What an Impact Window Permit Costs in Florida: County by County

A window replacement permit in Florida can cost $94 or it can cost $2,000, for exactly the same ten windows on exactly the same $30,000 contract. The only variable that changed is which city the house sits in.

That is not an estimate or a rule of thumb. We maintain adopted permit fee schedules for 93 Florida sub-jurisdictions as part of our estimating system, and 48 of them are verified against the city or county's own adopted schedule. Across those 48, a standard $30,000 impact window replacement runs from $94 in Bradenton to $2,000 in the Town of Palm Beach. Most homeowners never see this line broken out, and most contractors bury it in a lump-sum number.

Here is what drives the difference, what your jurisdiction actually charges, and which parts of the number you can predict before anyone pulls a permit.

Who pulls the permit, and why skipping it fails

In Florida, replacing a window or exterior door is structural work on the building envelope. It changes what the wall assembly does under wind load, so it requires a permit in every jurisdiction in the state. There is no square-footage exemption and no like-for-like exemption that lets you skip the process.

Your licensed contractor pulls the permit and their license number goes on it. That matters more than the fee. The permit is what produces the final inspection, and the final inspection is what produces the paper trail your insurance company needs.

Three things depend on that paper trail:

• Your wind mitigation credit. The wind mitigation inspection verifies opening protection. An inspector who finds impact windows with no permit history has a problem documenting them, and unpermitted openings routinely fail to earn the credit.
• Your sale. Open or missing permits surface in title work. Buyers' attorneys ask, and unpermitted structural work becomes a closing negotiation you will lose.
• Your warranty. Most manufacturer warranties condition coverage on installation to the approved method. An uninspected install has no evidence it met the approval.

Unpermitted window work also invites a code enforcement case, and the remedy is an after-the-fact permit at a penalty multiple, often double the original fee, plus opening the wall for inspection.

The five ways Florida cities charge for a permit

Every jurisdiction picks a fee architecture and applies it to all residential alteration work. There are five in use across the schedules we track, and the choice a city made decades ago explains almost all of the cost spread.

Flat fee. One price for a window and door replacement permit, regardless of project size. Bradenton charges $90. Hillsborough County, Sarasota County, and Miami-Dade unincorporated all sit at $130. Cape Coral charges $113.

Flat fee per batch of openings. A single price covering a set number of openings. Unincorporated Palm Beach County charges $100 for up to 20 impact window and door openings. Unincorporated Pinellas charges $145 per 20.

Per opening. A unit price with a floor. Hialeah charges $12 per opening against a $180 minimum, so a ten-window job pays the minimum.

Tiered by construction value. A base fee for the first bracket of value, then a rate per $1,000 above it. Hollywood charges $100 on the first $1,000, then $22 per additional $1,000, which is why a $30,000 job lands at $738 there.

Straight percentage of construction value. The city takes a flat percentage. This is the expensive architecture, and the rates range from 0.5% in the City of Miami to 3.0% in Homestead.

The pattern is worth stating plainly, because it is counterintuitive: the flat-fee jurisdictions are not the small rural ones. Miami-Dade unincorporated, the single largest permitting authority in South Florida, charges a flat $130. Its neighbor Homestead charges 3.0% of value. Same county, same code, same product approvals, roughly seven times the permit cost.

What permits cost by jurisdiction

Every row below comes from that jurisdiction's own adopted fee schedule. The dollar figure is what that schedule yields on a $30,000 residential impact window replacement of about ten openings. For most rows that is the schedule's computed permit fee before add-ons; the statewide 2.5% surcharge and the county charges covered below stack on top. Cities with the same headline rate can still land on different totals, because minimums, plan review, and fire fees differ. The as-of date is the schedule's effective date.

Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach

Three notes on that table. The unincorporated Miami-Dade figure is the fully stacked total under Implementing Order IO-04-63, including its surcharges, because the flat $130 base alone would understate what you pay. Broward's countywide schedule applies to unincorporated areas and the cities that contract with the county; Fort Lauderdale, Miramar, Sunrise, Hollywood, Davie, Plantation, Pompano Beach, Coral Springs, and Pembroke Pines all run their own. And Boca Raton's adopted schedule and its live permit calculator disagree slightly on the rate above the first $500, so treat that row as a range rather than a point.

The rest of Florida

Tampa's schedule sets a flat $162 window and door permit fee but has not been revised since 2018, so we do not publish a total for it.

What construction value means, and what it does not

This is the part that goes wrong most often, and it costs homeowners real money in bad estimates.

When a city charges "2.75% of construction value," construction value is not the price you paid your contractor. It is the estimated cost of the construction work, which building departments typically derive from a standardized cost manual such as RS Means, or accept from the applicant when the applicant's figure is higher. Broward's schedule says this outright: the fee is based on RS Means valuation or the applicant's stated job value, whichever is greater.

Your retail contract price includes overhead, margin, sales cost, warranty reserve, and financing cost. None of that is construction value. A $30,000 retail contract does not carry a $30,000 valuation in most jurisdictions.

If you take a 2.75% rate and multiply it against your contract price, you will overstate the permit fee, sometimes by a wide margin. If a contractor's estimate does that, it is a sign they are padding a line they did not look up. Our own cost calculator and estimating system carry the valuation basis per jurisdiction for this reason.

The figures in the tables above use a consistent construction valuation, not a retail price, so they are comparable across jurisdictions.

The surcharges nobody quotes

The base fee is rarely the whole number. Florida stacks several charges on top, and they compound differently depending on the base.

The state surcharge, 2.5%. Florida levies two building permit surcharges: 1.5% under Florida Statute 468.631 and 1.0% under Florida Statute 553.721. Both are calculated on the permit fee, not on the construction value, with a $4 floor. That basis changed in 2010, and encoding it against project value instead of permit fee produces an error of roughly 100 times. On a $130 flat permit, the state surcharge is about $4. Not $750.

Miami-Dade's RER surcharge, 7.5%. Miami-Dade adds 7.5% on building permitting fees countywide.

Miami-Dade code administration, $0.60 per $1,000 of value. A small value-based item that applies on top of the flat fee, which is why unincorporated Miami-Dade's $130 base lands at $187 all-in.

Broward's Board of Rules and Appeals surcharge. Charged per $1,000 of value countywide in Broward, on top of whichever city schedule applies.

Local technology and administrative fees. Commonly 2% of the permit fee. Hialeah charges 10%.

The compounding matters. In a percentage-of-value city, the surcharges apply to an already-large base, so the gap between architectures widens rather than narrowing.

Miami-Dade's flat fee, and why it moved in 2025

Unincorporated Miami-Dade deserves its own note, because it is the largest single jurisdiction in our service area and it changed recently.

Under Implementing Order IO-04-63, Section I.P covers residential hardening: an exact changeout of existing windows and doors carries a flat $130 permit fee, effective June 30, 2025. That was the first increase in more than 17 years. Add the $25 up-front application fee, the 7.5% RER surcharge, the $0.60 per $1,000 code administration charge, and the 2.5% state surcharge, and a $30,000 job totals about $187.

One condition decides whether you get that rate. The flat fee applies to a like-for-like changeout. Resize an opening, add a new one, or change the structural opening dimensions, and the permit falls to Section I.B.14 with a $147 residential minimum and a different calculation. If your design calls for turning a window into a door, or enlarging an opening for egress, ask your contractor which section your permit will be written under before you sign.

The residential hardening provision is also structured as an annual pilot, reassessed each year. It is not a permanent rate.

What else costs money in the permit process

Permit fee is one line. These are the others that show up on impact window jobs:

• Notarized permit application. Owner and contractor signatures, both notarized, in most South Florida jurisdictions.
• Product approval submittal. Your contractor submits the Florida Product Approval or Miami-Dade Notice of Acceptance for every unit, with the anchor detail matched to your wall type. This is labor, not a fee, but it is real cost and it is where quality contractors separate from cheap ones.
• Engineering. If your openings fall outside the approval's tested envelope, or the wall condition needs a site-specific anchor detail, a Florida-licensed engineer signs a drawing. Budget $350 to $1,200 when required.
• Notice of Commencement. Required and recorded with the Clerk of Court on jobs above $5,000. Recording fee is nominal, but a missing NOC stops the inspection.
• Re-inspection fees. Charged when an inspection fails. Typically $75 to $150 per trip.
• HOA or architectural review. Not a city fee, but it runs in parallel and can add weeks. Historic districts add a board review before the permit.

The full picture of what lands on a quote goes beyond permits, and stucco repair and structural correction usually cost more than the permit does.

How long the permit takes

Permit review times move with hurricane season and with staffing, so treat these as planning ranges rather than promises.

Straightforward like-for-like residential window permits in the tri-county area typically clear review in one to three weeks. Jurisdictions with mature online portals run at the fast end. Jobs that need engineering, that touch a historic district, or that change opening sizes take three to eight weeks.

After installation, you schedule the final inspection. In most jurisdictions that is a single inspection for a like-for-like window changeout. Some require a separate in-progress inspection before the exterior is sealed, which means the installer cannot finish stucco until the inspector has seen the anchors. Ask which sequence your jurisdiction uses. It changes the job schedule, not just the paperwork.

The permit stays open until that final inspection passes. An open permit is the single most common paperwork problem we see on homes that had work done years earlier.

Owner-builder permits, and why they usually backfire

Florida lets a homeowner pull a permit as an owner-builder on their own residence. It looks like a way to save the contractor's permit handling and to hire an unlicensed installer more cheaply.

It rarely works out on impact windows. As owner-builder you take on the licensed contractor's liability. You sign a disclosure statement saying you are responsible for the work meeting code. You must supervise the work yourself, and you cannot legally hire an unlicensed person to do it for you. If the install fails inspection, the correction is yours.

The consequences land in three places. Insurance carriers may treat owner-builder structural work differently at claim time. Manufacturer warranties frequently require installation by an authorized or licensed installer, and an owner-builder permit is evidence the install was not. And at resale, an owner-builder permit on structural envelope work invites scrutiny that a licensed contractor's permit does not.

The savings are small. On a $30,000 job in unincorporated Miami-Dade, the entire permit costs $187.

Next Steps

1. Find out which jurisdiction you are actually in. City limits decide your fee, not your mailing address. A Fort Lauderdale mailing address can sit in unincorporated Broward, and the fee difference is real.
2. Ask any contractor to break out the permit fee as its own line, and to say which fee schedule and which section they used. A contractor who quotes a percentage of your contract price rather than of construction value has not looked it up.
3. Confirm whether your job is a like-for-like changeout or involves resizing. That answer changes which section of the fee schedule applies and can change the number materially.
4. Check what your county requires on our Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach County pages.
5. Compare the permit line against total project cost using our county-by-county cost breakdown. Permits are usually under 3% of a job, which is worth knowing before you choose a contractor on the strength of a low permit quote.
6. Get a written estimate with the permit fee itemized. Request a free estimate and we will name the jurisdiction, the fee basis, and the number.

Fee schedules change. Every figure above carries the effective date of the adopted schedule it came from, and Miami-Dade's 2025 increase after 17 static years is a reminder that these move. Verify with your building department before relying on a number for budgeting.