we answer for them.
Where exposure already exists, a VDA typically limits the look-back period and abates penalty in exchange for coming forward. Almost always a better outcome than being found, and the arithmetic usually favours moving early.
Dividing income among states that each want to tax it. Sales-factor sourcing for services and intangibles, market-based versus cost-of-performance rules, and the throwback and throwout provisions that create tax where you assumed none.
For owners moving to Florida from a high-tax state, the question is not whether you moved but whether you can prove it. Domicile factors, day counts, and the documentation a former state expects when it challenges the change.
Florida’s county-level surtax sits on top of the state rate, varies by county, and applies under sourcing rules that differ from the state’s. The single most commonly misapplied item on Florida returns we review.
The annual county filing covering business furniture, fixtures, equipment, and leasehold improvements. Filing is what secures the exemption — skip the return and you can lose it.
Florida Mechanics
Florida’s general state sales tax rate is 6%. On top of that most counties levy a discretionary sales surtax, which varies county by county and changes as local referenda pass. Broward, Miami-Dade, and Palm Beach do not all carry the same rate, and a business delivering across county lines has to source each transaction correctly rather than applying its home county rate to everything.
The surtax also has its own cap rules on certain transactions that the state rate does not share. This is the detail we most often find applied incorrectly — usually in the taxpayer’s disfavour, sometimes not, and either direction is a problem in an audit.
Florida requires remote sellers with more than $100,000 in Florida retail sales in the prior calendar year to register and collect. Every other state sets its own threshold, and the rules differ on whether transaction counts matter, whether the measure is gross or taxable sales, and which period is tested. A business selling into thirty states is living under thirty separate tests.
Florida imposes corporate income tax at 5.5% on C corporations and on entities treated as corporations. S corporations and partnerships generally do not pay it, which is one reason entity choice and state exposure should be decided together rather than sequentially.
Florida counties assess an annual tax on business tangible personal property, reported on Form DR-405, with an exemption of up to $25,000 of assessed value. The exemption is not automatic in perpetuity — it is secured by filing. Businesses that stop filing because they are “under the exemption” are the ones that lose it.
Who Runs This
Questions about anything on this page go straight to the person who runs this work — not a contact form queue.
Elena Vargas, EA
Manager, State & Local Tax
[email protected]