Answer the question before you pay anyone

What each tool answers, and when to reach for it

These three exist because they are the three questions that come up before anyone can quote a job honestly. A permit cannot be filed until you know which department controls the parcel. A closing cannot proceed until you know whether there is an open permit against the property. And a contractor cannot pull anything until the jurisdiction has a current registration on file. Get those three wrong and the calendar slips before a reviewer has looked at a single sheet.

Which building department controls this address?

Florida has 67 counties and more than 400 permitting jurisdictions, and a mailing address does not reliably tell you which one you are in. Municipal boundaries do not follow postal boundaries, and the gap is worst exactly where activity is heaviest — near city limits, on annexed parcels, and in communities that share a name with a city they are not inside. A Sarasota mailing address can be unincorporated Sarasota County. A Tampa address can be unincorporated Hillsborough. Filing with the wrong department does not produce a helpful redirect; it produces an intake rejection and a lost cycle.

Open the building department lookup →

Is there an open permit on this property?

Open and expired permits surface at the worst possible moment, which is usually five days before a closing. The permit belongs to the property, not to whoever pulled it, so a permit a previous owner's contractor abandoned in 2016 is still the current owner's problem. Our directory collects every Florida county's permit search in one place, along with what each result actually means — because “open” can mean the job was never inspected, never finalled, or never started.

Open the permit search directory →  ·  What to do when one turns up at closing

Are my registrations current in the jurisdictions I file in?

A Florida state license does not by itself let you pull a permit. Most jurisdictions require separate local registration under Florida Statute §489.117, and several go further — Pinellas licenses certain specialty trades through the Pinellas County Construction Licensing Board, Broward and Collier issue their own Certificates of Competency, and cities including Largo, Bradenton and Sarasota require their own registration on top of the county's. Registrations lapse quietly, usually when an insurance certificate expires, and nobody tells you until the day you try to file.

Open the registration checklist →  ·  Have us handle the registrations

If the answer turns out to be complicated

These tools are built to give you an answer without calling anyone. When the answer is “this is worse than I thought” — an open permit from a contractor who is no longer in business, work that was built without a permit, a registration that lapsed across eleven jurisdictions at once — that is the point at which it is worth a phone call.

Related: permit filing and facilitation, after-the-fact and expired permits, urgent permit rescue.