Published on September 17, 2025 at 2:20 pm
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The St. Johns County Commission adopted a tax rate lower than last year’s, but not low enough to prevent many homeowners from seeing an increase on their property tax bills.
The commission finalized its budget for the next fiscal year during the county’s final budget hearing Wednesday night.
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This year’s overall tax rate of 6.7573 mills, or roughly $6.8 per each $1,000 of a property’s assessed value, comes in lower than last year’s tax rate of 6.8263 mills.
To keep property owner’s tax rates from increasing, the county would have had to adopt the rolled-back rate of 6.5237 mills, or the rate that brings in the same amount of money as last year’s tax rate, factoring for rising property values.
The property taxes property owners pay will fund the hiring of more than 30 new firefighters, the renovation of the county’s old jail and more.
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The bulk of that property tax is levied through the county’s general fund, which pays for government operations like salaries, public safety and capital improvements. The general fund makes up about one-fourth of the county’s overall nearly $2 billion budget.
While several members of the County Commission signaled that they wanted to drive the budget down even further, Commissioner Clay Murphy said he was pleased with the work the county’s staff did to find areas to cut the budget.
“I’m going to employ the help of a lot of people that are in this room today to make sure that we don’t need a DOGE, that we DOGE ourselves, that we continually look for ways to cut funds and cut spending,” Murphy said Wednesday evening. “I’m proud of the fact that we were able to get to a reduction in our millage rate this year, but I also feel that we have a lot of work to do.”
Murphy referenced DOGE, or the Department of Government Efficiency, the initiative at the federal government level led by billionaire Elon Musk to cut government spending by ending programs like USAID.
Unlike the City of Jacksonville — and despite calls to do so by Commission Chair Krista Joseph — St. Johns County never created its own department of government efficiency.
