Florida no longer has permanent alimony. A judge in Hillsborough County, or anywhere else in the state, cannot enter a new award of lifetime support. That has been true since July 1, 2023, when Senate Bill 1416 took effect and removed permanent alimony from the state's alimony statute.
If you are divorcing now, the question is which of the remaining forms of support fits your situation, and for how long. If you already hold a permanent alimony award from a judgment entered before that date, the answer is different, and it is the one most people are actually calling about: your award did not end on July 1, 2023. It remains in force. What changed is the framework a court applies to new cases, and, separately, some of the rules that govern requests to modify support.
What the 2023 law changed
Senate Bill 1416 rewrote Florida Statutes section 61.08. Governor Ron DeSantis signed it on June 30, 2023, and it took effect the next day as Chapter 2023-315, Laws of Florida.
- Permanent alimony is gone. The forms of alimony and spousal support a court may now award are temporary, bridge-the-gap, rehabilitative, and durational.
- Bridge-the-gap alimony covers identifiable short-term needs in the move from married to single life. It may not exceed two years and cannot be modified in amount or duration.
- Rehabilitative alimony supports a specific and defined written plan to redevelop skills, credentials, or employment. It may not exceed five years.
- Durational alimony provides support for a set period. It may not be awarded following a marriage that lasted less than three years.
The durational limits
Durational alimony is capped twice, once on how long it can run and once on how much it can be.
On length, the statute sets rebuttable presumptions by the duration of the marriage, measured from the date of the marriage to the date the dissolution action was filed. A marriage of less than 10 years is short-term, a marriage of 10 to 20 years is moderate-term, and a marriage of 20 years or longer is long-term. An award may not exceed 50 percent of the length of a short-term marriage, 60 percent of a moderate-term marriage, or 75 percent of a long-term marriage. A court may extend the term beyond those limits only on a showing of exceptional circumstances by clear and convincing evidence, after applying the statutory factors.
On amount, durational alimony may not exceed the lesser of the recipient's reasonable need or 35 percent of the difference between the parties' net incomes.
The burden sits with the person asking for support, who must prove need and the other spouse's ability to pay. The court makes specific written findings about the form and amount it awards.
Why the change took ten years
Anyone following this issue heard for a decade that permanent alimony was about to end. It kept not ending. The Legislature passed alimony reform in 2013 and again in 2016, and Governor Rick Scott vetoed both bills. It passed again in 2022, and Governor DeSantis vetoed that one. Other attempts stalled before reaching a governor's desk.
The sticking point in nearly every round was the same: what to do about alimony obligations that already existed. Several of the earlier bills would have opened settled judgments to modification on a fixed timetable, and the 2022 veto rested on the concern that reaching back into agreements people had already bargained for went too far. The bill that finally became law in 2023 left those judgments alone. That single decision is why the two sections below answer so differently.
If you are divorcing now
An alimony analysis starts with three inputs: the length of the marriage, the difference between the parties' net incomes, and whether the spouse requesting support can show a real need alongside the other spouse's ability to pay it. From there the question is which form of support fits, and the caps above set the outer edges.
Two practical consequences follow. Marriage length now carries more weight, because it sets both the presumption you begin from and the ceiling on how long an award can run. And financial records matter more, because a 35 percent net income limit is a math problem before it is an argument, and the math runs on figures both households have to document.
One thing did not change. The statute limits what a judge may order. It does not limit what two people may agree to. Spouses can still resolve support on terms a court could not impose, in a marital settlement agreement or a premarital agreement, including support with no fixed end date. Whether such an agreement can later be modified depends on how it is drafted, so that language deserves attention rather than boilerplate. If you are weighing a negotiated resolution against a contested hearing in your Florida divorce, that is one of the differences worth understanding first.
If you already have a permanent alimony award
This is the question that brings most people to this page, so here is the careful version.
Your award did not terminate, expire, or convert into something else when the law changed. The rewritten alimony statute carries its own instruction about reach: the court applies it to initial petitions for dissolution of marriage, or for support unconnected with dissolution, that were pending or filed on or after July 1, 2023. A final judgment entered in 2011, or in 2019, was neither. The 2023 law was not written as a re-opener for judgments already entered, and it did not include the retroactive modification timetable that helped sink the earlier bills.
What remains available is what was available before. An existing award can be modified under section 61.14 on proof of a substantial change in circumstances, unless your judgment or the settlement agreement incorporated into it made support non-modifiable. That standard is demanding, and it is met with evidence rather than argument.
Two provisions the 2023 law rewrote live inside that modification statute rather than the alimony statute, and they are the ones people paying under older orders ask about most:
- Supportive relationships. If a court makes specific written findings that the person receiving alimony is in a supportive relationship, it must reduce or terminate the award. The paying spouse carries the initial burden of proving the relationship exists. Once that is established, the burden shifts to the recipient to show why the award should continue.
- Retirement. The statute now describes a route for a paying spouse who has reached normal retirement age and has retired or taken demonstrable, measurable steps toward retiring. A petition may be filed no sooner than six months before the planned retirement date. Reaching retirement age is not automatic relief. The paying spouse must show that the retirement reduces the ability to pay, and the court weighs the factors the statute lists.
Now the part that deserves plain language instead of confidence. How far these amended modification provisions reach into awards entered under the older law does not have one clean answer. The alimony statute's applicability sentence speaks to initial petitions, not to modification cases, and the modification statute carries no matching sentence of its own. The result in a particular case can turn on the wording of the judgment, on whether the settlement agreement addressed modification at all, and on what the record actually shows. Anyone who tells you flatly that the new law does or does not apply to your 2016 judgment is telling you more than the statute says. That question is worth a real review of your documents. Post-judgment modification is its own kind of case, and it follows a different path than the original one.
What the change did not touch
Alimony is one piece of a divorce, and the 2023 law did not rewrite the others. Equitable distribution of marital property, child support, and time-sharing each run on their own statutes and their own analysis. A separate 2023 law did change time-sharing: effective the same day, Florida adopted a rebuttable presumption that equal time-sharing is in the best interests of a minor child, which a parent may rebut by a preponderance of the evidence. That is a different statute, and a different conversation from this one.
Where to start
If you are at the front end of a case, the useful preparation is documentary: your date of marriage, recent tax returns and pay records for both households, and an honest monthly budget. Marriage length, net incomes, and need do most of the work in an alimony analysis, and all three are provable on paper.
If you are asking about an award you already have, start with the judgment itself and any marital settlement agreement incorporated into it. The answer usually lives in the language of those documents.
Tampa family cases are heard in the Hillsborough County Circuit Court, Family Law Division, at the George Edgecomb Courthouse on East Twiggs Street. Rechel & Associates, P.A. has been serving Tampa Bay families since 1992, focused exclusively on divorce and family law.