Doc stamps give the real price
A Florida deed reciting ten dollars proves nothing about what was paid. The documentary stamp tax printed on the same instrument is computed from the actual consideration, so the number the deed will not state can be recovered by dividing.
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The same material, read aloud and told more loosely than it is written. Nothing is said in it that this page does not also say.
That same recording, with the writing lit line by line as it plays and the sections listed beside it, is on its own page.
The tax is on consideration, and the rate is fixed
Documentary stamp tax is an excise tax on documents that transfer an interest in Florida real property, and on written obligations to pay money. It is paid to the county recording official when the document is recorded.
The rate on a deed is 70 cents on each $100, or portion thereof, of the total consideration, in every county except Miami-Dade. Miami-Dade charges 60 cents on each $100 and adds a surtax of 45 cents on each $100. The surtax is not due where the document transfers only a single-family dwelling, which is most of what sells.
The rate on a or other written obligation is 35 cents on each $100 of the amount secured. There is no cap on the tax due on a mortgage. There is a cap of $2,450 on a note.
All parties to the document are liable for the tax whichever of them agreed to pay it, and if one party is exempt the other has to pay. So the figure is not a matter of who filled the form in.
Four Florida deeds compared. An arm's length sale reciting ten dollars carries $5,600 of documentary stamps, which divides out at 70 cents per $100 to consideration of $800,000. A gift to a child reciting ten dollars and other good and valuable consideration carries 70 cents of stamps, which means no consideration and no mortgage on the property. A transfer to a relative of a mortgaged property, also reciting ten dollars, carries $1,470 of stamps, which divides out to $210,000, being the mortgage balance rather than a price. A divorce deed of the marital home carries no stamps at all, because it is exempt, so no figure can be derived from it.
The arithmetic, both ways
Two divisions, and they answer two different questions.
From a deed: multiply the documentary stamp tax by 100 and divide by 0.70, outside Miami-Dade. Stamps of $5,600 mean consideration of $800,000. Stamps of $1,260 mean $180,000, which is the Department of Revenue's own worked example of a $30,000 down payment and a $150,000 purchase money note.
From a mortgage: multiply by 100 and divide by 0.35. Stamps of $1,750 mean an obligation of $500,000 secured by the instrument.
The rate is charged on each $100 or portion thereof, so the result is the consideration rounded up to the next hundred dollars. That is close enough to be useful and not exact enough to quote as a price.
Seventy cents means a gift
The most useful reading on the whole instrument is the smallest number that can appear on it.
Where an unencumbered property is transferred for nominal consideration, the Department's examples put the tax at $0.70. A transfer of a $400,000 to a new spouse, and a transfer of a $1 million parcel to the transferor's children, both produce 70 cents where the deed recites love and affection and one dollar, or ten dollars and other good and valuable consideration.
So a deed carrying $0.70 of stamps is not a sale that happened to be cheap. It is a transfer for no consideration, of a property with no mortgage on it, and that is a fact worth reading against the voidable transfer sections rather than a curiosity.
What consideration includes, which is more than the price
Consideration is defined widely enough that the derived figure is not the cash that changed hands.
It includes money paid or agreed to be paid. It includes the discharge of an obligation and the exchange of property. And it includes the mortgage, or other on the property, whether assumed or not. Where the property carries a mortgage, the balance at the time of transfer is consideration for the transfer.
Two consequences follow. A deed in lieu of foreclosure is taxed on the debt discharged, which the Department's example puts at $225,132.75 even where the property is worth less. And a transfer of an encumbered property between relatives for no money still carries stamps, computed on the mortgage balance, so the tax on that deed is evidence of the debt rather than of a price.
Where property is exchanged for something other than money, the consideration is presumed to be the fair market value of the property transferred.
What pays nothing at all
A deed with no stamps is a category rather than an absence, and the categories are listed.
No tax is due on a deed between spouses where the property is and the only consideration is a mortgage or other lien encumbering it. No tax is due on a deed between spouses or former spouses following a dissolution of marriage, where the property was the marital home at the time of the divorce. No tax is due on a transfer under threat of eminent domain or condemnation, or on a personal representative's deed given under a duly probated will.
The Department states plainly that there is no exemption for a transfer made for estate planning purposes. So the absence of stamps points at one of a short list of situations, and estate planning is not on it.
How to check it yourself
Three steps. The third is the one that stops the figure being taken for a price.
Pull the recorded deed and read the stamps from the instrument rather than from an index summary. Divide by the rate for the county, remembering that Miami-Dade runs at 60 cents with a separate surtax line.
Compare the result against the sale price shown on the property appraiser's record page. Broward states that the price it publishes is calculated from the documentary stamps paid at recording, because state law requires that. It also states that where the stamps paid were wrong the office will note a corrected closing statement internally and will not update the price on its website.
Then check whether a mortgage was recorded on the same day. If one was, part of the consideration is that debt rather than money, and the derived figure is the sum of the two rather than the cash paid.
What this does not cover
Any state other than Florida, and the accuracy of the stamps themselves.
New York charges its own transfer taxes and collects sale prices through a separate return on a different basis. None of the rates or rules above apply there. Within Florida the derived figure is only as good as the tax that was paid, which is the taxpayer's own computation, and the Department's penalty provisions exist because it is sometimes wrong. A deed is taxable whether it is recorded or not, so a transfer that never reached the produced a liability without producing a public record of anything.
Nobody writing this is a lawyer, and none of it is advice. Whether a particular transfer was for reasonably equivalent value is a question for counsel, and it turns on an appraisal rather than on a tax line. What a page can do is narrower. It can tell you that the deed reciting ten dollars was taxed on something, and how to find out what.