Starting July 1, 2026, a Florida homeowner can hire a contractor to redo a kitchen's cabinetry and flooring for $7,499 and never file a building permit application. Do the same job for $7,501, and the full permitting process kicks back in. That single dollar threshold — created by House Bill 803 — is now one of the most consequential numbers in Florida construction, and most contractors and homeowners still don't understand where its edges are.
HB 803 sounds like a deregulation win, and for a narrow category of cosmetic work, it is. But the exemption is much narrower than the headlines suggest, it comes with a paperwork requirement that surprises people expecting to skip paperwork entirely, and misusing it can turn a routine remodel into a code-enforcement or insurance problem. Here's what actually changed, who it helps, and where the traps are.
What HB 803 Actually Does
Signed into law and effective July 1, 2026, HB 803 requires every local government that issues building permits to exempt certain low-value residential work from the permitting process. Specifically: an owner of a single-family dwelling, or that owner's contractor, doesn't need a building permit for work valued at less than $7,500 on the owner's property.
That's the headline. The mechanics matter more than the number.
You still have to ask for the exemption. This isn't a silent, automatic pass. The owner or contractor must submit a written request for exemption to the local building department, along with documentation showing the nature and value of the work. Skipping that step and simply not pulling a permit is not the same thing as using the exemption correctly — it's just unpermitted work, with all the risk that carries.
The law also rewrites permit review timelines for everyone, not just small jobs. Building officials must now issue a permit within 10 business days of a complete application, or the permit is automatically deemed approved as a matter of law. If the department doesn't flag missing documents within that window, the applicant is legally entitled to the permit on the next business day. For an industry used to permit reviews stretching into weeks, that's a meaningful shift in leverage toward applicants.
Private providers got significantly more room to operate. Licensed private providers (independent architects and engineers who can review plans and perform inspections outside the local building department) can now be engaged at any time without preconditions, can conduct virtual inspections, and no longer need to give local officials advance notice before an inspection. Local agencies auditing a private provider's work must give at least 5 business days' notice first, and officials reviewing private-provider work can only check for local ordinance compliance, floodplain rules, and life-safety issues — not re-litigate the building code determination itself. Commercial projects using full private-provider plan review and inspection services get a mandatory fee reduction of at least 50%; partial services get at least 25% off.
What Qualifies for the $7,500 Exemption — and What Doesn't
This is where most of the confusion lives, because the exemption is written around categories of work, not just a dollar figure.
Generally exempt (assuming it's under $7,500 and the request is filed):
- Painting, interior and exterior
- Flooring replacement
- Cabinetry installation or replacement
- Drywall repair and finishing
- Other cosmetic, non-structural improvements
Never exempt, regardless of cost:
- Electrical work
- Plumbing work
- Structural work
- Mechanical work (HVAC)
- Gas work
A $200 outlet installation still needs a permit. A $7,499 cabinet refresh doesn't. The distinction is about what the work touches, not how much it costs — the dollar threshold is a second filter on top of the category filter, not a replacement for it.
Flood zones are carved out entirely. If the property sits partially or entirely within a flood hazard area as defined by the Florida Building Code, the exemption doesn't apply at all, even to purely cosmetic work. Given how much of Florida's coastline and low-lying interior falls into mapped flood zones, this exclusion alone removes a large share of the state's housing stock from eligibility.
You can't chop up a project to dodge the threshold. HB 803 explicitly prohibits dividing a single construction project into multiple smaller projects to stay under $7,500. Legal commentary on the law has been blunt about this: a contractor who splits one job into several invoices to avoid triggering a permit is not using the exemption correctly — they're violating it. Building departments are generally alert to this pattern (a "coincidental" string of $6,000–$7,400 invoices at the same address, in the same month, for related work) and it's an easy enforcement target.
Why the Paperwork Step Trips People Up
Homeowners hearing "$7,500 permit exemption" reasonably assume it means no contact with the building department at all. It doesn't. The written exemption request, with documentation of the scope and value of the work, is still a filing. Skip it, and you haven't used the HB 803 exemption — you've just done unpermitted work, which carries its own consequences: it can complicate a future home sale (buyers' inspectors and title companies routinely flag unpermitted improvements), can void portions of homeowner's insurance coverage tied to code compliance, and can expose a contractor to complaints even when the underlying work was competent.
The safer mental model: HB 803 didn't eliminate the permit process for qualifying work — it eliminated the plan review and inspection burden, and replaced it with a lighter-weight filing. Treat the exemption request with the same seriousness as a permit application, because from a documentation standpoint, that's effectively what it is.
What This Means for Contractors' Businesses
If you run a remodeling, painting, flooring, or general contracting business in Florida, HB 803 changes how you should scope, quote, and document jobs starting July 1, 2026.
Reworking your quoting process. Jobs that hover near $7,500 — a kitchen refresh, a bathroom cosmetic update, a whole-house repaint — now have a meaningful reason to be scoped and priced with the threshold in mind, as long as that scoping reflects the actual, legitimate work being done. Contractors who update their estimating templates now, with a clear line separating exempt cosmetic scope from non-exempt electrical/plumbing/structural/mechanical/gas scope, will be able to quote faster and more accurately than competitors still treating every job as a full permit process.
Documentation discipline matters more, not less. Because the exemption requires a written request with documented value, and because project-splitting is explicitly prohibited, contractors need clean, itemized records for every exempt job: the scope, the materials, the labor, the total value, and the exemption filing itself. A contractor whose invoicing is vague or inconsistent is the one most likely to look like they're gaming the threshold, even if they aren't.
Revisit existing contract templates. Provisions covering permitting timelines, inspection procedures, private-provider costs, and change orders were written under the old rules. The 10-business-day deemed-approval timeline, the private-provider changes, and the new exemption category are all reasons to update standard contract language before relying on any of them with a client.
This is also a good moment to separate exempt-job bookkeeping from permitted-job bookkeeping in your own records. Clean, auditable per-job accounting — knowing exactly what a job cost, what it was quoted at, and whether it crossed the $7,500 line — is the difference between confidently telling a client (or a building inspector, or your own insurer) that a job qualified for the exemption, and guessing. Contractors who track job costs in a shared spreadsheet that gets edited after the fact have a much harder time proving good-faith compliance than those with a clear, timestamped, version-controlled ledger of what was billed and when.
Practical Takeaways
If you're a homeowner:
- Confirm your project touches only cosmetic categories (paint, flooring, cabinetry, drywall) — anything electrical, plumbing, structural, mechanical, or gas needs a permit no matter the price.
- Check whether your property is in a mapped flood hazard area; if it is, the exemption doesn't apply.
- File the written exemption request with documentation — don't assume "under $7,500" means "no paperwork."
- Keep records of the exemption filing and the work performed; you may need them at resale.
If you're a contractor:
- Update quoting and contract templates before July 1, 2026.
- Never split a single scope of work into multiple invoices to stay under the threshold — it's explicitly prohibited and easy to detect.
- Keep itemized, dated job costing for every exempt project.
- Watch for the broader changes too — the 10-business-day deemed-approval rule and the expanded private-provider framework affect every job, not just the small ones.
Keep Your Job Costs Clean from Day One
Whether you're a Florida contractor tracking which jobs qualify for the new exemption or a homeowner documenting a renovation for resale, the underlying discipline is the same: know exactly what was spent, on what, and when. Beancount.io provides plain-text accounting that gives you complete transparency and control over your financial data — no black boxes, no vendor lock-in, and a version-controlled history that makes it easy to show exactly how a project's costs were tracked. Get started for free and see why developers and finance professionals are switching to plain-text accounting.