Cash-out refinance in Florida

A state page about cash-out refinancing usually exists because the state has a rule of its own about pulling equity out of a house. Florida's exists because it does not. Nothing in the statutes says how much equity may be turned into cash. What Florida does instead is tax the instrument you sign, on the amount it secures, so the size of the cash and the size of the tax base are the same number.

Nothing in Florida law caps the equity

None. No Florida statute limits how much equity may be taken out in a refinance, imposes a waiting period, or confines cash-out to a primary residence. The 80 percent ceiling quoted everywhere is a Fannie Mae eligibility overlay, not Florida law. Florida does impose one requirement of its own: under Fla. Const. Art. X s. 4(c) a married owner's homestead may be mortgaged only if the spouse joins in signing, whether or not that spouse is on the title. (Fla. Const. Art. X s. 4; Chapter 494, Fla. Stat., full chapter index, read 25 August 2026)

The usual paraphrase of that is wrong in the direction that costs people money. No statutory ceiling is not the same thing as no ceiling. What stops a cash-out sits in a lender's credit policy and in the agency guidelines the loan will be sold under, and neither of those is Florida law, which is why both can move without a legislature doing anything. Planning around the absence of a state rule is planning around the wrong document.

The one condition Florida does impose is about signatures rather than amounts. Where a married person mortgages a homestead, the spouse joins in signing whether or not that spouse is on the title. A file that misses it does not come back smaller. It stops.

The rule that used to sit here is gone

None in force. Florida once had one: the Florida Fair Lending Act at ss. 494.0078 to 494.00797 restricted refinancing a high-cost home loan without benefit to the borrower. It is no longer in the statutes. Chapter 494 in the 2026 Florida Statutes has three parts and ends at s. 494.0077, and s. 494.0079 returns nothing. (Chapter 494, Fla. Stat., full chapter index, confirmed on the Legislature's site and the Florida Senate mirror, read 25 August 2026)

What that removes matters more than what it permits. Florida once ran a test of its own on whether refinancing a high-cost home loan left the borrower better off than before, and nothing in the current statutes runs it. Nobody at state level is checking that on a borrower's behalf. The state layer is empty, and the question of whether this trade is worth making is yours.

The two charges that scale with the cash

The Florida charge most people have heard of is the documentary stamp on a deed, at 0.7% (Florida Department of Revenue, Florida Documentary Stamp Tax; s. 201.02(1)(a), Fla. Stat., read 25 August 2026) of the consideration. A refinance records no deed, so that one is not in play; nobody is buying anything. The two that are in play are keyed to the debt instead. Documentary stamp tax on the mortgage as it is recorded is 0.35% (s. 201.08(1)(b), Fla. Stat.; Miami-Dade Clerk of the Courts, Official Records, read 25 August 2026) of the debt it secures, and the one-time non-recurring intangible tax on the note is 0.2% (s. 199.133(1), Fla. Stat.; Miami-Dade Clerk of the Courts, Official Records, read 25 August 2026) of the same amount.

Both are measured against what the new mortgage secures, not against what was owed before it. On a rate-and-term refinance the two figures sit close together, because the new instrument re-records roughly the balance already on the books. A cash-out records a deliberately larger one, and the gap between them is the cash. Recording itself is flat by contrast: $10 (s. 28.24(13), Fla. Stat.; Miami-Dade Clerk of the Courts, Official Records, read 25 August 2026) for the first page, and every further page carries its own charge whatever the instrument says. A long mortgage costs more to put on record than a short one; a large mortgage does not.

The clerk's charge is indifferent to how much cash you take; the two taxes are about nothing else. None of it is a term of the loan. It is a tax on putting a document into the county's Official Records, it falls due whoever is lending, and it lands on the closing statement rather than in the note.

The ceiling that does bind, and the one county that sizes differently

Because the state is silent, the figures that genuinely bound a Florida cash-out are federal and contractual. In nearly every Florida county the one-unit conforming limit is $832,750 (Federal Housing Finance Agency, Full County Loan Limit List 2026 (HERA-based, final, flat file), read 25 August 2026). Monroe County is the only Florida county above the baseline: $990,150 for one unit, $1,267,600 for two, $1,532,200 for three and $1,904,150 for four. The other 66 counties are all at the $832,750 baseline. (Federal Housing Finance Agency, Full County Loan Limit List 2026 (HERA-based, final, flat file), read 25 August 2026) Above those figures a loan is simply not conforming, which does not make it impossible, only a different product with a different set of guidelines behind it.

Alongside the limit sits the loan-to-value ceiling the loan will be sold under, which is where the number people mistake for Florida law comes from. The investor and the lender set it, and it moves with the programme. This page carries no figure for the cash a Florida borrower might take, because that figure is an appraisal and a credit decision that have not happened yet.

Where a complaint goes

The Office of Financial Regulation, an office of the Financial Services Commission, licenses loan originators, mortgage brokers and mortgage lenders under Chapter 494 of the Florida Statutes, titled Loan Originators and Mortgage Brokers. (s. 494.001(29) and s. 494.0025(1)-(3), Fla. Stat.; s. 20.121(3)(a)2, Fla. Stat., read 25 August 2026) That office is where a licence is checked and where a complaint about an originator is filed. BEDRWay does not lend, does not broker and does not service, so nothing here is an offer of credit. A file sent in goes in front of a licensed mortgage professional working in Florida, and what they will write is theirs to decide.

What is not on this page

Two things a Florida borrower reasonably asks are missing, because nothing behind this page answers them. Whether the documentary stamp is reduced when the holder of an existing note refinances its own debt is the first, and on a large balance it is the one with real money in it. The second is what recording will actually cost, which turns on how many pages the instrument runs to and on what an individual clerk adds. Neither is sourced here, so neither is claimed: on this page a gap is better than a figure that looks right.

Florida sets no number of its own. The number that stops a Florida cash-out comes from the lender and the guidelines behind it, and the amount Florida takes climbs with every dollar of cash the lender does allow.