The apartment is the easy part. New York does not stop taxing you because you bought in Miami. It stops when your domicile changes, and it gets a vote on whether it did.
This page explains how New York decides, what the audit looks at 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, New York taxes its residents on worldwide income and has two separate ways of calling you a resident. You have to fail both before you file as a nonresident. Most people moving south think about one and lose on the other.
The first is domicile: 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 second is statutory residence, which ignores intent entirely. Keep a permanent place of abode in New York for substantially all of the year, which auditors read as more than eleven months, and spend more than 183 days in the state, and you are a New York resident on worldwide income no matter where your real life is.
This is the trap. People change domicile correctly, do every step properly, and then keep the Manhattan apartment because selling felt final. The apartment plus the day count hands New York the whole return anyway.
Worth knowing what is at stake before deciding how much trouble any of this is worth. New York State runs to 10.9 per cent at the top, New York City adds up to 3.876 per cent on residents, and the two stack to a combined marginal rate of about 14.776 per cent. New York 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 New York disagrees that you left, the burden of proof is yours, and the standard is clear and convincing evidence rather than the balance of probabilities. That is a meaningful difference. You are not arguing that leaving is more likely than not. You are proving it.
The state published Nonresident Audit Guidelines in 2014 that set out five primary factors an auditor weighs, and they are weighed before anything else is considered.
Home. The two residences are compared directly on size, value, use and upkeep. A furnished family apartment in New York against a lightly used Miami condominium reads badly, whichever one you sleep in more.
Active business involvement. Where you physically make decisions. Continuing to run something from a New York office, even part time, points at New York. Remote involvement is treated differently from being in the room.
Time. Days here against days there, and the pattern rather than the arithmetic. Five months in New York, three in Miami and four travelling reads as a New York life.
Items near and dear. Where the heirlooms, the art, the photographs and the collections physically are. The reasoning is that people keep what they care about where they live.
Family connections. Where a spouse lives and where minor children go to school. The guidelines treat this as intrusive and reach for it last, only when the first four have not settled the question.
Notice what is not on that list. The Florida driver licence, the voter registration and the change of address are all worth doing and none of them decides anything. Auditors see them on every file. They are the paperwork of the thing, not the thing.
Statutory residence is the mechanical test and it is the one that catches careful people, because it does not care how sincerely you moved. Two conditions, both objective: an abode kept for substantially all of the year, and more than 183 days present.
The day count is harsher than it sounds. Any part of a day in New York is a New York day. Landing in the evening and leaving the next morning is two days. The published exceptions are narrow, covering travel through the state to an airport and days spent in hospital, and auditors examine claimed exceptions closely. Married couples filing jointly should understand how each spouse’s presence is counted rather than assume.
The courts have narrowed what counts as an abode, which matters if you are keeping something. In Gaied, decided by the Court of Appeals in 2014, the dwelling has to actually serve as the taxpayer’s residence, not merely be owned by him. In Obus, decided by the Appellate Division in 2022, a vacation home stopped being automatically a permanent place of abode and became a question of whether there is a genuine residential interest in it. These are real doors, and both are fact specific enough that walking through either without counsel is not advisable.
The simplest version: selling the New York residence, or converting it to a genuine arm’s length rental, removes the statutory test from the conversation entirely. Everything else is argument. That step is not.
New York’s estate tax follows domicile only. The 183 day test does not reach it. That sounds like relief and is usually the opposite, because it means an unresolved domicile question does not simply cost you income tax in the years you are arguing. It sits over the estate.
For 2026 the New York exemption is approximately ~$7,350,000 per person, against a federal exemption of $15,000,000. The gap between those two numbers is the exposure, and it is where most families who think their planning is done are in fact exposed.
New York also runs a cliff. Go above roughly 105 per cent of the exemption, about ~$7,717,500, and the credit is not reduced, it is gone, and the estate is taxed from the first dollar at rates reaching 16 per cent. New York does not recognise spousal portability either, so a couple can lose one exemption entirely without planning for it. Florida has no estate tax.
These figures index annually and should be confirmed against current guidance rather than taken from this page. The structural points, the cliff, the absence of portability and the fact that domicile alone governs, are the durable part.
Buying here helps the home factor, which is one of five. 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 New York apartment stays furnished and staffed is evidence in the other direction, and auditors read 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 New York residence, 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 New York, 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 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.
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.
