Florida's New $500 Sales Tax Refund on Impact Windows (2026–2029)

On June 29, 2026, Governor DeSantis signed Florida's FY 2026-27 state budget, effective July 1, 2026. Tucked into it is something new for homeowners pricing impact windows: a refund of the sales tax you pay on impact-resistant windows and doors, up to $500 per eligible residential property, for purchases made between July 1, 2026 and June 30, 2029. It is not life-changing money next to a whole-home window project, but it is real money the state has committed to giving back — and it stacks on top of the bigger program most of our readers already know, My Safe Florida Home.

You may have read elsewhere that Florida passed a '3-year sales tax exemption' on impact windows. That was the proposal, and blogs written before the June 29 signing describe the proposal, not the law. What was actually enacted is a refund with a cap: you pay sales tax at the register as usual, and the state refunds it afterward, up to $500 total per residential property. The practical differences are real. An exemption would come off the invoice automatically and scale with the size of your project; the refund requires you to claim it, and on a typical whole-home window project the sales tax will exceed $500, so the cap — not your project size — sets what comes back.

• Up to $500 back per eligible residential property, refunding sales tax paid on impact-resistant windows and doors.
• The purchase window runs July 1, 2026 through June 30, 2029 — three years, tied to when you buy, not when you apply.
• It applies to residential property. The finer eligibility print (who files, for which properties, with what proof) is the state's to publish — see the next section.
• It is per property, not per window or per order: once a property has received $500 back, that is the cap.

As of this writing (July 22, 2026), the state has not published the exact procedure for claiming the refund. We are not going to invent a form number or a filing process that does not exist publicly yet. What you can do today is protect your claim: keep the itemized invoice for your window purchase, with the sales tax shown as its own line, along with your contract and proof of payment. When the state publishes the procedure, those are the documents any refund process will ask for. We will update this article when it does — and if you are quoting a project with us in the meantime, ask and we will tell you what is known at that point.

The refund and the grant come from the same enacted budget, and they point at the same project. My Safe Florida Home (MSFH) offers up to $10,000 toward hurricane hardening — impact windows and doors among the headline categories — and the same June 29 budget put $378 million back into it, aimed largely at the roughly 45,000 homeowners who had completed their wind-mitigation inspection and were waiting on funding. A homeowner who qualifies for MSFH and buys impact windows inside the refund window can, in principle, see both: up to $10,000 of grant money toward the project and up to $500 of sales tax back. The two run on separate rails — the grant through mysafeflhome.com with its own eligibility and sequence rules, the refund through whatever procedure the state publishes — so neither replaces the other and neither is automatic. Our MSFH explainer covers the grant side in full, including the one rule that disqualifies more projects than any other: no contract signed before grant approval.

• The itemized invoice for the windows and doors, with sales tax shown as its own line — a lump-sum receipt hides the number the refund is based on.
• Your signed contract and proof of payment.
• Permit and product-approval paperwork — your installer produces these anyway on a code-compliant job, and they prove what was installed was impact-rated.
• If you are also pursuing MSFH: every document that program asks for. The closeout packet overlaps heavily with what a refund claim would want.