Florida gold and silver money law

Effective July 1, 2026, sales of gold coin or silver coin that meet Florida statutory legal tender definitions, purity of at least 99.5 percent for gold and 99.9 percent for silver, marked with weight and purity, are exempt from Florida sales and use tax regardless of transaction size. Coin or currency currently used as United States legal tender is separately exempt at any purity. Bullion and coin that clear neither of those tests, such as a 22 karat foreign gold coin, are not unconditionally exempt. They fall back on a longstanding rule that exempts a coin or currency transaction only once its taxable amount exceeds 500 dollars. Because the broad exemption is gated behind a purity test, this record classes Florida as a partial exemption.

Purity condition. 99.5 percent for gold coin, 99.9 percent for silver coin

Minimum purchase. 500 dollars taxable amount for a coin or currency sale that does not qualify for the unconditional legal tender or purity based exemptions

Gold and silver are recognized as legal tender in Florida and that recognition is in force.

Fla. Stat. Section 215.986, created by CS/HB 999 (2025), effective July 1, 2026

Florida has no state personal income tax, so it does not tax capital gains from the sale of bullion, coin, or anything else at the state level. This follows from a general constitutional restriction on taxing individual income rather than a provision aimed at precious metals.

Florida's gold and silver legal tender law took an unusually long and conditional path to taking effect. Governor Ron DeSantis signed CS/HB 999 on May 27, 2025, creating Section 215.986, Florida Statutes, which defines a legal tender gold coin as at least 99.5 percent pure elemental gold and a legal tender silver coin as at least 99.9 percent pure elemental silver, each shaped as a round, bar, ingot, or bullion coin, valued by metal content, and stamped with its weight and purity. Coins meeting that definition became legal tender for debts incurred on or after July 1, 2026.

The same act rewrote the sales tax treatment of coin and currency in Section 212.05. Coin or currency that is United States legal tender was already fully exempt from Florida sales tax at any sale price. The new law adds a parallel, unconditional exemption for gold and silver coin meeting the new state legal tender definition, so those coins are exempt regardless of transaction size. Other coin or currency sales, such as foreign bullion coin that does not meet the purity definition, remain covered by a separate, longstanding rule that exempts the entire transaction only once its taxable amount exceeds 500 dollars.

The 2025 act did not take effect unconditionally. Section 17 of the act required the Chief Financial Officer and the Financial Services Commission to adopt implementing rules for depository, banking, and money services business treatment of gold and silver coin, submit them to the Legislature by November 1, 2025, and obtain legislative ratification before the rules, and the underlying legal tender and tax provisions, could take effect. Section 18 went further: if the required rules were not ratified, the entire act would stand repealed on June 30, 2026, one day before its own effective date. The Legislature ratified the rules through CS/CS/HB 1311, which passed the House 108 to 0 and the Senate 32 to 1 and which Governor DeSantis signed on June 11, 2026, avoiding the repeal and letting the July 1, 2026 effective date hold.