If you own three rental properties in Florida, you've probably faced this decision already: form one LLC to hold all of them, or pay for a separate LLC per property so a lawsuit over one house can't touch the other two. Until now, "separate LLC per property" won on safety, and "one LLC" won on cost and paperwork. As of July 1, 2026, Florida offers a third option that tries to give you both.
Senate Bill 316, signed by Governor Ron DeSantis in June 2025, added the Uniform Protected Series Provisions to the Florida Revised Limited Liability Company Act. The law took effect on July 1, 2026, and it lets a single Florida LLC split itself into multiple internal "protected series" — each one able to hold its own assets, sign its own contracts, and wall off its own liabilities, without you filing and maintaining a completely separate legal entity for each one.
It sounds like a free lunch. It isn't quite. Here's what the law actually does, and how to think about it if you're weighing a Florida protected series LLC against the traditional route of forming several standalone LLCs.
What a Protected Series LLC Actually Is
A protected series LLC (PSLLC) starts as a normal Florida LLC — sometimes called the "mothership" — that designates one or more internal divisions in its operating agreement and files a certificate of designation with the Florida Department of State. Each division, called a protected series, can then:
- Hold its own assets (a rental property, a piece of equipment, a business line)
- Enter contracts in its own name
- Have its own managers and, in some cases, its own owners
- Incur debts that, in theory, stay contained to that series alone
Critically, a protected series is not its own legal entity. It can't exist independently of the parent PSLLC, and it can't survive if the parent is dissolved. Think of it less like a subsidiary and more like a legally recognized compartment inside one company.
Florida isn't the first state to allow series LLCs — Delaware, Texas, Illinois, and a dozen-plus others already do, with real variation in how strict the rules are. Florida's version leans strict, particularly around recordkeeping, which is the part that actually determines whether the liability protection holds up in court.
The "Dual Shield" — and Why the Horizontal One Is New
Every Florida LLC already gives you a vertical shield: creditors generally can't come after your personal assets for the LLC's debts. That protection isn't new.
What's new is the horizontal shield between series. It has two pieces:
- Non-liability rule — one series generally isn't on the hook for another series' debts, or for the parent's debts.
- Non-recourse rule — a creditor of one series can only pursue the "associated assets" of that specific series (or the parent), not assets sitting in a sibling series.
In plain terms: if Series A (your duplex on Elm Street) gets sued over a slip-and-fall, and it maintains proper records, the plaintiff can't reach the rental property sitting in Series B down the road. That's the entire value proposition of a series LLC — and it depends entirely on records you have to keep up voluntarily, with no state agency checking your work.
The Fine Print That Determines Whether the Shield Holds
The horizontal shield is subject to traditional veil-piercing. If you don't maintain the records the statute requires, a court can disregard the separation between series entirely — which defeats the whole point of setting one up.
Florida's law requires each protected series to keep records specific enough that "a disinterested, reasonable person" could:
- Identify which assets belong to that series and distinguish them from the parent's or another series' assets
- Determine when and from whom the series acquired each asset
- Document any consideration paid, if the asset moved between the parent and a series (or between series)
The statute allows some flexibility in how you organize these records — by specific listing, category, percentage/share, or a documented allocation formula — but not in whether you keep them. There's no grace period and no cleanup-later option baked into the law.
Two other mechanical requirements worth knowing before July 1, 2026:
- Naming: each series' legal name must start with the parent PSLLC's name, typically followed by "Protected Series" or an accepted abbreviation like "P.S." This is how the public record — and title companies, banks, and courts — can tell a series apart from its parent.
- Real property quirks: Florida's recording system has its own non-uniform provisions for how series-held real estate gets titled and recorded, since the state's recorder infrastructure wasn't built with series LLCs in mind.
Bookkeeping Is the Real Cost, Not the Filing Fee
Florida's standalone LLC filing fee is $125, plus a $138.75 annual report. Form ten separate LLCs for ten properties and you're paying ten of each, plus juggling ten registered agents, ten annual reports, and ten sets of formation documents. A single PSLLC needs one formation filing, one annual report, and one registered agent, with additional (smaller) fees only for each series designation. On paper, the series structure looks meaningfully cheaper.
In practice, that gap narrows fast once you account for what proper compliance actually requires, series by series:
- A separate bank account — commingled cash is one of the fastest ways a horizontal shield gets pierced
- A separate bookkeeping ledger, ideally producing its own balance sheet and income statement
- Contracts and leases signed in the series' own name, not the parent LLC's
- Its own insurance policy where applicable
That's essentially the same operational discipline you'd need running separate LLCs — you're just doing it inside one legal wrapper instead of several. If you're not going to keep the books genuinely separate, the state filing-fee savings from a PSLLC won't save you when a court pierces the shield because your Series A rent deposits and Series B repair bills were sitting in the same account.
Tax treatment adds another wrinkle worth flagging to your CPA before you form one: the IRS hasn't issued definitive guidance on series LLCs, and whether each series needs its own EIN depends on facts like whether it has distinct ownership, elects its own tax classification, or files its own return. Some series can share the parent's EIN if ownership and management stay identical and records stay clean; others can't. This is not a DIY judgment call — get a tax professional's sign-off on the EIN and filing structure before you rely on it.
A Worked Comparison
Say you're a landlord with four rental properties in Tampa, each worth roughly $300,000, and you're deciding how to structure ownership before July 1, 2026.
Four separate LLCs: four formation filings at $125 each ($500 total), four annual reports at $138.75 each ($555/year), four registered agents, four sets of formation documents, and four EINs. If a tenant sues over an injury at Property 2, only Property 2's LLC is exposed — the other three are protected by well-established, decades-old Florida LLC law with a deep body of case history behind it.
One PSLLC with four series: one formation filing plus four series designations (lower combined cost), one annual report ($138.75/year), one registered agent — but four separate bank accounts, four bookkeeping ledgers, four sets of leases signed in each series' own name, and a real conversation with your CPA about whether each series needs its own EIN. If a tenant sues over an injury at Series 2, the other three series are protected only if your records are clean enough to survive a veil-piercing challenge — under a law with zero Florida case history as of this writing.
The dollar savings from the PSLLC route are real but modest — a few hundred dollars a year on filing fees for a four-property portfolio. The bookkeeping workload is nearly identical either way. What you're actually trading is decades of settled Florida LLC precedent for lower state fees and untested statutory language. For a large portfolio (a dozen-plus properties), the filing-fee gap widens enough that the trade-off tips more clearly toward a PSLLC. For three or four properties, many Florida attorneys are advising clients to wait and watch how the first few horizontal-shield disputes play out in court before converting an existing structure.
Who Actually Benefits
Florida's own legislative discussion around SB 316, echoed by the practitioners writing about it, points to a fairly narrow ideal use case: real estate investors and fund managers holding multiple, similar assets that they want to ring-fence from each other — think a landlord with five rental properties, or a fund splitting capital across several development projects, each with potentially different investors.
It's a weaker fit when:
- You expect to sell, merge, or convert an individual property or business line on its own — Florida's PSLLC statute doesn't smoothly support entity-level transactions involving a single series
- You can't commit to the bookkeeping discipline described above, for every series, indefinitely
- You're working with lenders, title insurers, or banks unfamiliar with the structure — because the law is brand new, some counterparties may balk at financing or insuring assets held inside a series until case law and market practice catch up
That last point matters more than it sounds. Because the law only took effect July 1, 2026, there's no Florida case history yet on how aggressively courts will pierce the horizontal shield when records fall short. Business owners adopting a PSLLC now are, in effect, early adopters of a legal structure that's statutorily sound but judicially untested.
The Bookkeeping Decision Comes First, Not Last
Whichever structure you choose — one PSLLC with several series, or several standalone LLCs — the liability protection lives or dies on your records, not your formation paperwork. A court doesn't care that your operating agreement says Series A and Series B are separate; it cares whether your bank statements, ledgers, and contracts actually treated them that way.
That's exactly why plain-text, version-controlled bookkeeping is worth considering if you're setting up a multi-entity or multi-series structure. With Beancount.io, you can maintain a clean, auditable ledger per property or business line — each account clearly tagged and separated, with a full history you (or your attorney, in a worst-case dispute) can point to and say "here's the proof these were never commingled." Get started for free and keep your entity structure as clean on paper as it is on the books.