Every year we meet people who moved to Miami, filed as Florida residents, and assumed the story ended there. Then a letter arrives from the state they left, asking them to prove it.
Here is the thing most people get backwards: your old state does not have to prove you stayed. In many cases, you have to prove you left. And the standard is higher than most people expect.
The easy part: Florida
Florida imposes no personal income tax. Move here, become a Florida resident, and Florida takes nothing from your salary, your dividends, or your capital gains. That is real money, and it is the reason a lot of our clients are here.
Florida also gives you a way to put your intent on the record. Under Florida Statute 222.17, you can file a sworn Declaration of Domicile with the clerk of the circuit court in your county, stating that you reside in and maintain a place of abode here that you intend to keep as your permanent home. If you keep a home in another state too, the statute lets you swear that your Florida home is your predominant and principal home.
Filing a Declaration of Domicile is useful. It is also the single most overrated step in the process.
It is one piece of evidence. It is not a shield. Filing that form and then spending eight months a year in your old apartment up north will not protect you.
The hard part: the state you left
Take New York, which runs some of the most aggressive residency audits in the country. New York can tax you as a resident under two separate tests, and you only need to fail one.
Test 1 — Domicile
Your domicile is your permanent and primary home, the place you intend to return to. New York’s own guidance is blunt about what it takes to change it: your New York domicile does not change until you can demonstrate with clear and convincing evidence that you have abandoned it and established a new one elsewhere.
“Clear and convincing” is a demanding standard. It is not a mailing address. Auditors look at where your life actually is — the home you treat as home, where your family lives, where your business is run from, where the things you care about are kept, and how you actually spend your time.
Test 2 — Statutory residency
This is the one that catches people who did everything else right. Even if you genuinely changed your domicile to Florida, New York will still tax you as a resident if both are true:
- You maintain a permanent place of abode in New York for substantially all of the year — meaning a period exceeding 11 months; and
- You spend 184 days or more in New York during the year.
The detail that ends most of these audits
Any part of a day counts as a day. Landing at JFK at 11 p.m. is a New York day. A three-hour layover, a lunch, a closing — all days. People count nights. The state counts days. That gap is where the assessment comes from.
A “permanent place of abode” is generally a building where a person can live, that you permanently maintain, and that is suitable for year-round use. A vacation structure not suitable for year-round use is generally not one. Neither is something without ordinary dwelling facilities like cooking and bathing.
So the pied-a-terre you kept “just for business trips”? If it is year-round suitable and you maintain it, it likely counts — and then it is only a day count between you and a resident tax bill.
What actually moves the needle
Auditors are not persuaded by paperwork alone. They are persuaded by a life that consistently points to one place. Things that carry real weight:
- Days, documented. Contemporaneously, not reconstructed two years later from memory. This is the whole ballgame.
- The home comparison. Auditors compare the size, value, and use of your Florida home against what you kept up north.
- Where the things you love live. The art, the heirlooms, the dog. It sounds soft. It is heavily weighted.
- Where your business is actually run from — not where it is registered.
- Family patterns. Where your spouse and minor children actually live and go to school.
- The boring stuff, done consistently: driver’s license, voter registration, vehicle registration, primary bank, physicians, house of worship, Declaration of Domicile.
What does not change
Your federal return. Moving to Florida changes your state tax exposure. The IRS does not care which state you live in. If someone is selling you a Florida move as a federal tax strategy, that is not what this is.
The practical takeaway
A Florida move is a genuinely powerful planning step. It is also one of the most commonly botched, because people treat it as a filing decision instead of a factual one. The move works when the facts back it up — and the facts have to be built deliberately, ideally before the year you claim the change, not after the audit letter.
If you are planning a move, or you already made one and never documented it properly, that gap is worth closing now rather than in an audit three years from now.
Sources
Florida Statutes §222.17 — Manifesting and evidencing domicile in Florida
NY Department of Taxation and Finance — Income tax definitions
NY Department of Taxation and Finance — Permanent Place of Abode
NY Department of Taxation and Finance — Nonresident Audit Guidelines
This article is general information, not tax advice. Residency outcomes depend on your specific facts and on the rules of the state you are leaving, which vary. Please talk to us before acting.