Orlando's $7,500 Permit Exemption Removed Nothing

Florida's $7,500 residential permit exemption took effect on July 1, 2026. Two months in, Orlando is filing 379 building permits a month under $7,500, against an average of 383 a month across the 18 months before the law. The exemption that was supposed to empty out the small-job record removed essentially nothing.

TL;DR

• HB 803 exempts sub-$7,500 single-family work from permitting, effective July 1, 2026.
• Orlando's sub-$7,500 building permits: 383 a month before, 379 a month after.
• Electrical, plumbing, mechanical, structural and gas work are all excluded.
• 40.4% of that tier is fire, sign and engineering work the exemption never reached.

What does Florida's $7,500 permit exemption actually cover?

House Bill 803, enacted as Chapter 2026-63, amends Florida Statutes section 553.793 to exempt work valued at less than $7,500 on a single-family dwelling from the building permit requirement. It took effect July 1, 2026.

The coverage is narrower than the headline suggests. Electrical, plumbing, mechanical, structural and gas work all stay permitted, at any value. Property located partially or entirely within a flood hazard area, as defined by the Florida Building Code, is excluded. And a project cannot be split into smaller projects to slip under the threshold.

What is left is cosmetic, non-trade work on a house: painting, cabinetry, flooring, drywall finishing, siding, and non-structural roof repair.

Nor is the exemption automatic. The City of Orlando requires a written request with a copy of the contract or other documentation of the nature and value of the work. Permitting Services reviews it within five business days, and the result appears on the city's permit lookup under a MET case number. That is less paperwork than a permit. It is not zero paperwork.

Did Orlando's small permits disappear after July 1?

They did not. This is the part nobody has checked, because every article written about HB 803 was published before the law took effect.

Our City of Orlando file holds 50,755 permits, running from January 2025 to September 1, 2026, with about a day of lag. Building permits are 86.4% valued, so the comparison below covers the valued subset only.

Period	Valued building permits	Under $7,500	Share	Per month
Jan 2025 – Jun 2026 (18 mo)	19,785	6,902	34.9%	383.4
Jul – Aug 2026 (2 mo)	2,076	758	36.5%	379.0

Monthly volume fell by 1.1%. The share of building filings sitting under $7,500 went up, from 34.9% to 36.5%.

Month by month, July 2026 recorded 418 sub-$7,500 building permits at 38.8% of valued filings, and August recorded 340 at 34.0%. For comparison, the pre-law months ranged from 27.1% in February 2025 to 41.1% in September 2025. Both post-exemption months land inside that range, comfortably.

A law that was expected to strip a swath of small residential jobs out of the public record has, in Orlando, produced a change indistinguishable from an ordinary month.

What is actually in the sub-$7,500 tier?

Here is the answer, and it is the reason the exemption had so little to remove. These are the 758 Orlando building permits under $7,500 filed in July and August 2026, by subtype.

Subtype	Permits	Could the exemption apply?
Building Permit - Roof	171	Only if non-structural
Building Permit - Repair	127	Sometimes
Fire Permit - FA	96	No, commercial life safety
Fire Permit - FireSupp	77	No, commercial life safety
Building Permit - Alteration	71	Sometimes
Building Permit - Fence	61	Zoning review applies separately
Engineering - Other	51	No, right-of-way and site work
Building Permit - Sign	45	No, commercial
Building Permit - ChangeUse	14	No, commercial
Building Permit - Accessory	12	Structural
Engineering - Paving	10	No, site work
All remaining subtypes	23	Mixed

Add the fire permits (176 including the smaller tank, underground and detection subtypes), the engineering work (66), the signs (45), and change-of-use and tent permits (19), and you get 306 filings. That is 40.4% of the entire sub-$7,500 tier, and not one of those permits is a single-family cosmetic job. A fire alarm panel in a strip mall does not become exempt because it cost $2,703.

The tier that looked like small residential work was never mostly small residential work. It was commercial life safety, signage, site engineering, and roofs.

Why didn't roofing drop?

Roofing is the interesting case, because non-structural roof repair and replacement is one of the scopes the exemption was written to cover.

Orlando's sub-$7,500 roofing permits by month in 2026 run: 88 in January, 61 in February, 77 in March, 89 in April, 125 in May, 57 in June, then 105 in July and 66 in August. July, the first month of the exemption, was the second busiest month of the year for exactly the filings that were supposed to stop.

Several things hold roofing in the record. Structural roof work is excluded outright, and the line between structural and non-structural is a judgment the building official makes, not the contractor. Flood hazard area properties are excluded. And in Florida a permitted, inspected reroof carries weight with windstorm insurance and at resale that an unpermitted one does not, which gives both the owner and the roofer a reason to file even when they could skip it.

The exemption is permission, not instruction. Plenty of people are declining the permission. Roofing is 22.6% of the sub-$7,500 tier and it has not moved.

Should you change how you buy Orlando permit data?

No, and the exclusion list explains why. Electrical, plumbing, mechanical and gas work stay permitted at every value, and those four types account for 25,012 records in our Orlando file against 25,356 building permits. If you sell into the licensed trades, the exemption tightened the record around your buyers, not away from them.

The filings most likely to leave are the ones carrying the least commercial signal in the first place: a $4,000 flooring job or an interior repaint on a single-family house, work that generates no inspection trail and often no follow-on trade. Our Orlando roofing market analysis makes the related point that the small end of a subtype and the large end behave like separate markets with separate contractors.

Where it does bite, over time, is the cosmetic trades reading permits as a demand signal. A painting contractor or a flooring contractor watching sub-$7,500 filings for renovation activity should expect that signal to thin, slowly, as awareness of the exemption spreads. A kitchen and bath showroom is better positioned, because a real kitchen remodel almost always trips plumbing or electrical and lands back inside the permit requirement anyway.

The wider point holds here as it does everywhere: a permit is a signal about the property owner, not the contractor. Orlando names the owner on 98.9% of its building permits, and the exemption did not change that field.

What can two months of data not tell you?

Quite a lot, and it is worth being direct about the limits.

Two months is two months. July and August 2026 both sit inside the historical range, but a range built on 18 months of a file that starts in January 2025 is not a long baseline. Awareness of a new exemption also spreads slowly, so a drift that begins in 2027 would be entirely consistent with what we see now.

Our valuation is declared value on the permit, which is what the applicant wrote down. The statutory threshold turns on the value of the work under the contract. Those two numbers are usually close and are not the same number, so treat the $7,500 cut as a good proxy rather than a legal test.

We also cannot see what did not get filed. An exemption request that Orlando approves creates a MET case, not a permit, and MET cases are not in our feed. The honest framing is that the permit record did not shrink, not that no exemptions were granted.

And this is Orlando. Our Florida coverage is the City of Orlando only, one of Florida's 67 counties, filed through the city's own Permitting Services rather than Orange County's separate system for unincorporated areas. A different Florida city may be seeing something else entirely.

How permits.llc fits in

We hold 50,755 City of Orlando permits with contractor names on 93.6% of building filings, owner names on 98.9%, and a contractor phone number on just over half. The file updates with roughly a day of lag, which is what made this comparison possible two months after the statute changed rather than two years after.

If you want to run the cut yourself, download the Orlando permit file and filter on the permit types the exemption never touched. To see how the subtypes divide before you commit, the Florida permit type breakdown and the Orange County coverage detail show what is in the file and what is not.

You can also put the licensed-trade filings on a standing permit alert and let the exempt work sort itself out.