Drive Highway 90 through Pace on any Saturday and you will pass at least four active new-home communities within ten minutes of each other. Floridatown. Southern Palms. Parkland Place. Lakes of Woodbine. The price sheets in each sales office look close enough to be interchangeable, and the builder reps will hand you a monthly payment estimate that looks reassuringly similar no matter which model you pick.
That estimate is the number the model-home lot wants you to remember. It is not the number your tax bill will show in eighteen months.
Three things changed in Santa Rosa County over the last year and a half that do not show up on a builder's price sheet: a brand-new transportation impact fee that started attaching to permits in 2025, a property tax reassessment that lands on new construction the way it never lands on a resale, and community development district bonds that some Pace subdivisions carry for decades and others do not carry at all. None of these show up in the sales office's monthly payment math. All three show up on your first two tax bills.
A Fee That Didn't Exist Two Years Ago
If you bought a new home in Pace before the spring of 2025, your builder never paid a transportation impact fee to pull the permit. That fee simply didn't exist. Santa Rosa County commissioners approved the ordinance creating it back in April 2024, but tied its start date to a transportation sales tax referendum voters were set to decide that fall. The referendum failed. The county board moved forward with the impact fee anyway, holding a public hearing on February 3, 2025, and the fee began attaching to building permit applications on May 5, 2025.
The debate leading up to that vote split along predictable lines. Home Builders Association of West Florida representative Jennifer Mancini spoke against it. Alton Lister, a local homebuilder and senior board member of the Florida Home Builders Association, asked for a delay, citing National Association of Home Builders data that put roughly a quarter of a new home's cost in government-regulated fees already, and pointed to Canadian lumber tariffs squeezing builders at the same time. Commissioners weren't swayed. Board Chairman Kerry Smith called them fair. Commissioner Bobby Burkett, who had just unseated a two-term incumbent in part on this issue, said he was for reasonable impact fees and noted the county had been putting off infrastructure funding for decades.
The fee for a single-family home started at $1,636. As of January 1, 2026, it sits at $1,687, after the county's built-in cost-of-living adjustment bumped rates 3.1 percent to match the prior year's inflation reading. The money doesn't move around the county freely, either: fees collected in one zip code fund road capacity in that same district, which means new construction in Pace is largely paying for Pace's own roads, not somebody else's.
Here's the part that actually matters for comparison shopping. That fee is paid by the builder at the time of permitting, not by you at closing, which means it never appears as a buyer-side line item. But it is baked into the price of every home permitted after May 5, 2025. A spec home that broke ground in early 2025 and one breaking ground today, in the same square footage and finish tier, can carry a meaningfully different embedded cost structure even if the builder's price sheet lists them the same. Ask when the permit was pulled. It's a fair question and most sales offices can answer it.
The Bill That Shows Up After You've Moved In
Florida assesses property value as of January 1 each year. For a home still under construction on that date, the county is often taxing dirt, not a finished house. Santa Rosa County's own property tax guidance walks through what happens next: when new construction is completed or ownership changes mid-year, the property appraiser issues a supplemental assessment that captures the increased value for the remainder of the fiscal year. The county's example lays out the math plainly: a property previously assessed at $200,000 that jumps to a $350,000 market value generates a supplemental bill on that $150,000 difference, prorated for the remaining months of the tax year at the prevailing millage rate.
For a new-construction subdivision specifically, the relevant combined millage, once county, school, and other local layers stack together, runs closer to 12.81 mills. Applied to the roughly $366,000 median sale price now seen across Santa Rosa County's tracked new-construction communities, that works out to something like $4,687 a year in property tax before any exemption, or about $391 a month. That number rarely resembles what the sales office quoted you during your tour, because that estimate was almost always built around the promotional financing scenario, not the county's actual post-completion assessment.
Once you close and file for homestead, Florida's homestead exemption knocks $25,000 to $50,000 off the taxable value, and the 3 percent Save Our Homes cap limits how fast your assessment can climb after that first year. Those protections are real and worth claiming promptly. They just don't erase the initial jump from land-value taxes to full-assessment taxes that every new build in Pace goes through once.
Not Every New Address Carries the Same Weight
Community development districts add a second layer that varies house to house, not just community to community. A CDD is a mechanism developers use to finance roads, drainage, and amenities inside a new subdivision, and the assessment for that debt rides on the property tax bill for the life of the bond, often for decades. Santa Rosa County has dozens of new-construction communities in active development right now, and CDD assessments show up on some of their tax bills and not on others.
This is not something you can eyeball from a listing photo or a model home tour. Two homes at the same list price in two different Pace subdivisions can carry very different long-term carrying costs depending on whether one of them is inside a CDD boundary and the other isn't. Before you write an offer, ask the builder or listing agent for the CDD annual assessment amount and the remaining term of the bond, in writing. If a community has no CDD, ask that be confirmed in writing too. It is a five-minute question that changes a decade of math.
Pace Commons, the roughly 1,055-home subdivision the county approved back in 2020 near Bell Lane and Sterling Way off Avalon Boulevard, is a useful example of the scale driving all of this. When the county later approved night-only drainage construction for the project, residents on Bell Lane raised concerns about the road already struggling to handle traffic, and the county framed the stormwater work as serving not just that subdivision but the surrounding area. That is exactly the kind of infrastructure load that impact fees and CDDs exist to fund, and it is exactly why the county's newest fee schedule targets fast-growing corridors like this one.
The Insurance Line Builders Rarely Walk You Through
Citizens Property Insurance policies in Santa Rosa County average around $2,444 a year, or about $204 a month, though private-market quotes vary widely with roof age and wind mitigation features. New construction often qualifies for stronger wind mitigation credits than an older resale, which can help here, but it is still a real monthly number worth pricing before you're locked into a closing date, not after.
What to Ask Before You Sign
- When was the building permit pulled, before or after May 5, 2025
- Does this specific address sit inside a CDD, and if so what is the annual assessment and remaining bond term
- What will the supplemental property tax assessment likely be once the county reassesses the completed home
- Is the builder's advertised monthly payment based on a rate buydown or a price reduction, and what does each actually do to your total cost over the life of the loan
- What does a current wind mitigation inspection actually save on insurance for this specific home
A Few Straight Answers
Does every new home in Pace have a CDD? No. Santa Rosa County has dozens of active new-construction communities, and CDD assessments apply to some and not others. Ask for it in writing before you make an offer.
When did the transportation impact fee start, and does it apply to my home? Collection began May 5, 2025, on building permit applications submitted on or after that date. If your home's permit predates that, the fee likely wasn't part of the builder's cost basis for that unit.
How much should I expect my property tax to change in year two? It depends on your assessed value and millage, but Santa Rosa County's own supplemental tax example shows the mechanism: your first bill often reflects land value, and the following year reflects the completed home, which is why the second bill is almost always higher than the first.
None of this means new construction in Pace is a bad move. It means the sticker price at the sales office is the start of the conversation, not the end of it. If you are comparing communities right now and want someone to run the real numbers on a specific address, Kelley Real Estate Co can walk through the permit timing, the CDD status, and the tax math with you before you sign anything, not after.
