Two Opportunity Zone maps, and only one of them will work

The map everyone is looking at is the old one

An investor sold a warehouse in the spring, moved the gain into a fund inside the 180 days, and put a small apartment building off Flagler under contract. The tract has been an Opportunity Zone since 2018. Every step of that is right.

The contract runs to February. In November the fund’s accountant asks which zone the building sits in on the 2027 map, and the 2027 map is not finished. The 2018 designation does not expire until the end of 2028, so nothing in the file looks wrong.

The date that decides it is neither of those. It is December 31, 2026, and it comes from a notice the IRS published in June.

Opportunity Zones came out of the 2017 tax act, and Miami’s were designated in 2018 and listed tract by tract in IRS Notice 2018-48. Those designations run ten years and end on December 31, 2028.

The One, Big, Beautiful Bill Act, Public Law 119-21, changed the shape of the program on July 4, 2025. Section 70421 made it permanent, and permanence meant the map stopped being a one-time event. Designations now run on a ten-year cycle keyed to a decennial determination date, the first of which is July 1, 2026. So a second map is being drawn while the first one is still hanging. The new designations take effect January 1, 2027 and run through December 31, 2036.

What the new list is made of

The new map is drawn from a narrower list, and the narrowing is the part that decides Miami.

Under the old rule a tract qualified through the low-income community definition in section 45D(e), which set the income test at 80% of area median. Section 1400Z-1(c)(1) now carries its own test. A tract inside a metropolitan area, which every tract in Miami-Dade is, qualifies one of two ways: median family income at or below 70% of the metropolitan area median, or a poverty rate of at least 20% with median family income at or below 125% of that median.

The other change is quieter and it removes a whole category. Contiguous tracts are gone. Under the old program a tract that did not qualify on its own could be designated because it touched one that did. Section 70421(b)(2) removed that provision for anything designated after July 4, 2025. A tract now qualifies on its own numbers or it does not qualify.

Treasury published the resulting list in Revenue Procedure 2026-14, drawn from the 2020 to 2024 American Community Survey and mapped onto 2020 census tract boundaries rather than the 2010 boundaries the first round used. It runs to 25,332 tracts nationally.

We counted the Florida rows in that appendix. There are 1,360 eligible tracts in the state, and 245 of them are in Miami-Dade, more than any other county in Florida by a wide margin. Then the ceiling: section 1400Z-1(d)(1) lets a state designate no more than 25% of its low-income communities in a designation period, which puts Florida’s number at 340. FloridaCommerce reports 427 designated zones in the state today.

The existing zones do not eat into that number. Notice 2026-40 says the count of previously designated zones in a state does not affect how many tracts the Governor may nominate for the period beginning in 2027. The two rounds are counted separately. They simply overlap.

The two years when both maps are live

That overlap is where the money question sits.

From January 1, 2027 to December 31, 2028 both maps are in effect, and FloridaCommerce describes it in those words. A tract designated in 2018 is still a designated zone in 2027. A tract designated in the new round is a designated zone at the same time. What is not the same is what a purchase inside each one buys.

Notice 2026-40, published June 18, 2026, works through it in section 5.01. Qualified opportunity zone business property has to be acquired after the applicable start date of the zone it sits in. Applicable start date is a new term, and it means the January 1 following certification, which is January 1, 2027 for the new round. A previously designated zone has no applicable start date at all, because it was designated before the statute created the term.

The notice states the consequence plainly. Property acquired by a fund after December 31, 2026 cannot be qualified opportunity zone business property unless it is acquired for use in a zone designated after July 4, 2025, or one of two exceptions applies.

Both exceptions are narrow. The first covers property bought under a working capital safe harbor plan adopted on or before December 31, 2026, where the business has received at least 10% of the planned working capital and spent at least 5% of it by that date. The second covers ordinary replacement of existing business property, and the notice says expressly that it does not reach the expansion of a business or its move into a new one.

So a 2018 Miami tract keeps its designation for two more years and stops accepting new acquisitions at the end of this one.

Three chairs, three dates

Three parties are looking at the same three dates, and each is anchored on a different one.

The seller reads it as an attribute of the building. An owner in a designated tract has had Opportunity Zone in the listing language for years and has watched it bring a particular kind of buyer to the table. That is a fair reading of the last seven years. From that chair the live question is whether the tract lands on the 2027 map, because that decides whether the pool keeps that buyer after this year. What the seller’s chair cannot see from where it sits is that the label was never doing the work. A designation is a date attached to a buyer, and the date for new purchases in the current zones runs out in December.

The buyer reads it as a closing deadline. A fund buyer with deferred gain to place is looking at December 31, 2026 and counting backward through diligence, financing and title. The honest strength of that position is that a February closing in a current zone, with no 2027 designation and no safe harbor plan, buys the building without the reason for buying it. What that chair has trouble seeing is that the deadline belongs to the buyer. A seller has no obligation to compress a schedule, and asking for December is asking for something, which usually means paying for it.

The developer reads the map, not the calendar. Money goes into a project across years, and what matters is whether the tract is designated when the property is acquired and while the work is done. From that chair the event is the nomination window, not the closing date, because a site bought in 2028 qualifies only if the tract is on the new map. What the developer’s chair cannot see is that eligibility is not designation. Being one of 1,360 is not being one of 340, and no amount of project quality moves a tract onto the list.

Where they collide

The argument is rarely about the rule. It is about which date is the real one, and each chair is right about its own exposure.

There is also something none of the three can price, and it is worth naming rather than smoothing over. Which tracts get nominated is a state decision made inside a window, not an outcome a formula produces. A tract can be eligible on every number and not be nominated. Nobody in the transaction can put a probability on that, and a contract written as though somebody can is a contract with an argument inside it.

The version we see is quieter than any of that. An owner asks whether the building is in an Opportunity Zone, hears yes, and reasonably stops there, because for seven years yes was the whole answer. That is not inattention. The question used to have one part and now has three: is the tract eligible, will it be designated, and does the buyer’s calendar still reach.

Our read

The designation should be checked before the listing, not during the contract.

That sounds small and it reorders the whole conversation. The eligible-tract list is public, free, and searchable by tract number, and a folio maps to a tract in a few minutes. Read before market, the answer sets the buyer pool and the pricing conversation. Read in November, it is a re-trade with a statutory deadline behind it, which is the worst negotiating weather there is.

For an owner whose tract is on the eligible list, the nomination window is a real thing and it is open now. FloridaCommerce is reviewing tracts and takes comment by email. That is a low-cost move available to anyone with a tract number and a reason, and it is available only until the window closes.

For an owner whose tract is not on the list, the honest read is that the incentive stops being part of the story after this year. Pricing that assumes an Opportunity Zone bidder in 2027 is pricing a buyer who has no reason to be in the room. That is not a bad outcome. It is a different one, and it is a great deal cheaper to know in August than in February.

One caution sits over all of it. Notice 2026-40 says on its own face that it previews proposed regulations, and that future regulations may differ from the transition rules it describes. What is above is what Treasury and the IRS have said they intend to write. It is not final regulation.

Who to ask

Florida’s nominations belong to the Governor, and FloridaCommerce is the office doing the work. Their team is reviewing eligible tracts, they ran a Miami-Dade workshop in April, and they ask for feedback on potential nominations by email at opportunityzones@commerce.fl.gov. For a tract that wants to be considered, that address is the route.

The list itself belongs to Treasury and the IRS. The eligible tracts are in the appendix to Revenue Procedure 2026-14, published as a spreadsheet on irs.gov, and Treasury has said the same list will sit in an online resource with mapping, which is the easier way to find one specific tract. Both are free.

Whether a specific gain can still be deferred, and by when, is a CPA question and it is not a close call. The 180-day windows, the inclusion dates, and the interaction between an existing fund position and a new one are exactly the arithmetic a CPA owns, and it is expensive to get wrong in a way a broker cannot repair afterward.

What a December closing deadline does to a contract is a real estate attorney’s question. A deadline driven by a statute behaves differently from one driven by a lender, and the remedies for missing it have to be written before anyone needs them.

What we do is read the map and say what we think it means for a specific building. Treasury designates the zone and the Governor nominates it. We last checked these sources on August 7, 2026, and the nomination window, the guidance and the regulations behind it are all moving this year, so anything acted on today is worth confirming against the version in force that day.