Every state guide on this site leads with one statewide rate — one property tax percentage, one transfer tax percentage. For most of the 17 states that baseline is the real number, because the tax is set at the state level with little local variation. Three states are the exception: Florida, Texas, and California each have specific counties or cities where this calculator applies a different rate than the statewide default, because the real-world tax actually works that way.
The calculator doesn’t ask you to pick a county from a dropdown. When you enter a street address, it geocodes that address through the Census Bureau, reads back the county name, and checks whether that county has an override on file. If it does, the override replaces the statewide number automatically; if it doesn’t, the statewide baseline applies. The three cases below are the counties and cities currently on file.
Florida: Miami-Dade is the one case where local is cheaper, not pricier
Statewide, Florida’s deed stamp tax on a sale is $0.70 per $100 of price, paid by the seller. Miami-Dade County’s rate for a single-family residence is $0.60 per $100 — lower than the rest of the state. On a $500,000 sale, that is $3,500 statewide against $3,000 in Miami-Dade: a $500 difference in the seller’s favor, from the county rate alone.
That is the single-family number. Miami-Dade also charges an additional surtax on sales of property that isn’t a single-family residence — condos held as investment units, multi-family buildings, commercial property — which this calculator’s county override does not model as a separate figure, since it only applies the lower single-family rate. If you’re comparing a Miami-Dade multi-unit deal against this calculator’s output, treat the transfer-tax line as a floor, not the final number, and budget for the surtax separately.
Texas: three counties where property tax runs well above the state’s own headline number
Texas has no state property tax — every dollar is set locally by the county, school district, and city layered together, which is exactly why the statewide 1.63% baseline is only ever an average. Three of the state’s largest counties carry a meaningfully higher combined rate: Harris County (Houston) at 2.09%, Dallas County at 2.02%, and Travis County (Austin) at 1.81%.
| Rate basis | Annual bill on a $500,000 home, $100,000 homestead exemption applied |
|---|---|
| Statewide baseline, 1.63% | $6,520 |
| Travis County, 1.81% | $7,240 |
| Dallas County, 2.02% | $8,080 |
| Harris County, 2.09% | $8,360 |
That is the same $100,000 homestead exemption Texas applies to a primary residence either way — the override only changes the rate applied to what’s left, not the exemption itself. Run a Harris County home through the statewide number instead of the actual county rate and the estimate comes in about $1,840 a year short; Travis County, the lowest of the three overrides, still runs $720 a year above the state baseline.
California: the county transfer tax is a rounding error next to the city’s
California’s statewide documentary transfer tax is $1.10 per $1,000 of price (0.11%), paid by the seller as a baseline. Two cities layer a separate municipal tax on top that dwarfs it: Los Angeles adds its own $4.50 per $1,000, bringing the combined county-plus-city rate to 0.56%; San Francisco’s progressive city tax pushes the combined rate to 0.68% at typical home prices. On a $500,000 sale that is $2,800 in Los Angeles and $3,400 in San Francisco against $550 under the bare statewide rate — more than five times as much in Los Angeles, and more than six times as much in San Francisco.
Los Angeles has one more layer above that: the city’s "Measure ULA" surtax adds another 4% on the portion of price above $5.15 million, and 5.5% above roughly $10.3 million. That threshold is far above a typical single-family sale, which is why it doesn’t show up in the $500,000 example above, but it matters for anyone pricing a high-end Los Angeles property through this calculator.
The statewide number is a starting point, not a guarantee
For 14 of the 17 states on this site, the state-level rate is the real rate everywhere in that state. For Florida, Texas, and California, it is a baseline that one specific county or city can move — down in Miami-Dade’s case, up in every other case here. Enter a real address and the calculator applies the county-specific number automatically; a rough estimate without an address should be treated as the statewide figure, with the caveats above.