Broward County, FL updates building permit fee schedule (Ordinance 2025-038)

Broward County, Florida updated its building permit fee schedule under Ordinance 2025-038, adopted February 25, 2025 and effective May 1, 2025. The minimum base permit fee is $125 (minimum $250 for a roofing permit), and structural, electrical, mechanical, and plumbing permits are each charged at 3.0 percent of job value up to just under $10 million, dropping to 2.5 percent above that.

What 3 percent of job value actually costs

A percentage-of-value fee is easy to skim past and expensive in practice. At 3.0 percent, a $20,000 kitchen renovation carries a $600 permit fee. A $60,000 addition carries $1,800. The percentage does not fall until the job passes roughly $10 million, so no residential project in Broward will ever reach the lower rate.

That structure also means the fee is unknowable until the work is priced, which is the opposite of how a flat-fee jurisdiction works. Bellevue, Washington charges $290 for a re-roof regardless of what the roof costs. In Broward the same job is billed against its value, with a $250 floor specific to roofing.

The roofing minimum is the detail to notice

Broward sets a $250 minimum for a roofing permit against a $125 minimum for everything else. A department that doubles its floor for one trade is telling you something about the work: roofing permits are numerous, individually small, and inspection-heavy relative to their value.

The practical effect is that the roofing minimum bites on small jobs. Any roof job valued under about $8,333 pays the $250 floor rather than the percentage, so a partial repair and a modest replacement can cost the same to permit.

How this collides with the state’s new exemption

Broward’s roof rule is conditional on the $7,500 threshold Florida introduced in 2026, and the interaction is worth spelling out.

Work valued at less than $7,500 can qualify for the state exemption, which means no permit and therefore no fee. Work at or above $7,500 needs a permit, and at 3.0 percent that permit starts at $225, which is below the $250 roofing floor. So in the band just above the exemption, a Broward homeowner pays the $250 minimum.

The gap between paying nothing and paying $250 is a few dollars of valuation. That is a strong incentive to price a job just under the line, which is presumably why the statute explicitly forbids splitting one job into several to get under it.

Reading the schedule correctly

Broward publishes no separate fee line for decks, fences, patios or sheds. All of them fall under the structural permit schedule at Section 40.29, on the same $125 minimum or 3.0 percent basis. A reader looking for “shed permit fee” on the county’s schedule will not find one and may wrongly conclude there is no fee.

Pools are the exception in the other direction. Broward requires separate structural, plumbing, mechanical and electrical applications for pool work under Sections 40.29 to 40.32, each charged its own minimum or percentage. A pool is therefore four fees, not one, and the $125 floors stack.

One correction worth recording: this ordinance replaced Ordinance 2024-062, not the 2021 schedule an earlier version of our own page cited.