Florida Construction Estimating Services

Florida has one building code. That sounds simpler than it is.

The Florida Building Code is statewide, and the edition on the street right now is the 8th Edition (2023). It took effect on December 31, 2023, and the rule is clean: any permit application submitted on or after that date is built to the new book. The 9th Edition (2026) is already printed. So the question on every Florida job isn’t “which city are we in” — it’s “when does this permit go in.”

Then there’s the tax. On a lump-sum job in Florida, you’re the consumer of the materials. You pay the tax to your supplier and you don’t charge the customer tax on the contract price — not on the materials, not on the labor, not on anything. The exception is a retail-sale-plus-installation contract, where you buy the goods for resale, bill the customer tax on the goods and not on the install. The rate depends on the county, so we don’t print one here. What we do is put the tax where it belongs: inside your material cost, not as a line you forgot to add.

And then there’s the license. Florida licenses contractors at the state level. A registered license works in the county or city that issued it, plus any neighboring ones that accept it. A certified license works statewide. General, building, residential, roofing, air-conditioning, mechanical, plumbing, pool — all of them need one or the other. That matters for the estimate because the sub you priced in Miami may not be able to legally pull the permit in Naples.

Underneath all of that is the site. Wind, water and a high water table are part of every Florida takeoff we do — every opening, every roof detail and every slab gets priced for the site it sits on, not for a generic version of the state.

Every one of these has cost somebody real money. We see them monthly.

1. The permit date, not the bid date. The 8th Edition has governed since December 31, 2023, and the 9th Edition is on the shelf. A job that gets designed this year and permits next year can land on the other side of a code change. Your estimate needs to say which edition it was priced to, and your schedule needs to say when the permit goes in. If you price a job to one edition and permit it under the next, you’re going to be doing the takeoff twice — once for the bid and once for the change order.

2. Tax inside the materials. Under Rule 12A-1.051, a lump-sum contractor is the consumer. There’s no sales-tax line on your invoice, which means the tax has to already be in your material unit costs or it isn’t anywhere. Bid Florida from out of state and it’s easy to leave out.

3. Impact fees at the permit window. Florida’s Impact Fee Act sets the rules every county and city has to live by: a fee can’t be collected any earlier than the day the building permit is issued, an increase can’t exceed 50 percent of the current rate, a fee can’t go up more than once every four years, and the public gets at least 90 days’ notice before a new or higher fee takes effect. The number is knowable before you sign for the land — but only if somebody looks. And if you built the road or the water line, the statute says you get a credit at fair market value. Ask for it.

4. The sub who can’t work there. A registered contractor is limited to their county and the adjoining ones that accept the registration. A certified contractor isn’t. When a bid carries a roofer, an A/C sub or a plumber who’s registered two counties away, the price on paper isn’t the price you’ll get. We flag it when we see it.

We don’t ask you to take our word for it. Sixteen real Florida estimates are on this page — four in each of the four categories we work in. $147M of construction value across 170 pages of takeoff and pricing. Open them. Read the line items. See exactly what you get before you send us a single sheet.

Commercial Buildings — ground-up retail, hospitality and institutional.

• Key West Airport – $68.9M (Key West 33040)
• Wyndham Garden Hotel, Cape Coral – $15.9M (33909)
• Unity Church of Clearwater – $6.4M (Clearwater 33764)
• 7-Eleven, North Port – $519K (34286)

Multi Family and Apartments — apartments, condos and multi-unit housing.

• Park Villa Apts, Panama City – $22.7M (32401)
• Habitus Brickell, Miami – $13.8M (33129)
• 3922 Park Lane Townhouses, West Palm Beach – $4M (33406)
• Riverside Apts, Jacksonville – $774K (32204)

Residential — custom homes, ADUs and whole-house remodels.

• 445 Solano Prado Residence, Miami – $4.2M (33156)
• 665 Curtiswood Dr Residence, Key Biscayne – $2.8M (33149)
• 3978 43rd Street Residence, St. Petersburg – $1.5M (33711)
• ADU International, Jupiter – $204K (33478)

Tenant Buildouts — interior fit-outs in existing buildings.

• Restaurant Interior/ Exterior Renovation, Miami – $3.1M (33126)
• Amskills Alteration, Holiday – $1.4M (34690)
• Paris Baguette Bakery Cafe, Tampa – $519K (33647)
• Primo Hoagies TI, Stuart – $287K (34997)

Four building types. Key West to Panama City, Jacksonville down to Miami. From a $204K accessory dwelling to a $68.9M airport. That range is the whole point — most shops price one lane and call it a service.

Look at the Key West Airport. $68.9M, twenty-one pages, general conditions through electrical, with sitework, concrete, masonry, metals, roofing, elevators and the whole finish package broken out line by line. That’s an island job at the end of US-1 — every truck that shows up came down the Overseas Highway, and the general conditions carry that.

Same story on the Brickell apartments. $13.8M and seventeen pages, with the tower crane and a seventy-two-week supervision line sitting in general conditions where they belong, and unit flooring, kitchens and balconies each on their own line. If you’re pricing a mid-rise off a square-foot number, you’re going to miss what’s on those seventeen pages.

We estimate statewide. Here’s where the volume actually is.

Miami and South Florida. Miami, Miami Beach, Coral Gables, Key Biscayne, Hialeah, Homestead, Fort Lauderdale, Hollywood, Pembroke Pines, Boca Raton, West Palm Beach, Jupiter and Stuart. Seven of the sixteen estimates above are South Florida jobs, from a Brickell mid-rise to a hoagie shop in Stuart.

Tampa Bay. Tampa, St. Petersburg, Clearwater, Holiday, New Port Richey, Bradenton, Sarasota and North Port. Five of the sixteen — a church, a bakery cafe, a training-center alteration, a house on 43rd Street and a 7-Eleven.

Orlando. Orlando, Kissimmee, Sanford, Winter Garden, Lake Mary and Lakeland.

Southwest Florida. Fort Myers, Cape Coral, Naples, Bonita Springs and Punta Gorda. The Wyndham Garden in Cape Coral is on this page.

Jacksonville and the Northeast. Jacksonville, St. Augustine, Ponte Vedra and Fernandina Beach. The Riverside apartments are a Jacksonville job.

The Panhandle. Panama City, Panama City Beach, Pensacola, Destin and Tallahassee. Park Villa — $22.7M, nineteen pages — is a Panama City job.

The Keys. Key West, Marathon, Islamorada and Key Largo. The airport estimate above is a Keys job.

Every one of those cities has its own page with local detail. Start there if you want the county-level specifics.

General contractors bidding hard-bid and negotiated work. Subs who need a takeoff that survives a scope review. Developers who want a real number before they commit capital. Architects who’d rather price a design now than explain a surprise at bid day.

If you’re a GC in Florida turning down invitations because you can’t get numbers out fast enough, you’re going to keep leaving work on the table until somebody else does the takeoff for you. That’s what our Florida construction estimating services are built to fix. You send the plans. We send back a priced estimate with the quantities shown, in a format you can hand straight to a client or an owner.

We’re not a lead service and we’re not a software subscription. A person does the takeoff. Another person checks it. You can call and ask why a number is what it is, and get an answer.

What you’re hiring is a cost estimator who has already priced work under the Florida Building Code, on your coast, with the tax inside the materials and the license question answered. Not a national square-foot average with the word Florida written on top.

Send us your plans. We’ll tell you what it costs.