The apartment is the easy part. Michigan does not stop taxing you because you bought in Miami. It stops when your domicile changes, and the mistake Michigan families make is not on the income tax return at all.
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This page explains how Michigan decides, where the property tax exemptions collide 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, Michigan taxes its residents on worldwide income at a flat 4.25 per cent, and the cities that levy their own income tax add 1 to 2.4 per cent for residents, Detroit at the top. Michigan has no estate tax. On paper this is one of the easier states to leave, which is why people leave it carelessly.
Michigan defines a resident as an individual domiciled in the state. Domicile is your true, fixed and permanent home, the place you intend to return to whenever you are away. You have exactly one at a time, and changing it takes intent plus action. Michigan adds one presumption: live in Michigan at least 183 days in the year and you are presumed to be domiciled there.
This is the trap. The presumption runs one way. Fewer than 183 days does not make you a Florida resident. It only means Michigan has to argue rather than presume, and it argues from the house.
Michigan taxes capital gains as ordinary income at the flat rate. Florida has no state income tax and no estate tax.
If Treasury disagrees that you left, the question is where your true and permanent home is, and it is answered from the facts of your life rather than from a form.
Home. The two residences compared on size, value, use and upkeep. A house in Bloomfield Hills or Grosse Pointe kept furnished and staffed weighs against a lightly used Miami condominium, whichever one you sleep in more.
Time. The 183 day presumption, and the pattern behind it. Any part of a day in Michigan is a Michigan day. Summers up north, winters in Miami and the rest travelling is a pattern Treasury has seen before.
Business. Where you physically make decisions. An office in Troy or Southfield you still walk into points at Michigan.
Things and people. Where the art, the papers and the boat are, where a spouse lives, where the children are in school.
The Michigan driver licence, the voter registration and the change of address are worth doing and none of them decides anything. Treasury sees them on every file. They are the paperwork of the thing, not the thing.
Michigan does not have an estate tax, so the planning that dominates an Illinois or New York move barely appears here. What takes its place is a property tax form.
The Michigan Principal Residence Exemption removes up to 18 mills of school operating tax from the home you own and occupy as your principal residence. The affidavit you signed to claim it says the home is your principal residence and that you claim no similar exemption on a home anywhere else. Florida’s homestead exemption says the same thing in the other direction: it is not available to anyone claiming a residency based exemption in another state.
So the two cannot both be true. The family that moves to Miami, files for Florida homestead and leaves the Michigan exemption in place has sworn to two states that each is home. Assessors on both sides check, the Michigan exemption is denied back to the year it stopped being true with interest, and the file now contains a sworn statement that Michigan was the principal residence. It is the worst possible exhibit in a domicile argument and it was created by not sending a one page form.
The simplest version: rescind the Michigan exemption in the year the domicile changes, file the Florida homestead after 1 January of the year you actually live here, and keep the dates consistent with the Declaration of Domicile. Three documents, one story.
Most Michigan families who move south keep something in Michigan, usually the lake house. That is fine, and it is not the same as keeping the family home. What it has to be is plainly a second residence: smaller, seasonal, without the near and dear things, and without the exemption.
One more Michigan mechanic worth knowing before deciding what to keep. When a Michigan property transfers, its taxable value uncaps to the current assessed value, and the annual increase cap that had been protecting it resets. A house held for twenty years carries a tax bill well below what a buyer would pay. Selling it ends that. Keeping it keeps the low bill and keeps the exhibit. That trade is the honest version of the decision, and it should be made with the numbers in front of you.
The rate and the thresholds on this page should be confirmed against current guidance rather than taken from here. The structural points, domicile as the test, the 183 day presumption and the collision of the two exemptions, are the durable part.
Buying here helps the home factor. A residence that is plainly the better home, actually lived in, with the near and dear things in it, is real evidence. A condominium held lightly while the Michigan house stays furnished and staffed is evidence in the other direction, and Treasury 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, decide what happens to the Michigan house and its exemption, 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 business, your board seats and your children’s school are in Michigan, the honest advice is that the case is weak. Buy in Miami because you want to be in Miami. That reason survives contact with an auditor.
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.
