Florida's New $7,500 Permit Exemption: What HB 803 Changes in Southwest Florida

On July 1, 2026, Florida House Bill 803 took effect statewide, and the part everyone heard about is the one that sounds simplest: small residential projects under $7,500 no longer need a building permit. If you own a home in Lee, Collier, or Charlotte county, the more useful version of that sentence has a lot of qualifiers in it, and in much of our service area the exemption will not apply to your project at all.

Here is what the law actually says, who it helps, and what it does not change.

What HB 803 does

According to the Florida Senate's bill summary for CS/CS/HB 803, the law requires local governments that issue building permits to exempt work on single-family residential property valued at $7,500 or less. The bill passed the Senate 37 to 0 and the House 109 to 0, and its provisions took effect July 1, 2026. You can read the summary yourself at flsenate.gov.

The exemption comes with two carve-outs that matter enormously here:

1. It does not apply to electrical, plumbing, structural, mechanical, or gas work
2. It does not apply in flood hazard areas

That second one is the reason this story lands differently in Southwest Florida than it does in Orlando.

Why most Southwest Florida projects still need a permit

The City of Cape Coral put out guidance the day the law took effect, and it was blunt about the local reality: more than 60 percent of Cape Coral sits in a FEMA-mapped Special Flood Hazard Area, and because the exemption also excludes the trades, the city said the exemption "will not apply to most projects in the City."

A Special Flood Hazard Area is FEMA's term for land with a one percent annual chance of flooding, the zones commonly labeled A or V on a flood insurance rate map. Large parts of Cape Coral, Fort Myers Beach, Sanibel, Pine Island, Matlacha, and low-lying stretches of Collier and Charlotte counties fall inside those zones. If any part of your parcel is in one, the $7,500 exemption is off the table regardless of what the work costs.

Cape Coral also added a procedural step that is easy to miss: owners and contractors who believe a project qualifies must submit an exemption request through the city's online permitting system and receive approval before starting construction. In other words, even the exemption requires you to ask first. Other jurisdictions in our area are handling this their own way, so check with the department for your address rather than assuming Cape Coral's process applies.

So what actually qualifies?

Work the exemption can reach, in a non-flood-zone single-family property, tends to be small, non-structural, and trade-free. Think of it as the narrow band between cosmetic work that never needed a permit and real construction that still does.

The most important line in that table is the last one that says "yes." A kitchen or bathroom remodel involves plumbing and electrical almost by definition, so it stays fully permitted. Our earlier guide on permits for remodels in Lee County still describes the process accurately for those projects; HB 803 narrows the edges, not the middle.

The parts of HB 803 nobody is talking about

The $7,500 headline crowded out several provisions that will affect more projects than the exemption does. From the same Senate summary:

• Building permits for single-family dwellings now expire one year after issuance. If you pull a permit and the project stalls, the clock is real.
• Permit applications for work valued under $15,000 get a five-day response timeframe. That is a meaningful service standard for small jobs.
• Homeowners associations cannot require that a building permit already be issued before they will review your construction plans. This removes a genuine chicken-and-egg problem for anyone in a deed-restricted community.
• Local governments must reduce commercial construction permit fees by specified percentages, and there are new limits on how building inspection fees are calculated. Worth knowing if you are budgeting a commercial build-out.
• Local governments must now establish a registration system for private providers, rather than choosing whether to, and the law reworks how private provider inspections interact with local review.
• Temporary residential hurricane and flood walls meeting specified standards are exempt from permitting, which is a small but real win heading into storm season.

The permit expiration change and the HOA change are the two we expect to come up most often in conversations with clients this year.

What has not changed at all

A permit exemption is a procedural waiver, not a change to the standards. Work that skips a permit still has to meet the Florida Building Code. It still has to be done by someone competent to do it. And it still shows up later.

Three practical consequences we see repeatedly:

• At resale, a home inspector and a title search do not care whether the law required a permit. They care whether the work is sound and documented.
• With insurance, carriers evaluate claims against what was built and how. An exemption from permitting is not a defense for work that fails.
• With your next contractor, which is often us, opening a wall and finding something no inspector ever saw.

If you are weighing whether a project qualifies, the value threshold is the easiest test to get wrong. It is based on the value of the work, not on what you happened to pay a friend for it, and Cape Coral's process asks for documentation showing the nature and value of the work before it will approve an exemption.

Our read on it

For our residential clients, HB 803 is a modest convenience with a narrow footprint. If you live inland in Lehigh Acres, Buckingham, or parts of Golden Gate outside the flood zones, and you want to replace some rotted exterior trim or repair a small section of fence, the new exemption may spare you an application. If you live anywhere near the water, which describes most of our clients, it changes nothing about your remodel.

The provisions we expect to matter more over time are the one-year permit expiration, the five-day response window on small applications, and the HOA restriction.

This post explains a new law in general terms and is not legal advice. HB 803 is implemented by each local building department, and the authority having jurisdiction for your address has the final word on whether a specific project qualifies. Always confirm with them, or with us, before starting work.

Talk it through before you start

If you are not sure whether your project needs a permit under the new rules, ask before you buy materials. We permit projects across Lee, Collier, and Charlotte counties every month and we can usually tell you in one phone call. Get in touch and we will walk through it with you.