Back in March, we covered the early stages of a property tax revolt spreading through several state legislatures — homeowners frustrated with rising bills, and lawmakers responding with everything from modest exemption increases to serious proposals to eliminate property taxes outright. Six months later, it's worth checking where the most ambitious of those efforts actually stand.
Florida: Scaled Back to an Exemption Expansion, Not Elimination
Florida's push, championed early on by Governor DeSantis, started with talk of eliminating property taxes on homesteaded property entirely. What actually made it to this November's ballot is more modest: raising the homestead exemption toward $250,000, not eliminating the tax. That's still a meaningful cut for homeowners, but it's a significant retreat from full elimination — and even that scaled-back version is currently facing a legal challenge over its ballot language.
Ohio: Momentum Without a Landing Spot Yet
Ohio's homeowner movement to eliminate property taxes gained real political attention this year, driven largely by frustration over school funding's heavy reliance on property tax revenue. As of mid-2026, this remains more of an organized political pressure campaign than an enacted law — the practical challenge Ohio shares with every state considering full elimination is the same one: property taxes fund a large share of local government and school budgets, and no serious elimination proposal has yet paired the cut with a fully worked-out replacement revenue source.
The Pattern Across Every State That's Tried This
What's notable, looking across every state that floated full elimination this year, is that none have actually gotten there. What passes tends to be a scaled-back version — a bigger exemption, a lower cap, a circuit breaker — rather than the full elimination that generates the initial headlines. Wyoming's 25% cut, one of the more aggressive changes to actually become law this cycle, still left local governments scrambling to replace lost revenue without a plan — and that was a 25% cut, not a full elimination.
Why Full Elimination Keeps Stalling
Property taxes are difficult to eliminate precisely because they're difficult to replace. Sales and income tax increases large enough to fully offset lost property tax revenue tend to be politically unpopular in their own right, and shifting that much revenue to a different tax base changes who actually bears the burden — often shifting cost toward renters and lower-income households who don't currently pay property tax directly but would pay more sales or income tax under a swap.
What This Means If You're Hoping for Elimination
If you're a homeowner hoping your state eliminates property taxes entirely, the realistic expectation based on how every serious 2026 effort has actually played out is: expect a meaningful exemption increase or assessment cap, not full elimination. That's still worth tracking and voting on if it's on your ballot — the savings can be significant — but it's worth calibrating expectations against what's actually happened everywhere this has been seriously attempted this year.