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The underserved half of a PCS
Every PCS guide assumes you are a renter. Many of you are not.
Search for PCS advice and you will find a hundred articles about scheduling movers and not one about what to do with the house you already own. That gap is why this page exists.
You have three real options: sell, rent it out, or hold it empty (almost never the right answer). Which one is best depends on your equity, the local market, whether you expect to come back, and two specific rules — one federal and one Florida — that most people have never heard of.
Those two rules are worth more than everything else on this page combined, so I have put them first.
Rule one: the IRS will pause your capital gains clock
Normally, to exclude capital gains on the sale of your main home — $250,000 filing single, $500,000 married filing jointly — you must have lived in it for two of the five years before the sale. Move away, and that five-year window quietly runs out.
Servicemembers can suspend that five-year test period for up to 10 years. Together the suspension and the test period can run as long as 15 years. That means you can move away on orders, rent the house out for years, and still sell it later with the exclusion intact.
It applies while you are on qualified official extended duty, which requires all of the following: you are called or ordered to active duty for an indefinite period or a definite period of more than 90 days; you are serving at a duty station at least 50 miles from that home, or living in government quarters under orders; and you are in the uniformed services, Foreign Service, NOAA, Public Health Service, or are an employee of the intelligence community.
Two limits: you can only suspend for one property at a time, and you can revoke the choice at any time. This is real, it is in IRS Publication 523, and it is the single most valuable thing a homeowner on orders can know.
Selling and renting questions
What homeowners on orders ask me, and what most guides get wrong.
01
Often, yes. Servicemembers on qualified official extended duty can suspend the IRS five-year test period for up to 10 years, so the two-of-five-years residency requirement does not quietly expire while you are stationed elsewhere. The suspension applies to one property at a time. This is set out in IRS Publication 523 — talk to a tax professional about your own situation.
02
Not if your absence is the result of military service. Florida Statute 196.061 specifically exempts servicemembers from the rule that renting out a homestead constitutes abandonment. Florida Statute 196.015 also provides that valid transfer orders are sufficient to maintain permanent residence. Confirm the paperwork with the Okaloosa County Property Appraiser.
03
Almost certainly not. HAP stopped accepting applications for permanent reassignment on 30 September 2012. It remains open only to a narrow group, principally members with a 30% or greater line-of-duty disability from post-9/11 deployments, certain wounded civilian employees, and surviving spouses moving within two years of the death.
04
It turns on your equity, the rent the property can actually command, whether you expect to return, and how you feel about managing it from a distance. The Florida homestead exception and the IRS suspension rule both tilt the math toward renting more often than people expect. I will run the numbers with you either way.
05
How quickly can I sell if orders drop?
Faster if the preparation is already done. Knowing your value, knowing which repairs matter and having quotes in hand can take weeks out of the process. That preparation costs you nothing and can be done before you have orders.
Rule two: Florida lets you rent out your homestead
Under Florida law, renting out substantially all of a home you claimed as homestead normally counts as abandoning the homestead — and with it the exemption and your accumulated Save Our Homes assessment cap.
Florida Statute 196.061 carves out an exception for servicemembers. Members of the armed forces whose absence is the result of service can rent out the property without abandoning the homestead claim. The Florida Department of Revenue states this plainly in its own guidance for military property owners.
Separately, Florida Statute 196.015 provides that valid military orders transferring a member are sufficient to maintain permanent residence for the member and spouse.
Put those together with the IRS rule above and a very specific strategy appears: a Florida homeowner on orders can rent the house out, keep the homestead exemption and the Save Our Homes cap, and preserve the federal capital gains exclusion for up to a decade. If you have significant equity and a low assessed value, that combination can be worth a great deal — and it is almost never explained anywhere.
If you decide to sell
The timing problem is real: you often cannot list until you have orders, and once you have orders the clock is short. What helps is doing the preparation before you need it — knowing what your home is worth, knowing what the two or three repairs are that would move the number, and having those quotes in hand rather than starting from scratch under time pressure.
I will do that assessment for you at any point, orders or no orders, without asking you to sign anything. If the assignment never materializes, you have lost nothing.
If you decide to rent it out
Being a long-distance landlord is a real job, and the honest question is whether the monthly margin justifies it after management fees, vacancy, and the repairs you will pay for sight unseen. Sometimes it clearly does — particularly with the Florida homestead exception preserving your tax position. Sometimes it clearly does not.
Military OneSource has specific guidance on income tax and rental properties for military families.
The Homeowners Assistance Program: read this before you count on it
A great deal of PCS advice still tells servicemembers who cannot sell to "look into HAP." That advice is more than a decade out of date.
The Homeowners Assistance Program no longer accepts applications for permanent reassignment. That category, along with the BRAC 2005 category, closed to new applications on 30 September 2012. What remains open is narrow: members with a 30% or greater disability from wounds or illness incurred in the line of duty during post-9/11 deployments; wounded civilian employees reassigned for medical treatment; and surviving spouses of fallen servicemembers moving within two years of the death. If you do not fall into one of those, HAP is not a plan.
Sources and further reading
- IRS Publication 523 — Selling Your Home (suspension of the 5-year test period)
- IRS Publication 3 — Armed Forces’ Tax Guide
- Florida Statute 196.061 — rental of homestead property
- Florida DOR Form PT-109 — property tax exemptions for military
- US Army Corps of Engineers — Homeowners Assistance Program status
- Military OneSource — income tax and rental properties
Last updated: September 2026. Nothing on this page is tax or legal advice. The capital gains exclusion thresholds and the statutes cited are current as at the date above but are subject to change — consult a tax professional and, for Florida homestead questions, the Okaloosa County Property Appraiser.
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