House leadership on Wednesday proposed a permanent reduction to the state’s general sales tax rate, lowering it from 6% to 5.25% in a measure projected to save taxpayers nearly $5 billion annually.
The proposed cut was announced by House Speaker Daniel Perez during a floor address, where he outlined the initiative as part of the chamber’s broader budget framework for the 2025–26 fiscal year.
“Our budget will not only be lower than the Governor’s proposed budget, it will also be lower than the budget passed by the Legislature last term,” said Perez. “For the first time since the Great Recession, we will roll out a budget that actually spends less money than we did in the prior fiscal year.”
Perez said he has instructed the House Ways & Means Committee to prepare committee legislation formalizing the tax cut.
Unlike temporary tax holidays or short-term exemptions enacted in prior years, he said, the current proposal is intended to be a permanent, recurring rate reduction. The change would apply to future fiscal years on an ongoing basis, altering the state’s revenue structure.
The announcement reportedly followed weeks of internal budget reviews, during which appropriations subcommittees were directed to identify structural savings. Perez said the resulting House budget will come in below both the governor’s proposed spending plan and the final appropriations act passed by the Legislature last year. According to the Speaker, it will represent the first year-over-year reduction in total state spending since the economic downturn of 2008–09.
During his remarks, Perez criticized what he described as a pattern of over-reliance on recurring general revenue expenditures and a tendency to fully allocate available funds each year.
“Our problem is not that we buy too many non-recurring projects, it is that we cannot resist spending every single dime of recurring revenue. We pile more money on programs that can’t even manage to spend the money they already have,” he said. “The beneficiaries of the state budget are the endless string of lobbyists and vendors who always have some shiny new thing for the state to buy that won’t actually improve the lives of Floridians. We have forgotten a fundamental truth – this money isn’t ours.”
The proposed General Appropriations Act, incorporating the subcommittee funding proposals and reflecting the anticipated revenue impact of the tax cut, is expected to be released by the House on Friday. The legislation to implement the tax rate change will likely be introduced next week and must be approved by both chambers of the Legislature and signed by the governor to take effect.
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