Refinancing a mortgage in Florida

Replacing a mortgage is a quieter transaction than buying a house. Nobody moves and no deed is signed. The old note is paid off, a new one is signed, and a new mortgage securing it goes on record. In most states that last step is clerical work with a fee attached. Florida taxes the instrument itself, and taxes it on how much the instrument is for.

What the state levies on the new note

Two charges attach to the paperwork a refinance creates rather than to a sale. The documentary stamp tax on a mortgage is levied per dollar of the debt secured, at 0.35% (s. 201.08(1)(b), Fla. Stat.; Miami-Dade Clerk of the Courts, Official Records, read 25 August 2026). Beside it sits a separate non-recurring intangible tax on the note, levied on the amount that note secures against Florida real property, at 0.2% (s. 199.133(1), Fla. Stat.; Miami-Dade Clerk of the Courts, Official Records, read 25 August 2026). Both attach to the mortgage going on record, so a mortgage replacing an earlier one is charged the way the earlier one was. Neither is a filing fee, and neither is waived because the borrower has not changed.

The filing fee is separate, and it genuinely is flat: $10 (s. 28.24(13), Fla. Stat.; Miami-Dade Clerk of the Courts, Official Records, read 25 August 2026) for the first page of an instrument in the Official Records, a statutory ceiling clerks may not exceed. It is the only one of the three that does not care how large the loan is.

The charge everyone has heard of is the one this transaction does not owe

The Florida figure that circulates most widely is the deed tax, 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. It falls on a document conveying the property, and a refinance conveys nothing, so it has no part in this. A Florida closing involves three distinct state charges, one on the deed, one on the recorded mortgage and one on the note (Florida Department of Revenue, Florida Documentary Stamp Tax; ss. 201.02, 201.031, 201.08, 199.133 and 28.24(13), Fla. Stat., read 25 August 2026) and only two of them belong to somebody replacing a note. Mistaking the deed figure for the mortgage stamp doubles that line on its own, before the note tax beside it is counted at all.

Why the size of the note matters more here than elsewhere

Because the two note charges are struck per dollar rather than per document, what they come to is a function of the loan and of nothing else. Weighing a Florida refinance against one in a flat-fee state is not comparing two versions of the same line: one grows with the balance, the other stops growing at the counter. For a conforming loan the outer marker in nearly every Florida county is the one-unit baseline limit, $832,750 (Federal Housing Finance Agency, Full County Loan Limit List 2026 (HERA-based, final, flat file), read 25 August 2026), and the charges above are struck on whatever the note actually is.

What no longer puts a clock on doing it

Some states restrict how soon a home loan may be refinanced again, or require a demonstrable benefit to the borrower first. That is a fair thing to ask and a bad thing to guess at, so here is the position with the source that establishes it: 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)

Two cautions belong beside it. The absence of a state rule is not the absence of any rule: federal law and a lender's own overlays both survive it, and neither is a Florida question. And the session law that removed the old chapter was never identified, so what is sourced above is how the chapter reads today, not a history of how it got there.

The tax on the house is a different question from the tax on the note

A new loan means a new escrow analysis, and the Florida property tax side of it is levied as millage against taxable value. Across all sixty-seven counties, weighted by the taxable base each one holds, that comes to 1.64% (Florida Department of Revenue, Property Tax Oversight, 2025 Data Book: Millage and Taxes Levied Report and Taxable Value Report, read 25 August 2026). Read it as the shape of the thing rather than as a bill: the Department publishes a total for each county and no statewide row at all, so any statewide Florida figure seen elsewhere is somebody else's arithmetic on a basis they usually do not state.

Who supervises the person who writes the loan

Mortgage origination in the state is licensed and supervised by the Office of Financial Regulation, an office of the Financial Services Commission (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 is where a licence is checked and where a complaint is filed. BEDRWay is not a lender, a broker or a servicer and originates nothing anywhere; a request that arrives here reaches a licensed mortgage professional working in your state, and that person is the only one who can discuss terms with you.

What this page will not tell you

It will not tell you whether to do this. That turns on the note you already hold, on what a lender is willing to write, and on how long you expect to keep the house, and none of those live in a state fact file. Nothing above is a price, a payment, or a promise about how long anything takes.

One gap is worth naming rather than hiding, because on a Florida refinance it is the largest thing in the escrow line: this page carries no insurance figure. Nothing here prices homeowners or dwelling coverage on a basis that would survive comparison against another state, and the coastal and inland bands that float around carry no publisher.