Florida waives permits for small single-family jobs under $7,500 (HB 803)

Florida now requires local governments to waive the building permit for minor work on a single-family home when the job is valued under $7,500, as long as the property is not in a flood hazard area. The waiver does not cover electrical, plumbing, structural, mechanical, or gas work, and a homeowner or contractor still has to file a written exemption request with supporting documentation before starting. Splitting one job into several smaller ones to dodge the $7,500 line is explicitly against the rule. This applies statewide starting July 1, 2026.

What the enrolled text actually says, and what it does not

This is the law most often described wrongly, including in an earlier version of our own pages, so it is worth being precise about the four things people get wrong.

It never names roofing. The statute covers work “valued at less than $7,500” and says nothing about roofs specifically. Roofing became the headline because a re-roof is the most common job near that price, not because the legislature singled it out.

It is “less than $7,500”, not “$7,500 or less”. A job valued at exactly $7,500 is outside the exemption.

It is not automatic. A written exemption request with supporting documentation has to be filed before work starts. An exemption you did not ask for is not an exemption, and this is the provision most likely to catch out a homeowner who reads a summary and starts work.

Five trades are carved out. Electrical, plumbing, structural, mechanical and gas work are excluded, which removes most of what makes a renovation expensive. Flood hazard parcels are excluded entirely.

How Florida’s counties are actually applying it

We hold rules for 28 Florida jurisdictions, and 18 of them now cite the $7,500 threshold in their own published guidance. That is the clearest signal we have that the change is real rather than nominal: county building departments have gone back and rewritten their own pages around it.

The uptake is uneven in an instructive way. In most of the 18 the threshold appears only against roofing, which is the pattern you would expect if departments are responding to the jobs that actually arrive at the counter. In Pasco and Pinellas it appears against six separate project types, including decks, electrical, HVAC, plumbing and solar, which is a broader reading of the same sentence. Palm Beach applies it to solar as well as roofing.

Two counties reading one statute and arriving at a different list of covered work is not a defect in our data. It is what the statute produced.

What this means if you are about to start work

Get the valuation in writing before you decide anything, because the entire question turns on it and $7,500 is a low bar for a Florida roof.

Then file the exemption request. Then check whether your parcel is in a flood hazard area, because that single fact voids the exemption regardless of price.

And check your own county’s page rather than a statewide summary, including this one. The legislature set the floor; the 18 counties applying it have not landed on the same reading of what sits above it.