Briefing · updated 2026-08-29

Florida HB 803: what changed on July 1, 2026, and what it does to your office

Practitioner summary, not legal advice. The law-firm briefings it draws from are linked at the end.

What changed

Provision	Before	Now (eff. 2026-07-01)	Who feels it
Permit review when a private provider is used	20 business days	10 business days	GCs, subs, design-build teams
Private-provider authority	Plan review and inspections; local re-review common	Expanded; limits on local re-review of privately approved plans	Anyone racing a schedule
Inspection fees	Some jurisdictions priced by job valuation	Valuation-based inspection fees banned	Estimators, CFOs
Residential work under $7,500	Permit generally required	Certain work exempt	Residential builders, remodelers, HOAs
HOA / ARC architectural review	Boards often required a permit first	Cannot require a permit as a prerequisite to architectural review	Community managers, boards, owners

Deadlines got shorter and moved to you. With a 10-day clock, the bottleneck is your document package being complete and your tracking of where each permit sits across Pinellas Accela, Hillsborough HillsGovHub, Tampa Accela, and St. Petersburg (moving to Tyler).
Private-provider packets are a new recurring document set — affidavits, plan-review reports, inspection reports — that must be filed, reconciled, and produced on request.
Fee schedules changed. Estimates and job-cost budgets built on valuation-based inspection fees are now wrong.
Community managers will see ARC applications arrive before permits, decoupling two queues that used to be one.

Permit-status tracking across the four Tampa Bay portals, with a daily written status to the PM — nobody refreshing Accela.
Private-provider packet assembly and checklist — the 10-day clock only helps if the package is complete on day one.
ARC-request intake and classification for managers now receiving un-permitted applications.

Each of these is a two-to-three-week fixed-price sprint installed inside the tools you already use. Start with the readiness checklist or write to me.