If you are in the middle of a Florida divorce, you have probably had the unsettling feeling that the rules are moving underneath you. You are not imagining it. Florida rewrote its alimony statute in 2023, and courts across the state are still working out exactly who that rewrite applies to. In January 2026, Florida’s Second District Court of Appeal — the appellate court that hears cases from Hillsborough, Pinellas, and Pasco Counties — handed down a decision that answers a piece of that question in a way every Tampa divorce lawyer needs to understand. The case is Morgan v. Morgan, 427 So. 3d 599 (Fla. 2d DCA 2026), and its holding is deceptively simple: if your case was sent back to the trial judge for a do-over, your divorce is still “pending,” and the new alimony law applies to you.
That sounds technical. In practice, it can be the difference between a lifetime alimony obligation and a time-limited one. Below, we walk through what happened, what the court decided, and — most importantly — what it means for real people going through a divorce in the Tampa Bay area.
The Case at a Glance: What Happened to the Morgans
The Morgan divorce is a case study in how long a contested family law matter can run.
The wife filed her petition for dissolution of marriage in April 2018. The trial court entered a final judgment ending the marriage in April 2020. The husband appealed, and in 2021 the Second District reversed three parts of that judgment: the equitable distribution of marital property, the alimony award, and retroactive child support. Everything else stood, but those three pieces went back to the trial judge for reconsideration.
On remand, the trial court issued an amended final judgment. It built a new equitable distribution schedule, awarded the wife retroactive child support, and awarded the husband permanent periodic alimony of $4,182 per month, plus retroactive alimony.
Worth pausing on that detail: the wife was the higher earner and the paying spouse; the husband was the recipient. Florida alimony law is gender-neutral, and this case is a useful reminder that support obligations follow income and need, not stereotypes.
The wife appealed again. She raised three challenges: the permanent alimony award, the way the court valued the marital assets, and the calculation of retroactive child support. In January 2026, the Second District agreed with her on the first two issues, rejected her arguments on child support on the merits, and still sent the child support award back for reconsideration — because when alimony and property division change, child support numbers usually have to change with them.
The husband did not file a brief or appear in the appeal at all.
Florida Ended Permanent Alimony in 2023. Here’s What Replaced It.
To understand why the wife won, you need a short history lesson.
Effective July 1, 2023, the Florida Legislature substantially rewrote section 61.08 of the Florida Statutes, the law governing alimony. The headline change: permanent alimony no longer exists in Florida. Judges can no longer order a spouse to pay support indefinitely as part of an initial divorce judgment.
What remains are four categories:
- Temporary alimony — support paid while the divorce case is still in progress, to keep both households afloat until the judge enters a final judgment.
- Bridge-the-gap alimony — short-term help with identifiable, legitimate short-term needs during the transition from married to single life. It is capped at two years and cannot be modified.
- Rehabilitative alimony — support tied to a specific, written plan to help a spouse redevelop skills, finish a degree, or obtain training or credentials. It generally cannot exceed five years.
- Durational alimony — support for a set period of time. The available length is tied to the length of the marriage, and the amount is subject to a statutory starting point based on the difference between the spouses’ net incomes.
The practical effect is that the question in most Florida alimony cases has shifted. It used to be “permanent or not?” Now it is “which type, how much, and for how long?” That is a very different negotiation, and it is one where preparation and documentation matter enormously.
The Legislature also included a provision, section 61.08(11), telling courts when to apply the new rules. It says a court “shall apply this section to all initial petitions for dissolution of marriage or support unconnected with dissolution of marriage pending or filed on or after July 1, 2023.”
That one word — pending — is what Morgan is really about.
The Central Ruling: A Case on Remand Is Still “Pending”
The wife’s lead argument was straightforward: the trial court entered its amended judgment well after July 1, 2023, so it had no authority to award permanent alimony. The Second District agreed.
The court’s reasoning built on its own 2025 decision in Woodward v. Woodward, 400 So. 3d 861 (Fla. 2d DCA 2025). In Woodward, a final judgment awarding permanent alimony was entered in February 2023 — months before the new law took effect — and the other spouse appealed. The Second District held that the new statute applied anyway, because the initial petition was still pending while the appeal was alive. As the court put it, an action generally remains pending until final judgment and until an appeal is taken or the time to appeal expires; if an appeal is taken, the action stays pending until final disposition.
Morgan extended that logic one step further. Here, the original judgment had already been reversed. The alimony award had been wiped out, and the trial judge was specifically directed to reconsider it. So when the trial court took the case back up, there was no live alimony award — there was an open question the judge had been ordered to answer fresh. The Second District held that the petition and the alimony issue remained pending on remand, which meant the amended statute governed.
The court leaned on a related principle that comes up often in these disputes: you do not have a “vested right” to permanent alimony. Under long-standing Florida law, the right to alimony vests only when a final judgment is rendered awarding it and making it payable in future installments. And even then, Florida courts may modify or terminate future payments under section 61.14 when circumstances substantially change. Because the original award had been reversed on appeal, the husband had nothing vested to protect. He had a claim to be re-decided — under whatever law applied at the time it was re-decided.
Because the application of a statute is a pure question of law, the appellate court reviewed the issue de novo, meaning it gave no deference to the trial judge’s conclusion and analyzed the question from scratch.
The result: the $4,182 per month permanent alimony award was reversed, and the case goes back to the trial court to reconsider alimony under the current statute. That does not mean the husband gets nothing. It means the judge must now decide whether durational, rehabilitative, or bridge-the-gap alimony is appropriate — and if durational, for how long and in what amount within the statutory framework.
Florida’s Appellate Courts Don’t Fully Agree — and That Matters
Here is where a good Florida divorce attorney earns their fee: the districts are not aligned on this question, and where your case is filed can affect the outcome.
The Fourth District takes a narrower view. In Alfonso v. Alfonso (Fla. 4th DCA 2025), the trial court entered a final judgment on June 30, 2023 — one day before the new statute took effect. The husband moved for rehearing two weeks later, arguing that permanent alimony was now improper because the time for rehearing had not expired when the law changed, so the petition was still pending. The Fourth District disagreed, reasoning that the final judgment had disposed of every issue raised in the initial petition, so nothing was pending on July 1. The court pointed to a Senate staff analysis suggesting the changes applied to final judgments entered on or after July 1, 2023.
The Second District rejected that approach in Morgan. Its answer was essentially textual: section 61.08(11) is clear and unambiguous, and when statutory language is clear, courts apply its plain meaning rather than reaching for legislative history or other interpretive tools. The court also distinguished Alfonso on the facts — in Alfonso, nearly the entire final judgment had been affirmed on appeal, while in Morgan the alimony award had been reversed and expressly sent back for reconsideration.
The First and Fifth Districts have addressed the question in different postures. In Stockdale v. Stockdale, 409 So. 3d 163 (Fla. 1st DCA 2025), a general magistrate had held a hearing but had not submitted a recommended order and no final judgment had been entered; the First District held the petition was still pending and rejected the wife’s claim that her right to permanent alimony had vested at the hearing. In Secrist v. Secrist, 421 So. 3d 781 (Fla. 5th DCA 2025), a trial judge had orally announced findings and rulings but had not yet signed a written judgment; the Fifth District held the petition remained pending until the written judgment was entered and agreed there is no vested right to alimony before then.
For Tampa family law clients, the practical bottom line is this: cases from Hillsborough County are appealed to the Second District, so Morgan and Woodward are the controlling authority here. But the split between districts is real, and questions like this sometimes end up before the Florida Supreme Court. If your case involves a judgment or an appeal that straddles the July 2023 effective date, this is not a do-it-yourself problem.
The Second Half of the Decision: When Are Your Assets Valued?
The alimony ruling got the headlines, but the property portion of Morgan may be even more useful to the average person going through a divorce, because it touches something every case involves: marital asset division.
Florida’s equitable distribution process has three steps: identify what is marital and what is not, place a value on the marital items, and then divide them. Two different dates control the first two steps, and confusing them is a common and expensive mistake.
Identification date. Under section 61.075(7), the date for determining which assets and liabilities count as marital is the earliest of the date the parties signed a valid separation agreement or the date the dissolution petition was filed. The Morgans had no separation agreement, so their marital estate was identified as of April 2018, when the wife filed.
Valuation date. This is where judges have room to work. Once marital assets are identified, the trial court may value them “as of the date or dates the court deems equitable.” That is a discretionary call, reviewed on appeal only for abuse of discretion.
In the original 2020 judgment, the trial judge valued the retirement and bank accounts as of March 2016 — the date the couple separated — and explained why at length. The court found that after the separation the husband contributed nothing toward the wife’s expenses and deposited his entire salary, then in excess of $70,000 a year, into his own account. Any growth in the wife’s retirement account after that point came from her own contributions and passive market appreciation. As for the checking and savings accounts, the judge found the balances fluctuated constantly, the wife’s savings account functioned like a checking account used to pay off credit card debt run up in prior months, and there was no evidence she had intentionally depleted anything. So the judge assigned no value to either party’s bank accounts.
Those findings produced a marital estate subject to distribution of $82,984.
On remand, the amended judgment valued everything as of April 2018 — the filing date — instead. It added assets that had been left out, including vehicles, the parties’ son’s car, an HSA, the wife’s Redstone accounts, and the husband’s Bank of America account. It also revalued the wife’s retirement account from $82,188 to $191,712.
The new total: $309,006.
The Second District reversed. The problem was not that the judge picked a different date — that discretion exists. The problem was that the trial court took no new evidence and gave no explanation for abandoning its own prior findings. The new valuation date flatly contradicted detailed factual findings the same court had made in the original judgment, findings that had never been disturbed on appeal. Citing Roth v. Roth, 312 So. 3d 1021 (Fla. 2d DCA 2021), where a separation-date valuation was upheld because the record supported it, the appellate court directed the trial judge on remand to either use the separation date for the retirement and bank accounts or make specific findings explaining why that date is no longer appropriate.
It is a discipline point as much as a legal one. Discretion in Florida family law is not a blank check. It is the freedom to choose among reasonable options and then explain the choice on the record.
The Arguments the Former Wife Did Not Win
A complete picture requires acknowledging what the appellate court rejected, because those rulings are just as instructive.
Need. The wife argued the trial court failed to account for its earlier findings that the husband understated income and overstated expenses. The appellate court found no support in the record: the trial court had found the husband’s gross monthly salary was $4,333.33 and his net was $3,287, and it made identical findings in the amended judgment. The wife pointed to no actual calculation error.
Standard of living. She argued the court gave too much weight to the marital standard of living. But the 2021 opinion had reversed the original alimony award precisely because a nominal award was out of step with the standard of living established during the marriage and the disparity in the parties’ incomes. Considering that factor on remand was exactly what the trial court had been told to do.
Bonus income. She argued her annual work bonus should not have counted toward her ability to pay because it was not guaranteed. The court disagreed. Under Barlow v. Barlow, 224 So. 3d 868 (Fla. 2d DCA 2017), bonus income must be included in an alimony calculation when it is regular and continuous. The trial court had reviewed the significant bonuses she consistently received and properly folded them into her income.
That last point deserves emphasis for anyone with variable compensation — bonuses, commissions, overtime, distributions, RSUs. The question is not whether the income is contractually guaranteed. It is whether it shows up reliably, year after year. If it does, expect it to be part of the analysis.
Practical Takeaways for Anyone Facing a Hillsborough County Divorce
You do not need to memorize case citations. But a few concrete lessons come out of Morgan that are worth carrying into your own situation.
1. If your case is on appeal or on remand, the law that applies may not be the law that existed when you filed. This is the single biggest practical lesson. Cases that started under the old alimony framework and are still moving through the system can land under the new one. If you have an older case that was reversed, remanded, or is currently on appeal in the Tampa Bay area, that is worth a conversation with a Tampa divorce lawyer sooner rather than later.
2. Nothing is locked in until a final judgment is entered — and even then, alimony can change. The vested-rights discussion in Morgan is a reminder that expectations are not entitlements. A ruling announced from the bench, a magistrate’s hearing, or a judgment on appeal is not the end of the story.
3. Insist on written findings. The wife won the property issue not because the judge lacked authority to pick April 2018, but because the judge did not explain the change. Detailed findings protect whoever they favor. Ask your attorney whether the proposed judgment in your case actually explains the why behind each significant number.
4. Separation dates can matter a great deal in marital asset division. In Morgan, the difference between a March 2016 and an April 2018 valuation was roughly $226,000 in the marital estate. If you have been separated for a meaningful period and one spouse has been building assets alone, the valuation date is not a technicality. It is potentially the largest single issue in your case.
5. Assemble your financial records early and completely. The amended judgment in Morgan added assets that had been omitted from the original — vehicles, an HSA, several bank accounts. Missing assets create years of litigation. Statements, titles, retirement summaries, tax returns, and account histories gathered at the outset save enormous cost later.
6. Expect variable income to count. If bonuses or commissions are a regular part of your compensation, plan for them to be part of the support analysis. The same is true for your spouse’s variable income, which is why complete discovery matters.
7. Litigation is long. Settlement is not surrender. The Morgan case ran from a 2018 petition through two appeals and is still not finished as of 2026. That is nearly eight years, two rounds of appellate briefing, and a substantial legal bill for a marital estate valued in the low six figures. A thoughtfully negotiated resolution — through mediation, collaborative divorce, or direct settlement — often produces more certainty and more control than a judgment that can be undone by an appellate court three years later. Sometimes litigation is genuinely necessary. A good Florida divorce attorney will tell you honestly which situation you are in.
Talk With a Tampa Divorce Lawyer at The McKinney Law Group
Divorce is rarely just a legal problem. It is a financial reset, a change in how you parent, and often a hard emotional season. You deserve guidance that respects all three.
The takeaway from Morgan v. Morgan is not that Florida family law is unknowable. It is that details and timing carry real weight — which statute applies, which valuation date the judge selects, whether the findings in your judgment are specific enough to survive review. Those are exactly the places where experienced representation changes outcomes.
At The McKinney Law Group, we represent clients throughout Hillsborough County and the greater Tampa Bay area in divorce, alimony, equitable distribution, child support, and post-judgment matters. Whether you are preparing to file, negotiating a settlement, responding to a petition, or dealing with a case that has already been through appeal, we will give you a clear read on where you stand and a realistic plan for moving forward.
If you have questions about how the current alimony law affects your situation, or you are ready to talk with a Tampa divorce lawyer who will take the time to explain your options in plain English, contact The McKinney Law Group today to schedule a confidential consultation. The sooner you understand your position, the more choices you have.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does permanent alimony still exist in Florida? No. For initial petitions pending or filed on or after July 1, 2023, Florida judges may award temporary, bridge-the-gap, rehabilitative, or durational alimony — but not permanent alimony. Older judgments that already awarded permanent alimony and were never appealed generally remain in place, though they may be modifiable under section 61.14 if circumstances substantially change.
My divorce was filed years before 2023. Does the new law apply to me? It depends on where your case stands. If a final judgment was entered and no appeal was taken, the old framework generally governed your case. But if your case was on appeal or was reversed and sent back to the trial court, the Second District’s decisions in Morgan and Woodwardhold that the petition is still pending — which means the new statute applies. Because the appellate districts have not fully agreed on this point, this is a question to take to a Tampa family law attorney rather than resolve on your own.
What is durational alimony, and how long can it last? Durational alimony is support for a defined period. The maximum available term is tied to the length of the marriage under the current version of section 61.08, and the statute also provides a starting point for the amount based on the difference between the parties’ net incomes. Judges still apply the traditional need-and-ability-to-pay analysis and consider the statutory factors on top of that framework.
Can a man receive alimony in Florida? Yes. Florida alimony law is gender-neutral, and Morgan is a clear illustration — the former husband was the alimony recipient and the former wife was the paying spouse. Courts look at need and ability to pay, not at which spouse is which.
When are marital assets valued in a Florida divorce? Two dates matter. Assets and debts are identified as marital as of the earlier of a valid separation agreement or the filing of the petition. They are valued as of whatever date or dates the judge finds equitable, which can be the separation date, the filing date, the trial date, or something else. A judge who departs from a previously chosen date should explain why on the record.
Will my annual bonus count against me in an alimony case? If it is regular and continuous, yes. Florida courts include bonus income in the alimony analysis when the record shows a consistent pattern of receiving it. A genuinely one-time or unpredictable windfall is treated differently, and how your income is presented and documented can matter significantly.
How long does a contested divorce take in Hillsborough County? Most cases resolve well short of what happened in Morgan, which spanned roughly eight years and two appeals. An uncontested divorce may be finished in a few months. A contested case involving significant assets, support disputes, or parenting issues commonly takes a year or more. Mediation and collaborative approaches often shorten that timeline considerably.
Should I appeal my divorce judgment? Appeals address legal errors, not disappointment with the outcome, and they carry strict deadlines — generally 30 days from rendition of the final judgment. Morgan also shows that appeals can reopen issues in unexpected ways, including subjecting your case to a law that did not exist when you filed. If you are weighing an appeal, speak with a Tampa divorce lawyer quickly, because the window closes fast.
Written by Damien McKinney, Founding Partner
Damien McKinney is the Founding Partner of The McKinney Law Group Family & Divorce Lawyers, bringing nearly two decades of experience to complex marital and family law matters. He is licensed in both Florida and North Carolina and has been repeatedly recognized as a Rising Star by Super Lawyers.