Two thousand Florida jobs are already posted, and nobody sold you the list

There are 2,148 live open Florida construction opportunities on the board this morning: 1,768 in Miami-Dade County and 380 in Orlando. None of them came from a lead broker, because none of them were anyone's to sell. They are county and city records, published by the government that issued them, free to read on the day they appear.

Public work in Florida runs on the same principle, and there the law is explicit about the calendar. Section 255.0525 tells a state agency with a construction project over $200,000 to advertise it "once in the Florida Administrative Register at least 21 days prior to the established bid opening". For a county or a municipality over $200,000, the notice runs "at least once in a newspaper of general circulation in the county where the project is located at least 21 days prior to the established bid opening and at least 5 days prior to any scheduled prebid conference". Over $500,000, both of those windows widen to 30 days.

So the buyer is legally obliged to give you three weeks. Here is what usually happens to them. A $420,000 county fire station re-roof advertises on the first Monday of the month, envelopes open 21 days later, and you hear about it on day 16 from a supplier. That leaves five days to walk the roof, get a tear-off number, chase two material quotes and price a job whose drawings you have not opened. Two ways that ends. You no-bid, which is a zero. Or you pad twelve percent to cover what you had no time to check, and lose to a roofer who used the full twenty one days, which is also a zero and cost you an evening. Finding the job on day one instead of day sixteen is the whole difference, and it is a reading habit rather than a subscription.

By the end of this page you will have five things: the four places a Florida construction job is required by statute to appear, with the notice period on each; a filter over the live Florida set narrowed to your trade and your counties, so Monday brings jobs rather than a data dump; the two Florida Department of Transportation files that, joined, show what your competitors actually bid; a one-email records request that returns the bid tabulation on the job you just lost, at fifteen cents a page; and the license facts that decide which half of the board you can sign. Everything below names the section of the 2025 Florida Statutes it comes from.

Read the four places a Florida job has to appear

Section 255.0525 is a publication duty, and a publication duty is a lead source with a statute behind it.

The Florida Administrative Register is not a product anybody sells. It is a state publication, free to read, browsable issue by issue, and one of its standing sections is titled "Notices Regarding Bids, Proposals and Purchasing". Ten minutes a week in that section is the cheapest coverage of state construction work available in Florida, and the statute is what guarantees the work is in there.

The newspaper rows are the ones contractors dismiss, and they are worth a second look. Counties and cities mostly post solicitations to their own purchasing pages as well, but the purchasing page is a courtesy and the legal notice is the obligation. When a buyer is running late, the obligation is what goes out on time.

Then there is the band the table does not cover. Under $200,000 there is no statutory advertisement, so that work goes wherever the buyer prefers: the purchasing page, a standing vendor list, or an email to the three companies they used last year. That band holds a large share of the repair, re-roof and small-works money in Florida, and reaching it is a registration problem rather than a reading problem. The bid-ready checklist for Florida covers what those buyers want on file first.

Stop clicking the Vendor Bid System link, because it is a 404

Nearly every Florida bid roundup still points at the Vendor Bid System at vbs.dms.state.fl.us. Probed in August 2026, the main menu redirects to a 404 page. VBS is retired.

Its successor is the MyFloridaMarketPlace Vendor Information Portal at vendor.myfloridamarketplace.com, and vendor registration there costs nothing. Register once against the commodity codes for the work you actually perform, and state buyers can find you.

It is worth knowing why the replacement is harder to live with than the thing it replaced. The portal is a single-page application: there is no server-rendered page behind a solicitation, so a search engine cannot index one, a bookmark cannot point into one, and the aggregators that used to mirror VBS quietly stopped covering state work. The solicitations are still published, just somewhere a link cannot reach. That is why the Register row earns its place: the state's own statutory notice channel, in plain dated text that still resolves in a year.

Join the two FDOT files and read your competitors' prices

The Department of Transportation publishes both halves of every letting, and keeps them in separate places.

The first half is the Bid Solicitation Notice, a PDF filed by district, year and letting date, carrying the description of the work and the Proposal Budget Estimate. That estimate is the department's own view of what the job is worth, published before anyone bids.

The second half is the letting result, an HTML report on bidletting.fdot.gov carrying contractor names and bid amounts, with no estimate and no description on it.

Neither file is much use alone. Joined on the financial project number, they become the most valuable free document in Florida heavy civil: the owner's estimate sitting next to every bidder's answer to it, with names attached.

Three things fall out of that pairing, and each one changes a decision you are already making.

Your spread against the estimate, on work you did not bid. Price a couple of past lettings in your category as an exercise and compare your number to the winner's. That is a free calibration against the market, with no bid bond and no proposal to write.

Who actually bids in your district, and how often. The same handful of names repeat. A district where four contractors split every letting is a different opportunity from one where fourteen chase each job.

Which lettings drew few bidders. A job the market avoided has a reason inside it, and half the time the reason is a scope quirk that suits somebody with the right equipment. That is where a smaller contractor wins on a state job.

Ask for the bid tabulation on the job you lost, at fifteen cents a page

Losing a public bid in Florida and never learning the number is a choice, because the number is a public record and the statute prices it.

Section 119.07(1)(a) puts the duty on the agency in one sentence: "Every person who has custody of a public record shall permit the record to be inspected and copied by any person desiring to do so, at any reasonable time, under reasonable conditions". The bid tabulation on a county job is a public record. So is the winning bidder's proposal, the evaluation scoring on an RFP, and the addenda log.

The price is capped in the same section. Under s.119.07(4)(a), a duplicated one-sided copy up to fourteen by eight and a half inches runs "Up to 15 cents per one-sided copy", with "no more than an additional 5 cents for each two-sided copy". Where a request genuinely takes extensive information technology resources or clerical labor, s.119.07(4)(d) lets the agency add a special service charge, which must be reasonable and based on the cost actually incurred.

In practice this is one email to the purchasing department naming the solicitation number, and the tabulation comes back as a PDF that costs you nothing because nothing was copied.

Make it a habit on every public job you bid and lose. Losing by three percent is a pricing conversation with yourself. Losing by thirty one percent is a scope conversation, and it usually means the winner read an allowance or an exclusion differently than you did. Six tabulations in, you will know which buyers you are competitive with and stop spending afternoons on the ones you are not.

Know which half of the board your license can sign

Two tiers of Florida contractor license exist and they draw a hard line across the map.

A certified license carries a C prefix, comes from a state exam, and works statewide. A registered license carries an R prefix, comes from a local competency card, and works only in the jurisdictions that issued it. On a bid board covering the whole state, that distinction decides which rows are yours.

The scale of the two tiers is worth seeing. Counted from the Department of Business and Professional Regulation's own construction licensee extract in August 2026: 97,093 active certified licenses against 3,467 active registered ones. Registered is roughly three and a half percent of certified, a small legacy population still renewing. Section 163.211 preempted occupational licensing to the state, and the grandfathered local licensing that fed the registered tier expired on July 1, 2025. If you are trading on a registered license, the certified exam is the single change that opens the rest of the board, and getting your Florida contractor's license walks the route.

There is a second half to this, and it catches people who already hold the right license. A person holds the license; a company signs the bid. Under s.489.119 the entity needs its own certificate of authority, obtained when a qualifying agent qualifies it. That same extract showed 9,751 active certified qualified businesses, which is roughly one qualified entity for every ten certified individuals. Bid as a company that was never qualified and you are contracting unlicensed on a job with a government on the other side of the table. The Florida qualifying agent is the one page to read before your first public bid goes out under a company name.

That licensee extract is worth having for its own sake. The Department publishes it free from its construction industry public records page and refreshes it weekly: active licensed contractors statewide, with class and status attached. Filter it to certified general contractors in your counties and you have the call list for the private side of this hunt, getting on general contractor bid lists in Florida.

Put your license number on the bid before you put a price on it

This is thirty seconds of formatting and it is written into Chapter 489.

Section 489.119(5)(b) is direct about where the number goes: "The registration or certification number of each contractor shall appear in each offer of services, business proposal, bid, contract, or advertisement, regardless of medium, as defined by board rule, used by that contractor or business organization in the practice of contracting." Every medium means the bid cover page, the proposal, the quote you email, the website and the truck, and s.489.119(5)(c) says the number goes on a vehicle bearing your name or any artwork that would lead a reasonable person to think it is used for contracting.

The enforcement ladder in s.489.119(5)(e) starts gently and does not stay there: the board issues a notice of noncompliance for a first offence, and may assess a fine or issue a citation for failure to correct within thirty days, or for any subsequent offence.

Build the number into the template once rather than remembering it per bid. A public buyer reading a bid with no license number on it learns something about the rest of the submission before opening the price.

Get bondable before the job you want appears

Bonding is the requirement that decides whether you can bid at all, and it takes longer to arrange than a bid window lasts.

Under s.255.05, a state job of $100,000 or less carries no statutory bond requirement, and above that the contractor executes and records payment and performance bonds in the county where the improvement sits. For any other public entity, including counties, cities and school boards, the governing body may waive the bond at its discretion at $200,000 or less, and above $200,000 the bonds are required. That waiver band is where a great deal of municipal work lives, so whether a given $150,000 city job is bonded is a question with a published answer rather than a guess.

A surety underwrites your financial statements and your completed work history, not your bid, so the first conversation belongs months before the job you want is advertised. The other side of that instrument is what protects your money once you are on a public job, because public property carries no construction lien in Florida: that sequence is in bond claims on Florida public jobs.

One more registration is local and easy to forget. Chapter 205 local business tax receipts are issued per county and per city where you operate. They run to September 30, renew from July 1, and go delinquent on October 1 with a ten percent penalty plus five percent per month to a twenty five percent cap. Pull the receipt for a county before you bid there, not after you win.

Search the whole Florida set instead of four portals

Keeping four sources open by hand is the part that stops happening in a busy month. That is what the Florida lane on AEC Stack is for.

It holds those 2,148 live open Florida opportunities, refreshed on a weekly job that reads the feeds against a nine day window so a skipped week leaves no hole. Every row is scored against your profile, classified to a trade, and stamped in US dollars. You search it the way you search an inbox: type the thing you build, and the rows come back with the buyer, the city, the date and the likely trades on the front of each one.

Four controls do most of the work. Biddable now hides anything expired or closed. Filter opportunities adds a type, a city and a sort, with Closing soon, Newest first and Highest value as the three sorts that matter on a bid board. Match my profile narrows the list to your own trades and regions. And active filters become chips you pull off one at a time, so you can widen a search without rebuilding it.

The profile behind all of that is a one-time form: Trades, Service Types, Target Regions, Target Cities, and Lead-Time Horizons. That last one decides how early work reaches you. The horizons run from immediate, meaning open bids and recent awards, through near-term solicitations, through pre-construction filings six to twenty four months out, to strategic pipeline beyond that. Leave all four on and a filing lands on the same board as a bid closing Friday, which is the point: the filing is the job, eighteen months before it becomes a bid you were too late to price.

Set your minimum value honestly while you are in there: the default floor hides a large share of Florida remodel and repair work, and the trade filter narrows better than the dollar figure does. When a row is worth chasing, tracking it turns it into a deal on your board with the title, value and scope carried across.

This week's Miami-Dade and Orlando permits reads the same board a different way: named contractors on funded jobs rather than bids with closing dates.

What it costs

There is no monthly subscription. The platform fee is 2.5% of each invoice processed through AEC Stack, collected on payment due dates.

The finding side of this page is almost entirely free, which is the argument for doing it rather than buying it. What the government charges around it:

Nothing in that table is a data subscription, and that is the honest comparison to draw when a vendor quotes you a per-county or per-state figure for the same records. Florida already published this work. Reading it costs a habit.

Do one thing today. Open the work feed, set Target Regions to Florida, pick your trade, drop the minimum value to what your smallest real job clears, and sort by Closing soon. Read the first ten rows and pick the one closest to your yard. Then put twenty minutes on Thursday morning against the Register's bids section and the purchasing page of the county you drive through most, and you will be reading Florida's public work on day one of its twenty one days instead of day sixteen.

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