Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a gold and silver legal tender bill into law in May 2025, with the state House voting 113-0 in favor and the Senate 38-0. Missouri eliminated its state capital gains tax on precious metals as of Jan. 1, 2026. Texas passed legislation recognizing gold and silver as legal tender, with a gold-backed digital transaction system scheduled to launch through the state’s bullion depository by 2027. Idaho, Alabama, Wyoming, and several other states have passed their own sound money measures in recent years.
Taken individually, each of these bills looks like a local curiosity. Taken together, they describe a national policy trend that has accelerated sharply — and one that Everett Millman, precious metals specialist at Gainesville Coins, flagged well before it commanded mainstream attention.
Gainesville Coins on the Policy Shift Most Investors Are Missing
“Something close to about three quarters of the states in the United States now have some kind of law in this direction,” Millman said in April 2025. “And that is a major, major shift from even just a few years ago. It’s a policy movement that’s gaining momentum.”
The laws vary in scope. Some remove sales tax from gold and silver purchases, treating precious metals as investments rather than consumer goods. Others eliminate state capital gains taxes on bullion, recognizing that taxing a sale of gold into dollars functions as a penalty for holding an alternative store of value. The most ambitious — like Florida’s and Texas’s — go further, formally recognizing gold and silver as legal tender alongside Federal Reserve notes.
Millman was clear-eyed about what this does and doesn’t mean. State-level recognition doesn’t bind the federal government or the U.S. Treasury. The dollar remains the national currency. But the pattern of legislation, he argued, reflects something real: a growing bipartisan consensus that gold and silver deserve treatment comparable to other financial assets, not the penalty treatment of taxable collectibles.
Why the Timing Matters
The sound money movement’s acceleration tracks closely with gold’s price performance and with broader erosion of confidence in monetary institutions. Gold surpassed $5,000 per ounce in January 2026. The Federal Reserve’s independence came under political pressure throughout 2025. Inflation stayed persistently above the Fed’s 2% target for years running. Each of these developments gave state legislators a clearer constituency for sound money bills — voters who had watched the purchasing power of the dollar decline and were looking for policy responses.
Gainesville Coins, based in Florida, has a direct stake in the legal tender movement. The company’s home state now sits at the center of the most aggressive sound money legislation in the country, with gold and silver set to become formally spendable legal tender as of July 1, 2026. For investors in Florida, that change eliminates the remaining state-level friction — no sales tax, no state capital gains tax — on precious metals held or transacted within the state.
The Bigger Picture
“It is indicative of a shift in thinking to recognize gold and silver more so as on par with things like the U.S. dollar or U.S. Treasury bonds than they have been in the past,” Millman said.
Whether or not individual investors follow state politics closely, the legislative trend has practical consequences: lower transaction costs, cleaner tax treatment, and — in states that go the furthest — the ability to use physical metals in everyday commerce. For anyone tracking the investment case for precious metals, the legal and regulatory environment is moving in one direction. That’s not a coincidence. It’s a policy response to a decade of monetary instability that doesn’t appear to be over.
