Tax Services in Miami, FL:
Federal-First in a No-Income-Tax City

Miami runs on movement — capital, people, and property flowing in from Latin America, the Northeast, and everywhere in between. It is the gateway city, and its tax picture reflects that: Florida has no personal income tax, so for a Miami business or investor there is no state return to file on your earnings. But that single fact fools a lot of people. When there is no state income tax to plan around, every dollar of real leverage sits at the federal level and inside the transactionsthemselves — the entity you choose, the way you sell a property, the forms a foreign owner must file, and the county taxes that quietly attach to every deed. In Miami, tax planning is not about the state. It is about getting the federal and cross-border pieces exactly right.

This guide walks the Federal-First Tax Blueprint — Miami Edition: what to plan when the state takes nothing, and the international layers — FIRPTA, foreign-owned filings, inbound investors, and Miami-Dade's own documentary stamp quirk — that make Miami tax work unlike anywhere else in the country. All delivered remotely.

By Carrie Anderson — Co-Founder, 406 Consulting Group. Former commercial banker and underwriter (300+ loan reviews) who reads tax structure the way a lender does — because how you're taxed shapes how you borrow, sell, and grow. Delivered remotely to Miami and Florida clients.

Tax services in Miami are not about filing a state return — there isn't one on your income. For a Miami business owner or investor, tax planning means federal strategy plus transaction-level structure: choosing the right entity, electing S-corp status when the math works, timing income and deductions, and — uniquely for Miami — handling the cross-border rules that come with a city where a huge share of capital and property is foreign-owned. When the state takes nothing off the top, the mistakes that cost real money are almost always federal or transactional.

That is the heart of the Federal-First Tax Blueprint — Miami Edition. In a high-tax state, a big part of planning is minimizing what the state grabs. In Miami, there is nothing to minimize at the state level, so the entire effort moves to the federal return and to the moment of each transaction — the sale of a condo, the setup of a US entity by a foreign owner, the deed that records at the county. Get those right and you keep far more than a state-tax dodge ever would have saved.

Start with where the leverage actually lives.

With no state income tax, your tax outcome is decided almost entirely by three federal levers: entity structure, the S-corp election, and timing. Florida taxes only C-corporations, at 5.5% — every other structure (sole proprietor, partnership, S-corp) pays no Florida income tax at all. So the entity question in Miami is really a federal question with a small Florida footnote: how do you want the IRS to treat this business, and does organizing as a C-corp trigger that one 5.5% state tax on purpose or by accident?

The most common federal lever a profitable Miami business reaches for first is the S-corp election.

An S-corp election in Florida is a purely federal move — there is no state income tax for it to affect, so 100% of the benefit is federal self-employment tax savings. The mechanism: as a sole proprietor or single-member LLC, your entire net profit is subject to self-employment tax (roughly 15.3% up to the Social Security wage base, then 2.9%+ above it). Elect S-corp status and you split that profit into a reasonable salary (which carries payroll tax) and distributions(which do not). Done right, that can save thousands a year — but only if the salary is genuinely reasonable, which the IRS scrutinizes.

Run your own numbers with our S-Corp Calculator, then let us pressure-test the salary. There is no Florida PTE or SALT workaround to layer on top — there is no state income tax to work around — so in Miami the election stands or falls on the federal math alone. Where Miami really diverges from the rest of the country is the international layer, starting with FIRPTA.

FIRPTA is the federal rule that makes the buyer withhold 15% of the amount realized(usually the sale price) when a foreign person sells a US real property interest — and in a market where foreign owners hold a huge share of the condos, it comes up constantly. FIRPTA stands for the Foreign Investment in Real Property Tax Act. It exists because the IRS cannot easily chase a seller who lives abroad, so it collects at the closing table instead. The withholding is a prepayment against the seller's actual US tax on the gain — not an extra tax — but if you do nothing, 15% of the gross price is held back and remitted to the IRS regardless of your real gain.

Confirm current thresholds and rates with the IRS FIRPTA guidance— the planning window is before the deal closes, not after. The other cross-border trap catches foreign owners the moment they set up a US entity.

If you are a foreign person who owns a US single-member LLC, the IRS treats that "disregarded" LLC as a domestic corporation for reporting purposes, which means you must file Form 5472 attached to a pro forma Form 1120 every year — and missing it carries a $25,000 penalty. This trips up an enormous number of inbound Miami investors, because a single-member LLC normally files nothing of its own (its activity just flows onto the owner's return). But when the owner is foreign, that shortcut disappears. The LLC itself has to file, reporting the "reportable transactions" between it and its foreign owner — capital contributions, distributions, loans, and the like.

We own the filing and penalty side of this. The records trail behind it — a clean, defensible ledger of every contribution, distribution, and intercompany loan so the 5472 is actually accurate — is the job of your books; see our Miami bookkeeping guide. To file any of this, a foreign owner first needs a US taxpayer number.

An ITIN— Individual Taxpayer Identification Number — is the IRS number a foreign person uses when they have a US tax obligation but are not eligible for a Social Security number, and for a Miami inbound investor it is usually the first practical step. You need one to file a US return reporting rental income, to claim back over-withheld FIRPTA money, to be listed correctly on entity filings, and generally to be a real taxpayer in the eyes of the IRS. Without it, refunds stall and filings get rejected.

This is exactly the kind of cross-border sequencing where a lender's eye helps: if you plan to finance US property, the bank will want to see clean tax identity and clean filings before it lends. We build that from day one. With the federal and identity layers set, one more Miami-specific tax attaches to almost every property deal — and it is a county quirk.

Florida's documentary stamp tax is a transaction tax on deeds and on written obligations to pay money — and Miami-Dade County is the one county that runs its own rates, so the math is genuinely different here than anywhere else in the state. Statewide, the tax on deeds is $0.70 per $100 of consideration. But in Miami-Dade the deed rate is $0.60 per $100, with an added $0.45 per $100 surtax that applies to real property other than a single-family residence. On promissory notes and other written obligations, the rate is $0.35 per $100 statewide, including Miami-Dade.

These rates change and the single-family versus other-property distinction has real dollar consequences on a commercial deal, so confirm current rates with the Miami-Dade County Clerk and the Florida Department of Revenue before you close. Alongside the deed taxes sits the tax a Miami business handles every single month.

A Miami business collecting sales tax charges the Florida state rate of 6% plus the Miami-Dade discretionary surtax, for a combined rate of about 7% — and the piece owners miss is use tax, which they owe themselves on untaxed purchases. Sales tax is straightforward when you sell taxable goods to a Miami customer: you collect the combined rate and remit it. Use tax is the mirror image — when you buy something for the business from an out-of-state or online vendor who did not charge Florida tax, you owe that same rate directly to the state. It is the most commonly overlooked liability in the state, and the one auditors look for first.

The surtax base has caps and category rules, so confirm the current combined rate with the Florida Department of Revenue. One more Florida tax rides on payroll — under a name most owners have never heard.

Florida has no state income-tax withholding to run on payroll, but it does have a state unemployment tax — it just calls it reemployment tax, filed on Form RT-6. If you have employees in Miami, this is the one payroll tax that is genuinely a Florida obligation rather than a federal one. It is an employer-paid tax on a capped amount of each employee's wages, at a rate that starts at a new-employer default and then adjusts based on your claims experience over time. Because there is no state withholding to distract from it, RT-6 is the easiest Florida payroll obligation to forget — and the one a new employer relocating from an income-tax state does not expect.

Confirm current wage bases and rates with the Florida Department of Revenue. With payroll covered, the biggest planning opportunities in Miami tend to live inside real estate.

Miami is a real-estate town, so for many owners the biggest federal levers are the ones that attach to property: depreciation, cost segregation, and depreciation recapture. Depreciation lets you deduct the cost of a building (not the land) over time, sheltering rental income. Cost segregation is a study that reclassifies parts of a property — fixtures, flooring, landscaping — into shorter recovery periods so you can front-load those deductions, sometimes dramatically, in the early years. The trade-off arrives at sale: recapture taxes back a portion of the depreciation you claimed, which is exactly why the sale needs to be planned, not stumbled into.

Short-term rentals add their own layer — the tourist development tax collected on stays, plus the question of whether the activity rises to a trade or business for federal purposes. For a foreign owner, all of this collides with FIRPTA at the moment of sale, which is where the pieces come together in a real example.

The clearest way to see the Federal-First Blueprint at work is to walk a sale from start to finish. The following is a hypothetical, composite examplewith illustrative figures — not a real client — built to show how FIRPTA plays out when it is handled correctly versus when it is ignored.

The lesson generalizes: in a no-income-tax city, the wins come from getting the federal and transactional timing right, on purpose, ahead of time. That is a cadence, not a once-a-year scramble.

Reactive tax work is filing a return in the spring to report what already happened; proactive tax work is a year-round cadence that changes the outcome before the year closes — and in a no-income-tax city, proactive is where nearly all the savings live. Because there is no state return to optimize, the calendar is built around federal moves and transaction timing: the entity and salary review, mid-year projections, the property and depreciation decisions, and — for anyone selling US real estate — the FIRPTA certificate that has to be filed before, not after, the closing.

This is where working with a firm that also understands lending pays off: the same clean, proactive structure that lowers your tax is what a bank reads when you go to borrow. Explore our tax planning, tax preparation, and fractional CFO services — or just talk to us. And yes, all of it is remote.

FAQ: Miami Tax Questions