Florida takes no cut of what you earn. Four small filings and five dates are the whole bill.

Whatever you drew out of the business last year, Florida did not tax it. There is no state personal income tax on the money you pay yourself, no state tax on profit passed up to you from an LLC, and no annual minimum entity tax that arrives whether or not the company turned a wheel. That money stays in the truck fund instead of going to Tallahassee, and it repeats every year you trade here.

What Florida asks in exchange is administrative and small. Four routine filings, three of which carry no filing fee at all, plus one annual report that does. The four are the DR-15 sales and use tax return, the RT-6 reemployment tax report, the DR-405 tangible personal property return, and your local business tax receipt renewal. That last one is a tax as well as a filing, priced by each county and city you work in, so it is the one to budget for rather than just diarize. The report is the Sunbiz annual report, and it is the one with teeth.

Price the teeth. The annual report is $138.75 for an LLC and $150 for a corporation, due May 1. File it on May 2 and the Division of Corporations adds $400, and that $400 cannot be waived: not for illness, not for a first offence, not for a report that went in twelve hours late. Leave it unfiled and the entity is administratively dissolved on the fourth Friday of September, which takes your construction workers compensation exemptions with it and leaves your license qualifying a company that no longer legally exists. A $138.75 line item, missed, is the most expensive calendar entry in Florida construction.

By the end of this page you will have five dates written down, the DR-15 filing band section 212.11 actually puts you in rather than the one people assume, a straight answer on what puts you on the RT-6, a DR-405 filed once that can stop asking you in later years, and a renewal window for your local business tax receipt that closes on September 30 and does not reopen quietly.

Count the bills that do not arrive before you worry about the ones that do

Start here, because the filings below are cheap in exchange for something expensive Florida hands you for free.

That last row is the one people mishear as "Florida taxes businesses after all." The Department of Revenue's filing requirement is written against corporations: all corporations doing business, earning income, or existing in Florida, plus certain LLCs classified as corporations for tax purposes. The rate for tax years on or after January 1, 2022 is 5.5%.

What it does not reach is the shape most small contractors are already in. A disregarded single-member LLC files no separate Florida return, and the owner reports the income. An LLC taxed as a partnership sits outside the corporate return, filing an F-1065 only where it has corporate members. An S corporation paying no federal income tax on line 23c of Form 1120S can notify the Department it is not required to file, and a sole proprietor is not a corporation at all.

Compare the third row. California bills an $800 minimum franchise tax every year whether the company worked or not. Florida charges $125 to form an LLC or $70 for a profit corporation, and then asks for a report. Which of those two you want is LLC versus sole proprietor in Florida.

Put five dates on the wall and stop carrying the calendar in your head

Here is the whole year. Three of these five cost nothing to file. The receipt renewal costs whatever your county and your city charge for it, once per jurisdiction. The fifth is the one that ends companies.

There is a sixth date on a two-year cycle. Certified CILB licensees renew by August 31 of even-numbered years with 14 hours of continuing education for the biennium, and ECLB electrical licensees share that date. 2026 is an even year, so it is live right now, and what it takes to hold the license is getting your Florida contractor's license.

Register once on the DR-1, because it opens both tax accounts at the same time

Two of the four filings come from a single application. Form DR-1, the Florida Business Tax Application, covers sales and use tax and reemployment tax together, and it is the prerequisite before you make taxable sales or pay wages.

It gives back two documents. The Certificate of Registration tells you your assigned filing frequency. The Annual Resale Certificate is what you hand a supplier to buy materials without paying tax at the counter, and whether you should be using it is decided by the kind of contract you signed rather than by your trade.

That contract question is the single biggest number in Florida contracting tax, and it is settled before you buy anything: Rule 12A-1.051 sorts you into ultimate consumer, who pays tax on materials at purchase, or retailer, who buys exempt and collects from the customer. Sort a job wrong and the tax on your whole material bill lands in your margin instead of the customer's invoice. That fork is worked through with the numbers in who pays the sales tax on your Florida job. This page is the calendar the registration puts you on afterwards.

Find your DR-15 band, because it decides how many dates land on your year

The day is uniform. Returns and payments are due on the 1st and late after the 20th of the month following each reporting period. The period is what moves, and section 212.11 sets it by what you remitted over the preceding four quarters.

Turn that into calendar entries and the difference is real: monthly is twelve dates on your year, quarterly is four, semiannual is two, annual is one.

Your band is not a preference. The Department assigns it, and it is printed on your Certificate of Registration, so the answer is in a drawer rather than in an opinion. One option in the statute is worth knowing: above $1,000 and up to $12,000 you may file a quarterly return while making monthly payments. That $12,000 is the ceiling on an option, and a lot of published advice repeats it as the point where monthly filing starts. Monthly filing starts above $1,000, twelve times lower.

Two details decide whether an on-time filing is actually on time. Pay electronically and you must initiate the payment and receive a confirmation number no later than 5 p.m. Eastern on the business day before the 20th, so the money leaves a day earlier than the date printed on the form. Filing and paying electronically on time also earns a collection allowance back: 2.5% of the first $1,200 of tax due, not to exceed $30.

Know what puts you on the RT-6, because it is a payroll number, not a headcount

Reemployment tax has a reputation for arriving with your first hire. The trigger is more specific than that, and it is written in dollars.

You become a liable employer if any one of these holds: at least one quarterly payroll totaling $1,500 or more in a calendar year, or one or more employees for a day or part of a day during any 20 weeks in a calendar year, or you were already liable, or you are liable for federal unemployment tax. A helper on the books for a full quarter clears $1,500 without difficulty, so in practice the first serious hire does put you here, but a weekend laborer on a one-off job does not.

The tax itself is modest and capped per person. The initial rate for new employers is 2.7%, and only the first $7,000 of wages paid to each employee in a calendar year is taxable. That puts the whole reemployment tax on a $62,000 carpenter at $189 for the year, and three of them at $567. Treat that as an opening figure rather than a settled one. The 2.7% holds until you have reported for 10 quarters, and then the Department works out a rate off your own record. A crew that stays put drives it down, as far as 0.1%, which is $7 a head. Layoffs that turn into claims drive it up, as far as the statutory 5.4%, which is $378. So the way you end employment, not the number of people you employ, is what moves this line.

The sentence that catches people is not about the tax at all. You must file a report even if you owe no tax or have no wages to report. Liability, once established, brings four dates a year whether or not the crew worked, so a quiet winter quarter still needs an RT-6 on January 31.

One more mechanic is worth having. If you employed 10 or more employees in any quarter during the preceding state fiscal year, which runs July 1 to June 30, you must file the wage data and pay electronically.

File the DR-405 once and it can stop asking you

This is the filing contractors have most often not heard of, and it carries an exemption that pays for itself in year one.

Anyone with a proprietorship, partnership or corporation, anyone self-employed, and any contractor who owned tangible personal property on January 1 files a DR-405 with the county property appraiser by April 1. Tools, compressors, laser levels, trailers, a mini excavator, the racking in the shop. Owners who lease, lend or rent property out file too.

File on time and you get a property tax exemption of up to $25,000 of assessed value. Better than that, tangible personal property owners valued at or below $25,000 may qualify for a filing waiver in subsequent years, which makes this the one filing on the page that can retire itself. One return, on time, and a small operation can be done with it.

Skip it and the arithmetic turns hard, annually. Filing late costs 5 percent of the total tax levied against the property covered by that return for each year, each month, and part of a month the return is late, to a maximum of 25 percent. Not filing at all is a flat 25 percent. Leaving property off a return you did file is 15 percent of the tax on the omitted property.

Put a number on a real kit list. A three-truck remodeler with a mini excavator, two trailers, a compressor, generators, laser levels and a shop of hand tools puts $70,000 on the schedule without stretching. Filing by April 1 takes $25,000 off that assessed value, better than a third of it, before any millage rate touches the figure. Not filing does the reverse: full assessed value, plus a quarter added to the tax on it, for as long as the return stays missing.

One structural detail. The DR-405 is filed per county, with that county's property appraiser, and January 1 is the date that fixes it. Where the trailer sat over New Year decides where the return goes.

Renew the local business tax receipt inside the window, because October 1 is a cliff

Chapter 205 lets each county and each municipality charge a business tax for the privilege of operating there. The receipt runs a year and expires on September 30. It is renewable from July 1, which gives you a three-month window rather than a date, and renewing means paying that jurisdiction's tax again at whatever rate it sets.

Miss the window and October 1 adds a 10 percent penalty, then 5 percent for each month after that, to a 25 percent cap. The reason to care is not the penalty, which is small against the other numbers here. It is that a lapsed receipt is what a permit clerk or a general contractor's compliance check surfaces at the wrong moment, and the fix takes days you had allocated to work.

This one also scales differently from the others. The DR-15 scales with what you sell and the RT-6 with what you pay. The local business tax receipt scales with where you go, because the next city over can want its own on top of the county's. The renewal is one date and one bill multiplied by the jurisdictions you carry, so write that list down in July, with each one's rate against it, rather than rediscovering it in October.

Treat May 1 as the date that keeps everything else alive

The Sunbiz annual report is the smallest filing on the page and the only one that can end the company.

It is due May 1. $138.75 for an LLC, $150 for a corporation. The late fee is $400, it applies from May 2, and it is not waivable. If the report is still unfiled by the fourth Friday of September, the entity is administratively dissolved.

Follow what dissolution takes with it, because the damage is not confined to the Division of Corporations. A construction workers compensation exemption is conditioned on the entity being active on Sunbiz, so dissolving the company quietly invalidates the certificates the officers rely on, and in construction the coverage trigger is one employee including officers. That chain is walked through in the Florida workers comp exemption. Your license is qualified through the entity under section 489.119, so the business it was qualifying stops existing while the license carries on looking fine on the DBPR site.

Reinstatement exists and it costs more than the report did. The date is May 1, and it does not move.

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.

Everything else on this page belongs to a government, and the whole year's stack is smaller than one bad week:

Let the dates come to you off the profile you already answered

The reason this calendar goes wrong is not that the dates are hard. It is that they belong to five agencies, none of which knows about the other four, so the reminder has to come from the one place holding your whole business.

AEC Stack builds the Florida calendar from profile answers rather than asking you to maintain a list. Say you are registered for Florida sales and use tax and name the frequency the Department assigned you, and the DR-15 clock produces dates on the 1st, late after the 20th, with section 212.11 named as the reason and the consequence written on the entry: penalties and interest, and the collection allowance is lost. Once the business carries a payroll account, the RT-6 clock lands four entries a year against chapter 443. The DR-405 clock sits on April 1 against section 193.062 and says what the miss costs, which is penalties and the $25,000 exemption. The Sunbiz clock sits on May 1 and carries the whole sentence: a $400 late fee that cannot be waived, then administrative dissolution on the fourth Friday of September, which also kills the construction workers comp exemption.

Answer yes to a CILB or ECLB license and the August 31 even-year renewal appears alongside them. Answer yes to a workers comp exemption with its issue date and the two-year clock computes from the certificate rather than from memory. Fifteen Florida clocks in all, each carrying the statute it came from, sitting on the same records the quotes and invoices already run off.

Do one thing today: open your business profile at start your business, say whether you are registered for Florida sales and use tax, and put in the date of the last Sunbiz annual report you filed. Those two answers generate most of the calendar above, and if the second one makes you go looking for a receipt you cannot find, you have found out in August rather than on the fourth Friday of September.

<!-- CAPTURE LATER: the Florida business profile with fl_sales_tax_registered answered yes and fl_sales_tax_filing_frequency set to monthly, showing the fl_sales_tax_return, fl_rt6_reemployment_tax, fl_tpp_return and fl_sunbiz_annual_report clocks resolved to dates with their statute references visible. Blocked in this wave: the demo tenant is Ontario. -->