A practical guide for homeowners in Miami-Dade County, written by a
Florida Certified Residential Contractor.
Most likely yes. In Miami-Dade County a building permit is required for any structural, electrical, plumbing or mechanical work. Purely cosmetic work is generally exempt: painting, flooring over an existing slab, and replacing kitchen cabinets or vanities in the same configuration.
The line is simple to remember: if you are changing what is behind the wall, you need a permit. If you are only changing what you see, you probably do not.
Miami-Dade County publishes an official list of permit exemptions. For a home remodel, the ones that matter most are:
There is a cap most homeowners miss: for single-family homes, duplexes and townhouses, all exempt work combined is limited to $5,000 in value over any 12-month period. Splitting a large job into small exempt pieces does not work.
In a typical kitchen or bathroom remodel in Miami-Dade, you will need a permit if the project includes any of the following:
This is the single most common point of confusion, and it costs people weeks.
Miami-Dade County's building department only issues permits for unincorporated areas. If your property is inside an incorporated city, you apply to that city's own building department, with its own portal, its own fees and its own review times.
Hialeah, Miami, Miami Beach, Coral Gables, Doral, Miami Lakes, Homestead and about thirty more municipalities each run their own building department. A permit pulled at the wrong office is simply a permit you do not have.
Before you plan anything, confirm which building department has jurisdiction over your address.
Miami-Dade and Broward counties form the High-Velocity Hurricane Zone, the strictest wind-load region in the United States. Every exterior window and door installed here must carry a product approval valid for that zone, commonly a Miami-Dade Notice of Acceptance, known as an NOA.
Every legitimate impact window has an NOA number you can look up. If a contractor cannot hand you the NOA for the exact product being installed, the inspection will not pass, and you will be paying twice.
Under Florida law, the property owner must record a Notice of Commencement before work begins whenever the improvement is valued at more than $2,500. The exception is repairing or replacing an existing air conditioning system, which uses a $7,500 threshold.
A certified copy has to be on file with the building department before the first inspection. In practice, a missing Notice of Commencement is one of the most common reasons a first inspection gets cancelled.
Condo projects carry a second layer of approval that has nothing to do with the building department. The association usually requires drawings, contractor licence and insurance certificates, approved work hours, elevator and loading protection, and often a deposit.
Plan for that approval to take real time, and never schedule demolition before you have it in writing.
Florida does allow an owner-builder permit on your own primary residence, and Miami-Dade requires a sworn owner-builder disclosure affidavit. It is legal, but it makes you the responsible party for code compliance, inspections and any work performed on the property, and there are restrictions on selling the home within a year of completion.
For anything beyond a very small job, the licensed-contractor route is usually cheaper once you count the corrections.
It rarely causes trouble during the work. It causes trouble later, and the later it shows up the more expensive it is.
Unpermitted work turns up in the title search when you sell, and buyers walk away or discount the price. Insurance carriers can deny a claim tied to work that was never inspected. And the county or city can require you to open the walls back up so the work can be inspected after the fact.
An open or expired permit from a previous owner is just as much of a problem. It is worth checking the permit history of any property before you buy it.
Permits are not the obstacle people think they are. What creates delays is submitting to the wrong jurisdiction, missing product approvals, drawings that do not match what you actually want to build, and starting demolition before the condo association has approved anything.
Handled in the right order, the permit becomes a schedule item instead of a problem. That is why we keep architects, engineers and dedicated permit runners in-house.
Rules and fee schedules change. Always confirm the current requirements with the building department that has jurisdiction over your address before you commit to a schedule.
We are a Florida Certified Residential Contractor, licence CRC1336208, and we handle the permit process from start to finish. Tell us about your project and we will tell you exactly what it needs.
Get a free estimateLast reviewed: September 2026. Verify current requirements with your building department.