Three documents get you onto a Florida public job, and the third one takes the tax off your materials

A county parks department is rebuilding the parking lot, the drainage and the pavilion at a boat ramp. The prime went to a general contractor you have met twice, your site and paving package is $340,000, and $190,000 of that is material: base, asphalt, pipe, precast and light poles. It is your first job for a public owner, and the work itself is a Tuesday.

Here is what setting it up by reflex costs. You price it the way you price private work, which means you hand over 6 percent at the supply house and bury it in the number. Six percent of $190,000 is $11,400. Bid the package at 8 percent and the margin is $27,200, so that one habit has taken 42 percent of the profit before a truck moves. Rule 12A-1.094 of the Florida Administrative Code is the reason: the government exemption belongs to sales made directly to the governmental entity, and a contractor who buys materials and incorporates them into public works is the ultimate consumer of those materials. The county is exempt. You are not, unless a particular document says the county did the buying.

Then the other half of the setup. Public property carries no construction lien in Florida. If the general goes quiet on your last $64,000 there is nothing to record against a boat ramp, and the whole of your security is a payment bond you may not have asked to see. Reaching it starts with a one page notice carrying a 45 day ceiling under Fla. Stat. s.255.05(2)(a), and that notice is at its cheapest and safest on the morning you mobilize, before anyone is owed a dollar.

By the end of this page you will hold three documents and the dates that govern them: a certified copy of the recorded payment bond, or a written answer that the job sits inside a waiver band and carries none; a Notice to Contractor served and dated inside 45 days of the day you commenced furnishing; and a Certificate of Entitlement question put to the owner before you price, because that is the paper that moves $11,400 off your side of the ledger. Ahead of all three sits the registry check that decides whether your envelope is opened. Everything below names the section of the 2025 Florida Statutes or the rule it comes from.

Pass the check a public buyer runs before anyone reads your price

A private customer takes your word for it. A public buyer looks you up, and the records they look at are public, free and checkable in the minutes before the bids are opened.

Your license tier decides which half of the map you can sign. Florida runs two: certified, earned on a state exam and good statewide, carrying a C prefix such as CGC or CCC; and registered, built on a local competency card and limited to the jurisdictions that issued it, carrying an R prefix. Section 163.211 preempted occupational licensing to the state, and the grandfathered local licensing expired on July 1, 2025. The live DBPR extract counts 3,467 active registered licenses against 97,093 certified, so the registered tier is a legacy population still renewing rather than a parallel route. If yours starts with an R, a county line is a scope limit.

Renewal parity catches people in the wrong year. Certified CILB licenses expire on August 31 of even numbered years, the next being August 31, 2026, with 14 hours of continuing education per biennium; registered licenses expire on August 31 of odd numbered years, and both ECLB electrical tiers run on the even year date. A lapsed license goes delinquent and then null and void, and contracting on a void one is unlicensed contracting under s.489.127.

The license belongs to a person, and the company needs its own paper. Under s.489.119 the credential attaches to the qualifying agent, and the business holds a certificate of authority obtained by that agent qualifying the entity. An entity with no qualifying agent cannot contract at all. It also has to be active on Sunbiz, which is a May 1 filing with a $400 late fee that cannot be waived and administrative dissolution on the fourth Friday of September. A public body about to award $340,000 checks that in ten seconds.

Insurance has a licensing floor underneath the buyer's schedule. Rule 61G4-15.003 sets $300,000 public liability and $50,000 property damage for General and Building contractors, and $100,000 and $25,000 for the other CILB categories, and s.489.115(5) makes that proof a condition of holding the license. Public owners routinely require limits above that floor, with additional insured wording on top. Read the insurance schedule at the pre-bid, because a broker needs days and an endorsement is not free.

Your license number goes on the bid itself. Section 489.119(5)(b) puts the certification or registration number on every advertisement, bid, offer and proposal, in every medium. Cheapest line in the package, easiest one to leave off a cover sheet typed at eleven at night.

Fix the whole row before you price anything. A bid returned as non responsive is a week of takeoff that scores zero, and the reason is usually a document that costs nothing. If the license itself is the open question, getting your Florida contractor license is the route in.

Settle the bond question at the pre-bid, not at the first missed draw

Ask one question at the pre-bid meeting and write the answer down: is there a recorded payment bond on this job, and can I have a certified copy.

Section 255.05(1) makes the contractor execute the bond, record it in the public records of the county where the improvement sits and hand the public entity a certified copy, and the entity may not pay the contractor until that has happened. So on a bonded job the document sits in two places, the county's records and the owner's file, and both are reachable by asking on the day you sign.

The reason to ask early is that not every public job is bonded, and the exemptions land precisely on the size of work a first timer bids.

Read the middle rows twice, because a great deal of first public work lives in them. There are three waiver bands in s.255.05(1)(d), not one, and two of them sit exactly where a first timer bids. A $150,000 city job may be bonded or may be exempted, and so may a $150,000 state agency job, and on either exempted version your invoice is unsecured paper with no lien behind it.

Note who holds that pen locally, because it decides who you ask. The section puts the exemption in the discretion of "the official or board awarding such contract", which on most county and city work is the purchasing officer named on the front of the solicitation rather than a commission item you could go and read. So the question goes to that officer in writing, at the pre-bid, and not to a meeting agenda that may never mention it.

An unbonded job is a reason to price the terms rather than only the scope: shorter draw intervals, a smaller retainage position, materials invoiced on delivery rather than on installation. The other lever on that job is Florida prompt payment.

There is a rescue clause worth knowing before you need it. Where the bond was not recorded before work commenced, s.255.05(2)(a) gives a claimant up to 45 days after being served with a copy of it to serve their notice. That covers a job that started out of order, not a habit of going looking for the bond in month four.

Serve the Notice to Contractor on the morning you mobilize

This is the ticket in, and the statute wrote it so that it is impossible to be late if you treat it as a mobilization task.

A claimant not in privity with the contractor serves written notice on the contractor that they intend to look to the bond for protection, "before commencing or not later than 45 days after commencing to furnish labor, services, or materials." Look at the order of those two options. Before commencing comes first, and a notice served the week you sign the subcontract cannot be late. There is no floor under this one and no advantage in waiting, so the question closes while the crew is still loading the truck.

Commencing to furnish means the day your labor, services or materials first went into that job. A load of pipe left on site starts it. Signing the subcontract does not, and neither does the pre construction meeting or your first invoice. Deliver base in April and send a crew in June, and April is your date.

Your role decides what you serve. If your contract is with a subcontractor, or you supply one, you are the claimant and this notice is yours. If your contract is with the public entity, you are the contractor, the bond is yours to furnish, and these notices are what your own subs serve on you. Log each one that arrives as a name for your final release list.

The sworn Notice of Nonpayment behind it only matters once the money stops. It has a floor as well as a ceiling, which makes it the one Florida deadline that punishes serving too early, and it is worked through in Florida public job bond claims. The Florida payment bond claim calculator will count both dates off your furnishing dates while the job is still healthy.

Ask for the Certificate of Entitlement before you price, because afterwards it is worth nothing

Government work carries a reflex that costs real money on a first public job: the customer is exempt, so the job is exempt. Rule 12A-1.094 says otherwise. The exemption attaches to sales made directly to the governmental entity, and a contractor incorporating materials into public works is the ultimate consumer of them.

The entity can be the purchaser instead, which is what an owner direct purchase program is. All five of these have to hold at once.

The instrument that makes it real is the Certificate of Entitlement, issued by the entity for each vendor with the purchase order attached and all five factors initialled. Once it is signed the entity assumes liability for tax, penalty and interest if the exemption turns out to fail. That is the strongest piece of paper on a public job, and your customer issues it, which makes asking early the whole move.

So the question at the pre-bid is two sentences long. Does this owner run a direct purchase program on this job, and is my material package inside it. On the boat ramp job the answer is worth $11,400 of state tax on $190,000 of material plus the delivery county's surtax, and it has to be known before you set a price rather than discovered at closeout.

F5 is the factor that fails, and it fails quietly, because risk of loss is buried in a term of the owner's own purchase order rather than announced in the meeting. Read that clause before the bid goes in.

When the answer is no, the tax belongs in the bid, and where it lands is decided by the contract type. Rule 12A-1.051 makes you the ultimate consumer on a lump sum, cost plus, fixed fee, guaranteed price, upset price or time and materials contract, so you pay at the counter and charge the customer nothing, and a retailer on a retail sale plus installation contract, so you buy exempt against an Annual Resale Certificate and collect from the customer. That second role holds only where the incorporated materials were itemised and priced in the contract before work began. The full fork, the Form DR-1 registration behind it and the surtax cap at the first $5,000 of any single item are in Florida sales tax on construction contracts.

Put the two furnishing dates on the job record the day you mobilize

Two facts drive the entire bond sequence, and neither is on any document the owner holds: the day you first furnished, and the day you finally furnished. They live in your head, in a delivery ticket and in a foreman's phone, which is a filing system that survives about four months.

Take the boat ramp job. You commenced furnishing on April 6, 2026 and finally furnished on July 24, 2026. Every date below falls out of those two.

Mark a Florida deal as public work and stamp your place in the contract chain, and the job clocks panel drops the chapter 713 lien dates and raises the two s.255.05 bond obligations instead, each carrying its statute. The Notice to Contractor shows as one due date counted 45 days from the day you commenced. The Notice of Nonpayment shows as a window with an opening date and a closing date. Until the job carries a class and a role, the panel names the fact it is waiting for rather than computing the private calendar.

One more flag is worth stamping while you are there. Permit applications filed on or after December 31, 2026 fall under the 9th Edition of the Florida Building Code, and applications accepted before it stay under the 8th for the life of the permit. Bid a public job in the autumn of 2026, permit it in the new year, and it is priced to one edition and built to another. Write the edition into the bid assumptions.

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 three documents on this page carry no state fee. They are pages, certified postage and one notary appointment, and they decide whether the last $64,000 is collectible and whether $11,400 of tax sits in your column or the county's. The government charges around them cannot be argued down afterwards:

Every one of those dates is a Florida job clock on the platform, carrying its own statute reference, so the license renewal and the annual report sit on the same board as the two bond notices.

Open the oldest live job on your board, set its class to public work and stamp your place in the contract chain, then read the two dates that appear underneath. Take the next public job you are quoting and put the direct purchase question in writing to the owner before the price goes out. If your board is thin while you wait for an answer, the live Florida opportunity list is free to read and needs no account, and the private side of the same paperwork habit starts at the Florida Notice to Owner.

<!-- CAPTURE LATER: a Florida deal record classified as public work with role_in_chain set to subcontractor, showing the fl_notice_to_contractor_bond due date and the fl_notice_of_nonpayment_bond window side by side, plus the quote screen's public works panel with F1 to F5 answered. Blocked in this wave: the demo tenant is Ontario. -->