New Jersey to Florida: Correcting the Exit Tax Myth

The phrase has outlived every attempt to kill it. New Jersey does not tax you for leaving. There is no departure levy, no clawback of prior-year income, no toll at the state line. What exists is a payment collected at a real estate closing, and calling it an exit tax has done real damage, because it puts people in a defensive crouch about the wrong thing.

The actual rule lives at N.J.S.A. 54A:8-8 through 8-10. A nonresident who sells New Jersey real property must make an estimated Gross Income Tax payment before the deed is recorded, and the county recording officer is prohibited from accepting the deed without it. The Division of Taxation sets out the mechanics in Technical Bulletin TB-57(R), revised June 15, 2026. It applies to nonresidents, it attaches to a property sale, and it is a prepayment credited against a return you file anyway.

Notice what it does not do. It does not decide whether you are a New Jersey resident. It does not create liability you would not otherwise have. It does not care where you moved to. And it is entirely absent from the case where this corridor actually goes wrong, which is a residency audit opened three years later against someone who never sold the house at all.

Our New Jersey residency guide rates the state 4 out of 5 on exit stickiness and 4 out of 5 on audit aggressiveness, below New York and California but well above the national middle. Our Florida residency guide rates Florida 1 out of 5 on both, because Florida has no personal income tax and therefore nothing to recapture. The tax gap is genuine: the 2025 New Jersey Tax Rate Schedules top out at 10.75 percent on taxable income over $1,000,000 for every filing status, against zero in Florida, and New Jersey carries the highest effective property tax burden in the country at roughly 2.23 percent of home value. This is informational and is not legal or tax advice; work through your own facts with a qualified CPA or tax attorney.

Start with the arithmetic, because the popular version of it is wrong in a way that matters. TB-57 says the nonresident seller calculates the estimated tax by multiplying the reportable gain for federal income tax purposes, if any, by a tax rate equal to the highest rate for the tax year provided in N.J.S.A. 54A:2-1, which is 10.75 percent. It then adds that the law requires the estimated tax payment be not less than 2 percent of the seller’s consideration for the sale or transfer stated in the deed.

So 2 percent is a floor on a payment, not a rate on a gain. On a modest gain it is the number that governs, which is why everyone quotes it. On a large gain the 10.75 percent calculation governs and the payment is far more than 2 percent of the price. And because the floor applies to consideration rather than profit, a nonresident selling at a break-even or a small gain still writes a check at closing.

The forms are a family, not a single document. GIT/REP-1 is the nonresident seller’s tax declaration, presented to the settlement agent at closing with the payment. GIT/REP-2 is a prepayment receipt for a seller who paid in advance at a Division Regional Information Center, and it is valid only if the Division’s raised seal is affixed. GIT/REP-3 is the seller’s residency certification and exemption, used by residents and nonresidents alike when one of its numbered assurances applies. GIT/REP-4 is a waiver the Division has to approve, and TB-57 recommends requesting it at least fourteen days before closing. GIT/REP-4A covers a corrective deed with no consideration.

The exemptions that matter most to people leaving are on the GIT/REP-3. Box 2 covers a principal residence meeting the ownership and use period in 26 U.S.C. section 121, with the caveat that if proceeds exceed the excludable gain the seller still pays that tax when filing the NJ-1040 or NJ-1040NR. A sale at a capital loss does not get a box at all; TB-57 says the seller must request a waiver from the Division, and if the loss comes from capital improvements the request has to include an itemized list with dollar amounts.

Then the part that closes the loop. If you were overwithheld, and most sellers of a former principal residence are, you get it back. TB-57 gives two routes: claim the excess on the NJ-1040NR for the year of the sale, or file Form A-3128 separately. The bulletin’s own guidance on choosing is practical. A sale early in the year makes A-3128 the faster refund even though you still have to file the NJ-1040NR later; a sale late in the year makes it simpler to just claim the refund on the return. Either way the money was never a tax on leaving. It was cash sitting in Trenton until a return reconciled it.

The money is the boring half. The paper is the half that shows up in an audit, and almost nobody thinks about it that way at the closing table.

Box 1 of the GIT/REP-3 can only be used by a New Jersey resident. TB-57 clarifies which day that is measured on, and the clarification is more interesting than it looks: the box is based on the date of closing, not the date of recording. The bulletin gives the example directly. Mary sells her house in New Jersey in April and the deed is recorded in May. The house was her primary residence. At the time of closing Mary was a New Jersey resident, so box 1 is acceptable even though she is a nonresident by the time the county records the deed.

Read that as an evidence problem rather than a filing instruction. The form asks a residency question. You answer it under signature. The settlement agent files your answer with the county clerk alongside the deed, where it becomes a dated, third-party-held statement about your status on a specific day. That is completely fine when it is true. It is a problem when the rest of your file says something else: a GIT/REP-3 with box 1 checked on an April closing, sitting next to a part-year return claiming you became a Floridian in March. Or the mirror image, a nonresident payment made on a February sale by someone who then filed a full-year New Jersey resident return for the same year.

Nothing at the closing forces those to agree. TB-57 notes that under N.J.S.A. 54A:8-10.g an error on a GIT/REP form accompanying a validly recorded deed does not invalidate the recording or impair title, and the deed does not have to be re-recorded to fix it. That is sensible property law and it is terrible hygiene for a residency file, because it means no one in the transaction has any reason to care whether the box matches your return. The deed records. The inconsistency stays in the county record for as long as anyone cares to look.

The practical version is unglamorous. Settle your move date before the closing rather than after, make the form agree with the return you intend to file, and know your presence numbers before a piece of paper decides them for you. Our day count checker is the place to answer that question while it is still a choice.

While everyone is arguing about the closing, the actual liability question runs on a statute that generates no paperwork at all until the Division asks.

N.J.S.A. 54A:1-2(m) defines a resident taxpayer two ways. You are a resident if you are domiciled in New Jersey. You are also a resident, domicile aside, if you maintain a permanent place of abode in the state and spend in the aggregate more than 183 days of the taxable year there. Either prong alone makes you a full resident taxed on worldwide income. The second one does not care what you intended, where your family is, or how sincere the move was.

The first prong is where the fights are. New Jersey courts treat domicile as a person’s true, fixed, permanent home, the place they intend to return to whenever absent, and once established it is presumed to continue there until the taxpayer proves both an intent to abandon it and the establishment of a new one somewhere else. That presumption is the structural fact of this corridor. It is not an evidentiary tie-breaker applied at the end. It is the starting position, and it runs against you.

The Division has an ordinary, unexotic set of tools for testing it. Our New Jersey guide collects them: bank and brokerage statements, cell phone records, E-ZPass toll records, airline tickets and travel documents, insurance policy riders tied to a New Jersey address, credit card statements, mortgage and home-sale records, and comparison against prior years’ resident filing history. That last one is the trigger more often than anything else. Practitioners describe the classic case as a taxpayer who filed New Jersey resident returns for years and then filed a nonresident return the year of the claimed departure while still owning or using a New Jersey home. The state does not need a tip. It has your own filing pattern.

The timing is generous to the state and unhelpful to you. New Jersey generally has four years from the date a return is filed to make audit adjustments, six years to collect an assessed liability, and no time limit at all on a year for which no return was ever filed. Unlike New York, New Jersey has not published a standardized month-by-month residency audit timeline, so there is no public script to prepare against. A move made in 2026 may need to answer a question asked in 2031, from records you either kept or did not.

One structural note worth carrying into the comparison with moving from New York to Florida. New Jersey’s 183-day prong reads almost identically to New York’s on its face, and New Jersey generally counts any part of a day spent in the state, though its published guidance is far less granular than New York’s regulation about specific travel-day exceptions. Less written guidance is not less exposure. It is less certainty.

The New Jersey decision that anyone leaving for Florida should actually read is Samuelsson v. Director, New Jersey Division of Taxation, decided by the Tax Court of New Jersey on May 10, 2005. It gets invoked for the proposition that a retained New Jersey house sinks a move. That is not what it held. The taxpayers won, and how they won is the useful part.

Kjell Samuelsson played defense for the Philadelphia Flyers and lived with his family in Voorhees, New Jersey. In October 1998 he signed a one-year contract with the Tampa Bay Lightning for the 1998 to 1999 season. The family moved to Tampa that fall. They rented a home there, moved all of their furniture and belongings to Florida, listed the New Jersey house for sale, enrolled the children in Florida schools, closed their New Jersey bank accounts and opened Florida ones, and said their goodbyes. He obtained a Florida driver’s license and registered his car in Florida. Mrs. Samuelsson looked at buying a Florida home but never completed a purchase, and she did not change her voter registration or get a Florida license.

None of it lasted. The New Jersey house did not sell. The season ended, his skills were declining, and he could not find a coaching position in Florida. The family spent the summer in Sweden, and it was there, still without work, facing school enrollment decisions, that they decided to go back. He returned to New Jersey on September 7, 1999, she on September 14, and by November he was an assistant coach with the Trenton Titans. They filed a 1999 New Jersey return as part-year residents. The Director assessed them as full-year 1999 residents.

The court walked through the standard from Lyon v. Glaser, 60 N.J. 259: domicile is acquired by a concurrence of elements, an actual and physical taking up of an abode in a particular state accompanied by an intention to make a home there permanently or at least indefinitely, and to abandon the old domicile. The opinion is candid that domicile is very much a matter of the mind. It also states the presumption in its strongest form: no person is ever without a domicile in the eyes of the law, and a person is presumed to be domiciled in his domiciliary state until a new domicile is acquired, and there can be no establishment of a new domicile unless there is proof of an intent to abandon an original one.

Then it found abandonment anyway. On the unsold house, the court said that although the Samuelssons continued to own a home in New Jersey, it had been listed for sale and they had moved all of their furniture to Florida, their new domicile. On the one-year contract, it reasoned that at the time of the move he had no particular reason to expect a return to New Jersey rather than Florida or anywhere else, a career in professional hockey having already moved him repeatedly without a return. On the move back, it dated the change of intent to the events that produced it, the end of the contract and the failed Florida job search, rather than reading a 1999 decision backward into a 1998 move.

The statutory prong is the quiet lesson. The opinion records that during 1999 the Samuelssons spent more than 30 but fewer than 183 days in New Jersey, and that they had a permanent place of abode in New Jersey. Both halves of the second residency test were on the table, and the test did not fire, because the day count stayed under the line. Whether they were New Jersey residents before September therefore turned entirely on domicile. Judgment was entered in favor of the plaintiffs, dismissing the Director’s assessment of taxes based on a conclusion that they were full-year residents for 1999.

Four things follow for anyone moving from New Jersey to Florida. A house you cannot sell is not fatal, but what saved this one was that it had been emptied and listed, not merely intended for sale. A short or uncertain reason for the move is not fatal either, as long as nothing at the time of the move points back to New Jersey. A return does not retroactively erase a departure, because intent is dated and the state has to show what you meant when you meant it. And the permanent place of abode was harmless here only because the days stayed low. Put those same people in New Jersey for 190 days in 1999 and the domicile analysis becomes irrelevant, because the second prong makes them residents on its own.

A successful move ends New Jersey’s claim on your worldwide income. It does not end New Jersey. Two categories survive, and they behave very differently.

The first is sourcing. Income from New Jersey real property, income from a New Jersey business, and wages allocated to New Jersey workdays stay New Jersey income for a nonresident indefinitely, reported on the NJ-1040NR. Remote work is the piece people get wrong in both directions. New Jersey enacted its own convenience of the employer rule in P.L. 2023, c.125, signed July 21, 2023 and retroactive to January 1, 2023, which sources a nonresident telecommuter’s compensation to New Jersey when the work is done for the employee’s own convenience rather than the employer’s necessity. But the statute only reaches residents of states that impose a similar test on New Jersey residents, and the Division names Delaware, Nebraska and New York; Pennsylvania is out because of the reciprocal agreement. Florida imposes no income tax and no convenience rule, so a Florida resident working remotely for a New Jersey employer is not swept in by it. Days physically worked in New Jersey are a separate matter and still source there.

Compare that with moving from New Jersey to Pennsylvania, where the reciprocal agreement exempts salaries, wages, tips, fees, commissions and bonuses from the other state’s tax in both directions, with a Form NJ-165 filed with the employer to stop withholding. The agreement covers employee compensation and nothing else. Self-employment income and gains on the sale of property fall outside it entirely, which is exactly the kind of exception that surprises people who assumed reciprocity meant a clean break.

The second survivor is the one almost nobody plans for, and it is the real reason a retained New Jersey house is expensive. New Jersey has had an inheritance tax since 1892, and it did not go away when the estate tax did. No New Jersey Estate Tax is imposed on the estates of resident decedents dying on or after January 1, 2018, and there was never a New Jersey Estate Tax on nonresident decedents’ estates. The inheritance tax remains in force and it follows property, not just people.

The distinction is precise. For a resident decedent, a return must be filed for the transfer of real or tangible personal property located in New Jersey and all intangible personal property, wherever it sits. For a nonresident decedent, a return must be filed for the transfer of real or tangible personal property located in New Jersey. There is no direct tax on a nonresident decedent’s intangible assets, bank accounts and stock among them, although they are still used in the calculation and reported on the return.

So becoming a Floridian does end New Jersey’s reach over your portfolio at death. It does not end its reach over the shore house. And the rate depends entirely on who inherits it. Class A beneficiaries, which is spouses, civil union partners, children, grandchildren, parents and stepchildren, are exempt from the tax entirely. Class C, siblings and sons-in-law or daughters-in-law, pay nothing on the first $25,000, then 11 percent on the next $1,075,000, 13 percent on the next $300,000, 14 percent on the next $300,000, and 16 percent above $1,700,000. Class D, meaning every other beneficiary, pays 15 percent on the first $700,000 and 16 percent above that. Class E, qualified charities and the like, is exempt. Transfers with an aggregate value under $500 are not taxed.

One more feature deserves attention from anyone keeping New Jersey property. The return is due eight months after the date of death, and the tax is a lien on all New Jersey property for fifteen years from the date of death unless it is paid before then or an acceptable bond is filed. A house kept for sentimental reasons is not only the strongest fact against your residency claim while you are alive. It is a fifteen-year lien surface afterward, at a rate set by your family tree.

The year of the move is where most of the avoidable damage happens, because several New Jersey programs keep operating on their own schedules and each one produces a dated record of what you told the state.

Filing first. New Jersey has no combined part-year form. Per Tax Topic Bulletin GIT-6, a mid-year mover files Form NJ-1040 as a resident for the resident portion of the year and Form NJ-1040NR for New Jersey-source income earned during the nonresident portion. Two returns, one tax year, one move date implied by both. They have to tell the same story, and they are the first documents anyone reviewing the move will line up next to each other.

Then the retirement exclusion, which is a cliff and not a phase-out, and which the year of the move is uniquely good at pushing you over. The pension exclusion requires being 62 or older or disabled on the last day of the year and total income of $150,000 or less. At total income of $100,000 or less the exclusion is up to $100,000 for married filing jointly, $75,000 for single and head of household, and $50,000 for married filing separately. Between $100,001 and $125,000 it drops to 50 percent of taxable pension income for joint filers, 37.5 percent for single, and 25 percent for married filing separately. Between $125,001 and $150,000 it is 25, 18.75 and 12.5 percent respectively. Above $150,000 in total income you are not eligible for a pension exclusion at all. A retirement account distribution taken to fund the Florida house, or a gain on the New Jersey sale, can land in exactly the wrong tier and erase the exclusion for the resident half of the year.

Then ANCHOR, which is where the calendar quietly contradicts people. The benefit turns on occupying a New Jersey property as your main home on October 1, with New Jersey gross income of $250,000 or less for homeowners and $150,000 or less for renters, and vacation homes and second homes are ineligible. Applying is an assertion, filed with the Division, that a New Jersey property was your principal residence on a specific date. If you are claiming a June move to Florida and you apply for the ANCHOR benefit tied to the October 1 that follows, you have contradicted your own residency position in the state’s records, for a rebate.

Florida runs the same logic from the other end. The homestead exemption requires permanent residency as of January 1 and proof that you are not also claiming a residency-based tax benefit in another state, and county property appraisers actively cross-check against out-of-state filings and motor vehicle and voter records. Between the two programs there is a clean annual test: for any given benefit year you should be able to claim one of them, not both, and which one should match the move date on your returns.

The destination state matters less than people think on tax and more than they think on evidence, and Florida is unusually generous on the second. New Jersey will never issue you a document that says you left. Florida issues several that say you arrived.

The Declaration of Domicile under Fla. Stat. section 222.17 is the strongest of them and the least used. It is a sworn one-page statement, notarized and recorded with the Clerk of the Circuit Court in your county for roughly a ten dollar recording fee, stating your prior domicile, your Florida county, and the date Florida became your home. It is not dispositive anywhere and no state treats it as conclusive. What it is, uniquely, is an instrument whose only function is to fix a date to a domicile change, made under oath and held by a court clerk rather than by you.

The homestead exemption does more work than its dollar value suggests. It reduces assessed value by up to $50,000, the first $25,000 applying to all taxing authorities including schools and the second $25,000 applying to value between $50,000 and $75,000 while excluding school levies. The evidentiary value is in the application, which requires ownership and occupancy as of January 1, a filing deadline of March 1 for that year, and proof of permanent residency in the form of a Florida driver’s license, voter registration and vehicle registration all showing the homestead address, plus proof you are not claiming a residency-based benefit in another state. It is a sworn statement to a government body with penalties for fraud, which is precisely why it carries weight in another state’s audit.

The rest of the Florida checklist is ordinary, and the reason to hit the deadlines is that the dates are the evidence. A Florida driver’s license is required within 30 days of establishing residency. Vehicle registration is required within 10 days. Voter registration has no deadline of its own but must be completed at least 29 days before an election in order to vote in it. A license obtained promptly says something a license obtained eighteen months later does not.

And then the asymmetry that defines this corridor. Florida rates 1 out of 5 on exit stickiness and 1 out of 5 on audit aggressiveness in our dossier, because it has no income tax and conducts no residency audits. Every question about this move will be asked by the state you left, using records you generated while you were busy not thinking about it, possibly years from now. That shape is the same as moving from New York to Florida, even though the origin states behave quite differently, and it is the reason the useful work is contemporaneous rather than reconstructive.

The Mobility Map records days and nights by state as they happen, which is the difference between a presence record and a reconstruction assembled from E-ZPass and card statements after the Division asks. On a statute where 183 days is a bright line sitting next to a permanent place of abode, the count is not a detail.

Evidence Vault holds the documents this corridor actually asks for: the GIT/REP form filed at your closing and the box you checked on it, the NJ-1040 and NJ-1040NR for the year of the move, the Florida declaration of domicile with its recording date, the homestead application, the license and vehicle registration with their dates, and the records showing when the New Jersey house stopped being furnished and available. AuditIQ surfaces retained New Jersey ties that keep generating dated records in a state with a four-year assessment window and no limit at all on an unfiled year. Advisor sharing lets a CPA or tax attorney review the presence record, the two returns and the New Jersey-source items together, since only one of those responds to the move.

ResidencyIQ organizes records and highlights potential exposure factors. It is not a law firm or an accounting firm and does not provide legal or tax advice; work with a qualified CPA or tax attorney on your own domicile, filings, and state exposure.

New Jersey Division of Taxation Technical Bulletin TB-57(R), Estimated Gross Income Tax Payment Requirements on Sales of New Jersey Real Property by Nonresidents, revised June 15, 2026, is the source of the requirement that a nonresident individual, estate or trust make an estimated payment prior to the recording of the deed under N.J.S.A. 54A:8-8 through 8-10, the calculation of the estimated tax as the reportable gain for federal income tax purposes multiplied by the highest rate for the tax year provided in N.J.S.A. 54A:2-1, the requirement that the payment be not less than 2 percent of the seller’s consideration stated in the deed, the prohibition on a county recording officer accepting a deed without the appropriate GIT/REP form and payment, the roles of the GIT/REP-1, GIT/REP-2 with its raised seal, GIT/REP-3, GIT/REP-4 and GIT/REP-4A, the box 1 clarification that residency is measured at the date of closing rather than the date of recording along with the April closing and May recording example, the box 2 principal residence assurance under 26 U.S.C. section 121 and the caveat about proceeds exceeding the excludable gain, the requirement that a sale at a capital loss be handled by waiver with an itemized list of improvements, the fourteen-day waiver recommendation, the N.J.S.A. 54A:8-10.g rule that GIT/REP form errors do not invalidate a recorded deed or impair title, and the refund routes through Form A-3128 and the NJ-1040NR including the guidance on which is faster: https://www.nj.gov/treasury/taxation/pdf/pubs/tb/tb57r.pdf. The Division’s nonresident sellers page is at https://nj.gov/treasury/taxation/individuals/nonsellers-property.shtml.

Samuelsson v. Director, New Jersey Division of Taxation (Tax Ct. N.J., May 10, 2005) is the source of the entire case narrative: the Voorhees home, the October 1998 one-year contract with the Tampa Bay Lightning, the fall 1998 move to a rented Tampa home with all furniture relocated, the New Jersey house listed for sale but not rented, the Florida school enrollment, the closed New Jersey bank accounts and opened Florida accounts, Mr. Samuelsson’s Florida driver’s license and vehicle registration and Mrs. Samuelsson’s unchanged voter registration, the incomplete Florida home purchase, the summer in Sweden where the intent to return formed, the September 7 and September 14, 1999 returns to New Jersey, the November 1999 Trenton Titans coaching position, the Lyon v. Glaser, 60 N.J. 259 standard of an actual and physical taking up of an abode accompanied by an intention to make a home there permanently or at least indefinitely and to abandon the old domicile, the statement that domicile is very much a matter of the mind, the presumption that no person is ever without a domicile and is presumed domiciled in his domiciliary state until a new domicile is acquired, the requirement of proof of intent to abandon an original domicile, the finding that the retained New Jersey home had been listed for sale with all furniture moved to Florida as the new domicile, the reasoning that the return to New Jersey arose from later events, the finding that the Samuelssons spent more than 30 but fewer than 183 days in New Jersey during 1999 while maintaining a permanent place of abode there, and the judgment entered in favor of plaintiffs dismissing the Director’s assessment based on a conclusion that they were full-year 1999 residents: https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/nj-tax-court/1218952.html. Riker Danzig’s practitioner summary, which describes the Tax Court as having agreed with the taxpayers that they abandoned their New Jersey domicile during the Tampa Bay period, is at https://riker.com/publications/changing-your-residency-its-harder-than-you-think/.

The definition of a resident taxpayer as a person domiciled in New Jersey or, absent domicile, a person who maintains a permanent place of abode in the state and spends in the aggregate more than 183 days of the taxable year there is N.J.S.A. 54A:1-2(m), quoted in the Samuelsson opinion above and reproduced at https://law.justia.com/codes/new-jersey/title-54/section-54-8a-3/. Tax Topic Bulletin GIT-6, Part-Year Residents and Nonresidents, is the source of the rule that New Jersey has no combined part-year form and that a mid-year mover files Form NJ-1040 for the resident period and Form NJ-1040NR for New Jersey-source income in the nonresident period: https://www.nj.gov/treasury/taxation/pdf/pubs/tgi-ee/git6.pdf.

The 10.75 percent top rate on taxable income over $1,000,000 for both Table A and Table B filers is from the 2025 New Jersey Tax Rate Schedules at page 63 of the NJ-1040 instructions: https://www.nj.gov/treasury/taxation/pdf/current/1040i.pdf. The Division’s Retirement Income Exclusions page is the source of the pension exclusion rules, the age 62 or disabled requirement, the $100,000, $125,000 and $150,000 total income tiers with their per-filing-status amounts and percentages, and the rule that total income above $150,000 makes a taxpayer ineligible for a pension exclusion: https://www.nj.gov/treasury/taxation/njit7.shtml. The ANCHOR eligibility rules, including occupancy of a New Jersey property as a main home on October 1 and the $250,000 homeowner and $150,000 renter gross income limits, are at https://www.nj.gov/treasury/taxation/anchor/eligibility.shtml.

New Jersey’s convenience of the employer sourcing rule, enacted as P.L. 2023, c.125 on July 21, 2023 and retroactive to January 1, 2023, applying to nonresidents whose home states impose a similar test, with Delaware, Nebraska and New York named and Pennsylvania excluded by the reciprocal agreement, is described in the Division’s FAQ at https://www.nj.gov/treasury/taxation/conveniencerulefaq.shtml. The New Jersey and Pennsylvania Reciprocal Income Tax Agreement, covering salaries, wages, tips, fees, commissions and bonuses but not self-employment income or gains on property sales, with Form NJ-165 filed to stop withholding, is at https://www.nj.gov/treasury/taxation/njit25.shtml.

Form O-10-C, General Information: Inheritance and Estate Tax, is the source of the 1892 origin of the Inheritance Tax, the rule that no New Jersey Estate Tax is imposed on estates of resident decedents dying on or after January 1, 2018 and that there is no Estate Tax on nonresident decedents’ estates, the requirement that a resident decedent’s return cover New Jersey real and tangible personal property plus all intangible personal property while a nonresident decedent’s return covers only New Jersey real and tangible personal property with no direct tax on intangibles, the Class A exemption for spouses, civil union partners, children, grandchildren, parents and stepchildren, the Class C schedule of no tax on the first $25,000 then 11, 13, 14 and 16 percent, the Class D schedule of 15 percent on the first $700,000 and 16 percent above it, the Class E exemption, the exemption for transfers under $500, the eight-month filing deadline, and the fifteen-year lien on New Jersey property from the date of death: https://www.nj.gov/treasury/taxation/pdf/other_forms/inheritance/o10c.pdf. The nonresident decedent return itself is Form IT-NR: https://www.nj.gov/treasury/taxation/pdf/other_forms/inheritance/itnrai.pdf.

Florida’s Declaration of Domicile is Fla. Stat. section 222.17. Florida homestead exemption mechanics, including the January 1 ownership and occupancy requirement and the March 1 filing deadline, are covered in the Department of Revenue’s homestead guidance at https://floridarevenue.com/property/documents/pt113.pdf, with the 30-day driver license and 10-day vehicle registration deadlines from https://www.flhsmv.gov/new-resident/ and the 29-day voter registration rule from https://registertovoteflorida.gov/.

The New Jersey and Florida exit stickiness and audit aggressiveness ratings, the New Jersey enforcement method inventory including E-ZPass toll records and comparison against prior years’ resident filing history, the description of the classic exit-audit trigger, the four-year assessment and six-year collection periods with no limit on unfiled years, the observation that New Jersey has published no month-by-month audit timeline comparable to New York’s, the any-part-of-a-day treatment, the 2.23 percent effective property tax burden, and the Florida declaration of domicile and homestead evidentiary descriptions come from ResidencyIQ’s own dossier research, with underlying citations on the New Jersey and Florida residency guides.