Florida residency

I think you are a Ohio resident for 2020 or at least a part-year resident.

First, we have to consider the concept of domicile. Your domicile is basically your primary and permanent residence. You can only have one domicile at a time no matter how many homes you live in over the course of a year. There is no single fact that determines where your domicile is, it is a combination of all the significant factors in your particular circumstances.  Factors to consider include where your significant social relationships are, your church membership, your doctor and your dentist, your voter in car registration and so on.  When you establish a domicile in a new state, you also must take active steps to abandon the domicile in the previous state. If I were a tax auditor for Ohio, I would consider the fact that you did not give up your Homestead exemption in Ohio until November 2020, or obtain a Florida drivers license, to indicate that you were domiciled in Ohio until November.  If you feel the facts and circumstances are otherwise, you must be prepared to prove them to the satisfaction of the state of Ohio if they audit you.

Separately, even if you are domiciled in Florida, Ohio probably has a tax law that says that if you live physically in the state of Ohio more than half the year, which is 183 or more days, then you are a Ohio resident.  This is something you want to research for yourself.  Even if you lived in Ohio less than 183 days, Ohio will generally consider all income that you receive while you live in Ohio to be taxable in Ohio.

So, let’s consider two possibilities.

1. If you take the position that you changed your domicile and moved out of Ohio and became a permanent resident of Florida on January 1, 2020, then you would file an Ohio state non-resident tax return.  You would apportion your income between Ohio and Florida based on the number of days that you lived in each state.  If your Ohio tax was less than your Ohio withholding, you would get the difference as a refund.

2. you changed your domicile to Florida in a band in your Ohio domicile at some other time during 2020, perhaps November when you abandoned your Homestead exemption, or perhaps some other day in 2020 based on other facts and circumstances. Then, you would file a part-year resident tax return for Ohio.  You will owe Ohio state income tax on all of the income paid to you while you were considered a permanent Ohio resident, even if you were living in Florida for some of those days.  If you had more withholding than the tax you owe, you would get the difference as a refund.

turboTax can handle either of these situations. The program will ask when you moved to the state of Florida, and it will ask if you had income from other states. If you believe you moved to Florida on January 1, 2020, then you would indicate you had income from other states and you will probably have to manually apportion your Ohio income to the number of days you lived in Ohio.  If you indicate you permanently moved to Florida on a different date in 2020, the program will prepare the part year resident return for you and will ask you to help calculating the apportionment of your income.

In either case, the situation for 2021 is that you are a Florida resident and your Ohio pension will only be taxable income in the state of Ohio for the amount of time that you live in the state of Ohio. You should carefully review the instructions in the Ohio state tax forms on resident and non-residency, and I suspect you will find that you will have to limit your time in Ohio to 182 or fewer days in the future in order to avoid being designated a resident for tax purposes.