The apartment is the easy part. California does not stop taxing you because you bought in Miami. It stops when your closest connections move, and the Franchise Tax Board decides whether they did.
You will be speaking with the desk in Miami Beach, not a call centre. Tell us briefly what you have in mind and we reply personally within 24 hours, usually much sooner. On weekends, we are back with you on Monday morning.
This page explains how California decides, what the audit looks at, what income follows you out and where the Miami purchase actually fits. Your own position should be settled with a tax adviser before you sign anything. Contact the desk at Miami Dossier for the current position on any building we cover.
As of September 2026, California taxes its residents on worldwide income, and it defines a resident in two directions at once. You are a resident if you are in California for other than a temporary or transitory purpose. You are also a resident if California is your domicile and you are outside it for a temporary or transitory purpose. The second sentence is the one that catches people moving south.
Domicile is the one place you treat as your permanent home and intend to return to. You have exactly one at a time, and changing it takes intent plus action. The Franchise Tax Board reads the word temporary generously. A two year assignment, a trial period in Florida, a move while the house in California stays furnished and the children stay in school there, all of these can be called temporary, and if they are, you never left.
This is the trap. People move, spend most of the year in Miami, and keep California as the place they might go back to. California agrees with them, and taxes the whole year.
Worth knowing what is at stake before deciding how much trouble any of this is worth. California runs to 13.3 per cent at the top, which is 12.3 per cent plus a 1 per cent Behavioral Health Services Tax on income over $1,000,000, and an uncapped 1.3 per cent disability insurance deduction takes the rate on wages to about 14.6 per cent. California taxes capital gains as ordinary income with no preferential rate, which is why the year you sell a business or a large position is so often the year the question gets asked. Florida has no state income tax.
If the Franchise Tax Board disagrees that you left, the burden of proof is yours. The test is where your closest connections are, and it is decided on the whole picture rather than on any single fact. The list of factors comes from a 2003 decision, Appeal of Bragg, and from the Board’s own residency publication, and it is long.
Home. The size, value and use of each residence, and which one the family actually lives in. A furnished house in Los Angeles held against a lightly used Miami condominium reads badly, whichever one you sleep in more.
Time. Days in California against days elsewhere, and the pattern. Spend more than nine months of the year in California and the statute presumes you are a resident. Spend less and the presumption is gone, but nothing is decided.
Business and professional life. Where you make decisions, where your professional licences are held, where the office is that you still walk into.
Family. Where a spouse lives and where minor children go to school.
The paperwork of a life. Driver licence, voter registration, vehicle registration, the doctors and dentists you see, the clubs and places of worship you belong to, the address on your federal return, the bank branch you use. None decides anything alone. All of them are read.
There is one safe harbor. An individual domiciled in California who is outside the state under an employment contract for an uninterrupted period of at least 546 days is treated as a nonresident, with limits on return visits and on investment income. It was written for people posted abroad, and it rarely fits a retirement or a move by choice.
Careful people change domicile correctly and are then surprised by a California return years later. The reason is sourcing. California taxes nonresidents on income from California sources, and it sources compensation to where the work was done, not to where the cheque arrives.
Stock options and restricted stock granted while you were a California resident and exercised or vested after you moved are taxed by California on the portion attributable to California workdays. Deferred compensation earned in California is California income when it is paid. A California house kept and rented produces California income for as long as it is rented.
The sale of a business is the sharpest case. Gain on the sale of shares is sourced to your residence on the day of sale, which is why the sequence of domicile change and closing is the whole question and why the Board looks hard at moves that happen in the months before a transaction. An installment sale agreed while resident can keep paying California for years.
The simplest version: selling the California residence, or converting it to a genuine arm’s length rental with a manager in between, and moving the near and dear things, removes the strongest exhibits from the file. Everything else is argument. Those steps are not.
California has no estate tax, so the planning that dominates a New York or Illinois move barely appears here. What takes its place is the house.
Proposition 13 caps the assessed value of a home at its purchase price plus small annual increases, so a house held since the late 1990s carries a property tax bill a fraction of what a new buyer would pay. That is a real reason people keep the house. It is also the single strongest fact the Board can put in front of a hearing officer, because a kept family home in California, staffed and furnished, is the definition of a place you intend to return to.
If it is kept, what it is used for has to be true and provable. A rental at market rent through a manager, with the family staying in hotels when they visit, is one thing. A house left ready for the family is another. The Board reads utility bills, not intentions.
These are fact questions. The rates and thresholds on this page should be confirmed against current guidance rather than taken from here. The structural points, closest connections, the nine month presumption and sourcing of income earned while resident, are the durable part.
Buying here helps the home factor, which is one of many. A residence that is plainly the better home, actually lived in, with the near and dear things in it, is real evidence. A pied a terre held lightly while the California house stays furnished and staffed is evidence in the other direction, and the Board reads it that way.
So the purchase is not the plan. It is one exhibit in the plan, and the order matters more than the address. Decide the domicile question with a tax adviser, understand what happens to the California house and to any equity compensation still vesting, and then choose the building. Reversing that order does not usually lose the argument, but it removes options that were free beforehand and expensive afterwards.
One practical item on the Florida side. Section 222.17 of the Florida Statutes lets you file a sworn Declaration of Domicile with the clerk of the circuit court in your county, which in Miami Dade is filed with the Clerk of the Courts. It is not required and it does not by itself decide anything. What it does is create a dated, sworn record of when you say the change happened, which is worth having in a process where you carry the burden.
Where the answer is neither: some people should not do this at all. If your company, your board seats and your children’s school are in California, the honest advice is that the case is weak and the audit is likely. Buy in Miami because you want to be in Miami. That reason survives contact with the Franchise Tax Board.
This is the desk at Miami Dossier, a real estate desk. It is not a tax practice and does not pretend to be one. What it can do is make sure the property side of the decision is not the part that goes wrong.
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Residency and domicile are decided by tax law and by your own facts, and nothing on this page is tax advice. Contact the desk at Miami Dossier and we will go through the current position on any building we cover and where a purchase would sit against a move like this. Where a question is legal, tax or immigration, we introduce you to advisers who handle that properly rather than answering it ourselves.
