Florida closing cost calculator

Picking a property fills the figure in, and the line under the box says which office it came from, which parcel it belongs to and which year’s roll it is on. Nothing is estimated on the way: what you see is what the roll says. In Bay, Brevard, Broward, Columbia, Dixie, Duval, Flagler, Hamilton, Hendry, Hillsborough, Indian River, Lafayette, Lee, Leon, Liberty, Madison, Miami-Dade, Orange, Palm Beach, Suwannee, Volusia and Wakulla the figure is the appraiser’s own, read straight off the roll they publish. Everywhere else it is the Department of Revenue’s copy of that county’s roll, found by where the address stands.

It arrives two ways. A handful of appraisers publish their certified roll as an open data service, address and value in the same row, so the figure comes back with the suggestion. The rest publish where every address is but not what it is worth, so picking a property there reads the parcel off the Department of Revenue’s statewide parcel roll at the point it stands on. That second step checks itself: unless the parcel it finds carries the address you picked, you get an empty box and the appraiser’s link rather than the figure for the house next door.

We would rather leave the box empty than fill it from a data broker’s copy of a roll we cannot cite.

It does not change the premium. The Office of Insurance Regulation sets title insurance rates by rule under Fla. Stat. § 627.782, and the schedule runs the same in Pensacola as it does in Key West. What the county does change is the tax on the deed: documentary stamp tax is 70¢ per $100 of consideration across Florida and 60¢ in Miami-Dade, which never applied the ten-cent increase in ch. 92-317, and Miami-Dade adds a 45¢ surtax on anything that is not a single-family residence.

That tax is charged on the consideration — the price — and an estimate that starts from an address has no price in it. So the address option computes it on the appraiser’s value instead, says so on every line that does it, and keeps it in its own group away from the premium. On a sale above the roll’s value, which is most sales, the real tax is higher.

The toggle above is not a filter on one list. Some of these lines genuinely have no other side: a seller is not borrowing, so the lender’s policy, the documentary stamp tax and intangible tax on the mortgage, and the recording and e-recording of it are never a seller’s to pay. Showing a seller one total with a buyer’s loan costs inside it was the thing worth fixing.

The rest is custom, which is not law. Documentary stamp tax on the deed is the seller’s in ordinary Florida practice — s. 201.02 taxes the deed and names nobody to pay it — and the buyer records the deed they are taking. Who pays for the owner’s policy is the one that really moves: in some counties it is customarily the buyer, who then chooses the closing agent, and in others the seller. Each of those lines says on its face which way custom put it.

That custom is read off the same county record the county and city pages print, not typed into the calculator. Where we have not verified it for a county — and “another Florida county” is sixty-odd counties at once — the owner’s policy is shown to both sides and says so. In every case the purchase contract is what settles it, and the contract can put any of these lines on either party. Read the paragraph that does it rather than assuming.

Each side’s costs, the ones no calculator can price included, are set out line by line on the buyer closing costs and seller closing costs pages.

A policy is written for the full insurable value of the property — on a sale, the purchase price. Florida’s assessed value is a tax figure. On homestead property the annual increase in assessed value is capped by the Save Our Homes provision, so a house held for years can be assessed far below what it would sell for today. Other exemptions and classifications pull it down further. The box leads with the just value where the roll has one, because it sits before the cap and the exemptions, and offers the assessed value beside it. The just value is still a figure for the tax roll rather than a sale price, so the same caution applies to it.

That makes an estimate off the roll useful and one-sided: the premium on the real coverage amount is usually higher than the figure it gives, rarely lower. If you have a contract price, use it — the second option works from a price and a loan amount and adds documentary stamp tax, intangible tax and recording on top. If you have the contract itself, the third option sends it to us and we price everything, our own fees included.

Not sure? Tick it and untick it. The difference is what it is worth digging the old policy out for, and we will check the rule against your file if you ask.

Tick it and a second box appears, asking what the previous policy insured for. It is worth filling in. The reissue rate reaches only as far as the old policy did; under R. 69O-186.003(2)(c) anything above that amount is charged at the original schedule. Leave it empty and the whole figure is rated as reissue, which reads low on a property worth more now than when it was last insured — which is most of them.

It is sent to this site while you type, in the body of the request rather than its address, so it does not end up in a server log the way a search in a URL would. This site then asks about it: the county and city services that publish property records, the U.S. Census Bureau’s geocoder and, where it is switched on, Esri’s. Those requests carry the address in their URLs, so it reaches those services and their logs. Nothing about it is emailed to the office and no cookie is set; answers are held in the server’s memory for up to an hour so the same search is not sent twice.

The two estimators ask for nothing else because the premium is the rule’s, not ours, so there is nothing to trade for it. If you would rather send nothing at all, use the second option — the figures are computed in your browser either way, and the address box is only there to save you a trip to the property appraiser.

The third option is different, and says so: a contract you upload goes to the office over an encrypted connection with your name and email, so we can read it and write back. It is opened by a person and never sold.