What a TRIM notice is
Every August, Florida property appraisers mail a Notice of Proposed Property Taxes, universally called the TRIM notice, short for Truth in Millage. It is not a bill. It is the state-required preview of three things: what the property appraiser says your property is worth, what exemptions and caps were applied, and what each taxing authority proposes to charge.
The TRIM notice matters more than the bill that follows in November, because the TRIM notice is the document that starts your appeal clock.
The 25-day clock
A petition to the county's Value Adjustment Board challenging your assessment is due 25 days after the property appraiser mails the TRIM notices. Not 25 days after you open the envelope, and not 25 days after you notice the number looks high. The mailing date is printed on the notice, and each county's deadline lands on its own date in September.
Miss the window and, apart from narrow good-cause exceptions, the assessment stands for the year. The next opportunity is next year's notice. Our deadlines reference tracks the major Florida counties as mailing dates publish.
Before the petition deadline there is also an informal path: you can ask the property appraiser's office to review the value directly. Sometimes a documented factual error gets corrected without a petition. The informal conversation does not pause the 25-day clock, so the safe sequence is to file the petition and talk in parallel rather than talk first and file late.
How to read the values on the notice
The notice shows several numbers, and they do different jobs:
- Market value, which Florida law calls just value, is the property appraiser's estimate of what the property is worth. This is the number an appeal challenges.
- Assessed value is just value after caps. For non-homestead property, including most commercial property, assessed value cannot rise more than 10% in a year, but that cap resets on sale.
- Taxable value is assessed value minus exemptions, and it is what the millage rates apply to.
A common misreading is to look only at the tax amount. If the tax went up because millage rates went up, an assessment appeal does not touch that; the millage line has its own public hearing process, listed on the notice. If the tax went up because just value jumped, that is the appeal question: does the evidence support the value?
For commercial property, the evidence question usually runs through income. Florida property appraisers model income for income-producing property, and a building whose actual rents, vacancy, and expenses do not support the modeled value has the beginnings of a case. What that evidence looks like in practice is covered in What Counts as Evidence in a Commercial Property Tax Appeal.
One disclosure that belongs in any honest discussion of Florida appeals: if the review process uncovers a factual error in the property record that understates the property, the value can be corrected upward as well as downward. Screening for that exposure before filing is part of the work.
What to do when yours arrives
Open it the week it arrives, note the mailing date, and compare the just value against what you know about the building. If you want the comparison run against the county's own records before the petition deadline, start a free analysis. If the value is already in line, we will say so, and nothing gets filed.
More on the Florida process end to end in the Florida guide.