Legislative leaders direct members ahead of budget Special Session

The Senate and the House have butted heads the last two years, but Senate President Ben Albritton and Speaker Daniel Perez are presenting a unified message regarding the Fiscal Year 2026-27 budget Special Session.

The Special Session will begin the morning of May 12 and run through May 29 to complete the General Appropriations Act, the implementing bill and the tax package, both leaders said in their own memos.

The House will be hosting the conference committees this year. Legislators in the Senate and House will be on a one-hour notice through Friday for their respective conference committees, but can leave Tallahassee when their respective committees have completed work with outstanding issues bumped.

“Senators will not need to return to Tallahassee until the week after Memorial Day,” Albritton said.

He added that Senators “will complete all procedural work needed to place our Chamber in the position we left at the end of the Regular Session and swiftly enter the budget conference with the House” with “new vehicles for our budget, implementing bill, conforming bills, and tax relief package.”

To that end, Albritton says identical bills to the budget package filed by the Senate earlier this year will be filed later this week, with “differences and outstanding issues (to) be considered during public meetings within the budget conference and again on the Senate floor prior to final passage.”

The House will file its own bills mirroring those it approved during the Regular Session.

When it comes time to vote on the budget, Perez says legislators can count on being in Tallahassee for one full day to affirm the spending plan in the week after Memorial Day.

Exact timing of the vote is to be determined though, given the constitutionally-required 72-hour waiting period before voting on the budget bill.

Perez is hopeful the budget can be voted on May 27 or 28 in light of that constraint.

Conference committees will remain the same as they were for the Regular Session. Sen. Ed Hooper will continue leading budget negotiations in the Senate, while Rep. Lawrence McClure will remain at the helm of the Budget Committee in the House.

The allocations total nearly $52 billion, with the largest allocation for health and human services, at $19.2 billion. The PreK-12 Education allocation sits at $16.2 billion, with higher education and criminal and civil justice allocations each at just shy of $7 billion. The allocations include $1.38 billion for agriculture and natural resources; $568 million for general government; $560 million for transportation, tourism and economic development; and $476 million for administered funds and statewide issues.

Lawmakers adjourned the Regular Session on March 13 without passing a budget, the only statutorily mandated task for which the Legislature is assigned. The House and Senate were locked in a stalemate at the end of Session with a $1.4 billion difference between the two chambers’ proposals. The Senate proposed budget sits at $115 billion, while the House came in at a more austere $113.6 billion.

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Janelle Irwin Taylor of Florida Politics contributed to this report.