PACE Financing for Impact Windows in Florida: How It Actually Works in 2026

PACE financing for impact windows is the most-asked-about and least-understood path to paying for hurricane protection in Florida. It promises $0 down, no credit check, and payments collected through your property tax bill, which sounds like the answer for any homeowner who has been told no by a bank. The reality is more nuanced, and the rules changed in 2024.

This guide covers PACE as it actually works in 2026: who offers it, where it is available, what it really costs over 20 years, why the lien matters, and the situations where another option makes more sense. The headline you need to know up front: Florida's PACE rules shifted twice, once with the state's SB 770 in 2024 and again when the federal CFPB rule took effect in March 2026. Availability is now county-by-county, the administrator roster has churned, and the underwriting is stricter. If you researched PACE a year or two ago, most of what you read is out of date.

What PACE Financing Actually Is

PACE stands for Property Assessed Clean Energy. The idea is simple: the money you borrow is treated as a special tax assessment on your property, not a personal loan, so it follows the house rather than your credit profile. Florida's residential PACE program operates under Florida Statutes §163.08.

The structure is the appeal. It is also the catch, because the same property-tax mechanism that makes PACE accessible is what puts it ahead of your mortgage in the priority order. We get to that in a moment.

What Changed in 2024: SB 770 and County-by-County Availability

Florida overhauled residential PACE through SB 770, signed in 2024. The single most important change for homeowners: PACE is no longer automatically available statewide. Each county or municipality must now authorize PACE through a local ordinance or resolution before it can be offered to residents.

Many counties have approved it. Others have not. Before you go any further, check the service map at the Florida PACE Funding Agency to confirm your county is participating. If it is not, residential PACE is not currently an option for your address, regardless of what an installer or a salesperson tells you.

SB 770 also added consumer protections with real teeth, separated residential and commercial PACE into distinct statutes (F.S. 163.081 is now the residential one), and expanded the eligible-improvement list. The protections worth knowing before you sign:

• Terms are capped at 20 years (the old 30-year assessments are gone), and the financed amount must not outlive the improvement's useful life.
• Your total annual PACE payments cannot exceed 10% of your annual household income, and the assessment cannot exceed 20% of the home's just value without your mortgage holder's written consent; mortgage plus PACE together must stay under 97% of just value.
• A recorded confirmation call is mandatory before approval. The administrator calls you directly, and your contractor is prohibited from taking that call for you. If someone offers to "handle the call," that is a violation, not a convenience.
• You have a 3-business-day cancellation right, penalty-free, and projects over $10,000 require price quotes from two unaffiliated contractors.
• The statute's required disclosures name the risk plainly: an unpaid PACE assessment is a delinquent property-tax event, collectible through the tax-certificate process, not a late fee on a consumer loan.

Contractors involved in PACE projects must be registered and are subject to advertising standards and closer monitoring.

The Federal Layer: The CFPB Rule Now in Force

The second overhaul is federal, and most PACE coverage online predates it. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's Residential PACE rule took effect on March 1, 2026, ending PACE's long run outside consumer-credit law. PACE is now "credit" under the Truth in Lending Act, which means:

• Ability-to-repay underwriting. The administrator must determine you can actually afford the assessment, the same legal standard mortgage lenders answer to — a real change for a product that historically qualified homes, not borrowers.
• Mortgage-style paperwork. You receive a Loan Estimate and Closing Disclosure on forms adapted from mortgage closings, with the assessment's cost laid out the way a mortgage's would be.
• Legal recourse. PACE creditors now carry TILA civil liability, and contractors who effectively originate PACE deals in the field can fall under loan-originator rules themselves.

The practical read for a borrower today: PACE paperwork got longer and approval got more honest. An application that sails through with no income questions is now a red flag rather than a convenience, and the disclosure forms are worth actually reading, because they exist specifically so you can compare the assessment against a HELOC or dealer financing on the same terms.

Who Actually Administers Florida PACE

PACE is not one company. It is a financing structure that several approved administrators deliver, and the roster has churned enough that most guides you will find online are out of date. Here is our read as of our last review in 2026, which you should treat as a starting point rather than gospel.

Two things follow from that table. First, an administrator's marketing site is not proof it is lending today; several of these kept polished, active-looking websites well past the point where they were funding new residential projects. Second, the name on the pitch matters less than whether the program is authorized in your county and the contractor is registered. Confirm both before you sign anything, and start from the service map at the Florida PACE Funding Agency rather than from whoever contacted you.

What PACE Will Pay For

Impact windows and doors are explicitly PACE-eligible in Florida, which is the whole reason this post exists. The full list of eligible improvements is broader than most homeowners realize.

Combining hurricane-hardening categories matters for insurance. The wind-mitigation discount is largest when impact windows are paired with a code-plus roof and proper roof-to-wall connections, all of which can be financed in a single PACE assessment.

The Real Cost of PACE Over 20 Years

The headline rate is not the whole cost. PACE assessments are fixed at the rate in effect when the contract is signed, and recent Florida offers have run roughly 6% to 12.99%. Terms run up to the 20-year SB 770 ceiling, and the financed amount cannot outlive the improvement's useful life. Confirm the current rate offered to you in writing, because that single number, multiplied by two decades of payments, drives the total.

The number that hides in the paperwork is the program fee: closing and administrative fees near 7% of the financed amount, rolled into the assessment itself, so a $25,000 project starts its life as a materially larger balance before the first tax bill arrives. The new federal disclosure forms put this in writing; find the "amount financed" line and compare it against your contract price.

A worked example shows why the duration matters as much as the rate. A $25,000 impact window project financed at 7% over 20 years pays roughly $194 per month. Over the full term that totals near $46,500, which is almost $21,500 in interest on top of the original price, before the rolled-in program fee widens the gap further.

Shorten the term to 10 years and the monthly rises to about $290, but the total drops to about $34,800. Lengthening the term lowers the monthly and raises the total. There is no penalty for prepaying, so if you can chip away at the principal in good years, you will save real money.

The right framing is the right one for any long-term assessment: PACE makes the project doable today, but you are paying for the convenience over time. The insurance and energy savings on the same windows partially offset the payment in higher-premium counties, which is why PACE pairs better with a coastal project than with an inland one.

The Lien Priority Issue Every Borrower Should Understand

This is the single most important detail about PACE, and it deserves its own section. A PACE assessment is recorded as a property tax lien, and property tax liens are first-lien in Florida. That means the PACE assessment sits ahead of your mortgage in the priority order.

In practice this affects three things:

• Refinance. Some mortgage lenders require the PACE balance to be paid off before they will refinance the home, because they do not want a senior lien sitting ahead of their loan.
• Sale. Depending on the buyer's lender, the PACE balance may need to be paid off at closing rather than transferred with the property. Disclose the assessment early in any sale.
• Foreclosure. In the event of default on property taxes, the PACE lien is paid before the mortgage lender. This is the source of much of the historic controversy around PACE.

SB 770 added stronger disclosure requirements, so the lien implications should be spelled out in any current PACE contract. Read those disclosures carefully, and if you can, have a real estate attorney or mortgage broker look at the contract before you sign.

The Resale and Refinance Question

This follows directly from the lien issue. PACE is sold as a financing path that transfers with the property at sale, and in principle it does. In practice, whether the next buyer can leave the assessment in place depends on their lender. Conventional Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac loans have generally been unwilling to underwrite a home with a senior PACE lien still in place, which often forces a payoff at closing.

If you expect to stay in the home for the duration of the term, this is less of an issue. If you expect to refinance or sell within the next several years, it becomes a real planning question. PACE works best for long-term ownership, not for short-term holds.

PACE vs HELOC vs MSFH Grant: When PACE Makes Sense

PACE is one of several ways to pay for impact windows, not the only one. The right choice depends on credit, equity, and timeline.

If you qualify for a HELOC and have the equity for it, that is almost always cheaper than PACE because the rate tends to be a little lower and the lien position is friendlier. PACE earns its place for the homeowner who has been turned down for traditional financing or has no equity to draw against, and who plans to stay in the home long enough to amortize the assessment.

There is also a middle path that a lot of homeowners never get shown, because the PACE pitch tends to arrive first. We offer financing through our lending partner, Hearth, which runs a single application past a panel of more than a dozen lenders.

Terms run from two to twelve years on amounts from $1,000 to $250,000, and the pre-qualification is a soft credit pull, so seeing your rate does not affect your score. It is worth ten minutes before you sign a PACE contract, and the reason is structural. An unsecured installment loan puts no lien on your home at all. That means no first-lien position ahead of your mortgage, no payoff fight at closing, and no complication when you refinance. If the rate comes back competitive with the PACE offer, it is usually the cleaner instrument. For a side-by-side look at every path, see our guide to financing impact windows and doors.

Where PACE Is Actually Available

Since SB 770, availability is a county question before it is anything else. As of the Florida PACE Funding Agency's 2025 county list, these counties had approved residential PACE countywide:

Brevard, Broward, Citrus, Duval, Flagler, Gulf, Highlands, Hillsborough, Holmes, Jackson, Jefferson, Levy, Manatee, Marion, Miami-Dade, Monroe, Nassau, Okeechobee, Okaloosa, Sarasota, St. Johns, Suwannee, Volusia, and Walton. Gadsden approved commercial PACE only, and Charlotte County terminated its program on September 30, 2024.

Two caveats matter as much as the list. Many counties that are not named above still have PACE available at the municipal level, because an individual city passed its own ordinance even though the county did not. And a group of counties led by Alachua has been litigating the agency's pre-SB 770 statewide operation, so the map moves. That is why every honest answer to "can I use PACE?" ends at the service map for your specific address rather than at a list in an article.

The economics also vary by where you are. In Broward and Miami-Dade, high wind premiums mean the insurance savings on an impact window project offset a meaningful share of the PACE payment. Inland, where premiums are lower, less of the payment is offset and the effective payback stretches out. Our county-by-county pricing tables show how the underlying project cost moves across the state.

Watch for PACE Scams: Door-Knocking and High Pressure

This is the warning the Florida PACE Funding Agency states plainly on its own site, and it is worth repeating here. The agency does not mail solicitations and does not conduct door knocking. Anyone showing up at your door offering "free" impact windows financed through a state PACE program is not the program.

The reforms exist because the abuse was documented and expensive. The Federal Trade Commission sued Ygrene over its Florida and California PACE sales, and the case settled with a $3 million consumer-relief fund; in July 2025 the FTC distributed more than $2.9 million to 960 affected homeowners. The conduct the FTC described is worth knowing by name, because it is what SB 770's disclosure rules are written against. The complaint described door-to-door high-pressure sales, forged paperwork in some cases, and salespeople telling homeowners that PACE would not affect their ability to sell or refinance. That last claim was false then and it is false now.

A few rules to keep you safe:

• Initiate the conversation yourself by visiting floridapace.gov, not by responding to a door pitch
• Verify any contractor is registered through the PACE program and licensed by the state
• Read the contract, especially the lien and total-cost disclosures, before signing anything
• Be skeptical of "today only" pricing, $0 first-year payment claims, or pressure to sign on the spot

The legitimate PACE process is unhurried by design. If it feels like a rush, it is not the program.

How to Apply, If PACE Is Right for You

The mechanics are straightforward once you have decided PACE fits.

1. Confirm your county is participating on the floridapace.gov service map.
2. Pre-qualify online through the Florida PACE Funding Agency. The pre-qualification is informational; it does not commit you.
3. Pick a registered contractor. Florida PACE works through approved installers; your impact window contractor must be on that list to use the program.
4. Get and read the assessment contract. Pay attention to the rate, the term, the total amount, the lien disclosure, and any prepayment terms.
5. Project completes first, then payments begin. Florida PACE confirms customer satisfaction before disbursing funds, and payments appear on your next annual property tax bill.

If PACE turns out not to be the right fit, the rest of our financing options cover the other paths: a HELOC, an unsecured installment loan through Hearth, or a My Safe Florida Home grant combined with traditional funding. We can run the Hearth pre-qualification alongside your estimate, so you have a real number to compare the assessment against rather than choosing between a PACE contract and nothing.

Next Steps

1. Confirm your county is participating. Check the service map at floridapace.gov before you go any further.
2. Compare PACE against HELOC and grants. If you qualify for a HELOC or for a My Safe Florida Home grant, run those numbers first.
3. Get the assessment in writing. Insist on a contract that spells out rate, term, total cost, lien position, and prepayment terms.
4. Pick a registered contractor. Only registered contractors can deliver a PACE-funded project.
5. Request an estimate. Get a free estimate from a licensed installer who can match the project scope to either PACE or one of the other financing paths.