Florida local codes of ordinances

Why this exists

Municipal law is the hardest layer of American law to find. The Library of Congress guide to municipal codes says so plainly, that no single master site holds them, and it is right. Each commercial codifier publishes an index of its own clients and nothing else, so a reader who does not already know who publishes a town’s code has nowhere to begin. State statutes have Online Sunshine. Federal law has GovInfo. A city ordinance has a phone number for the clerk.

This is that missing index for one state. It was assembled by taking an independent list of every Florida local government from the Census Bureau, then asking each codifier which of them it carries, then opening the rest by hand. The valuable part is not the towns on Municode, which anyone can find by searching Municode. It is everything else, because no vendor index can show you an absence.

What it shows

Four outcomes, and the middle two are the ones no existing list records.

• 423 have a code online. That is 61 of the 67 counties and 362 of the 411 municipalities. 414 serve it as a searchable web code and 9 only as a PDF.
• 9 publish their ordinances but have never codified them. The documents are online one at a time, so answering a question about fences means reading every ordinance the town ever passed. That is a different thing from having a code, and pooling the two would hide it.
• 2 publish nothing online. To read their ordinances you contact the clerk.
• 44 could not be confirmed. No codifier carries them and this survey could not establish what they publish instead. They are almost all towns under a thousand people. Each row says what was checked, and none of them is a claim that nothing exists.

Two things about currency. 1223 adopted ordinances are waiting to be folded into a code somewhere in Florida right now, and an ordinance that has passed but has not been codified still binds the property. Separately, 16 codes were last codified more than three years ago, and a further 15 state a codification date that falls after the supplement carrying it was published. That is impossible, so those dates are recorded as a note rather than as a date.

One publisher, Municode, carries 400 of these codes. A single vendor holds most of Florida’s municipal law, and three towns in this table have already moved off it to a publisher that no research guide lists.

Who this is for

If you have inherited Florida property, or you are the personal representative or trustee handling one, the county code is not the whole answer. A house sits inside a city as well as a county, and the fence height, the short-term rental rule, the lot maintenance standard and the code enforcement process can all change at a city line you cannot see from the street. Fla. Stat. ch. 162 lets a local government fine a violation up to $250 a day, or $1,000 a day for a repeat violation, and record the running total as a lien against the property. Our county property owner guides walk through that process. This table tells you which code to read first.

Every Florida county and city

Filter by county or by whether a code is online. Codified through is the date of the most recent ordinance the publisher says is included, taken from the publisher’s own banner. Pending is the count of adopted ordinances not yet folded in, which the publisher reports and which is the number most likely to surprise a reader.

Generated from the dataset at commit unknown. Every row was checked on the date recorded in the CSV.

How it was built, and what would make it wrong

The list of jurisdictions comes from the Census Bureau subcounty population file, which is independent of every codifier and yields exactly 67 counties and 411 municipalities, matching the Florida League of Cities directory. Each codifier’s public metadata was then joined onto that list by name, and everything left over was opened by hand in a browser.

Two things had to be right. Municode’s own classification field does not encode whether a client is a city or a county, so type is taken from the Census and never from the vendor. And the Municode library answers a request for a jurisdiction that does not exist with a success code and an empty page, so a status code cannot verify a link. Every Municode address here was checked against the resolver the library’s own page calls, which returns the client identifier, and the check is stored beside the row.

A third thing only showed up by looking. Municode’s Florida client list is not complete, and its content records are not always current with its own library. Three towns in this table have left it for MunicipalCodeOnline, a publisher no research guide lists, and one city’s Municode page still serves a code from 2018 that the city replaced. A reader who arrives there from a search has nothing on the page telling them so.

The honest limits. Codifier contracts move, so every row carries the date it was checked and that date is part of the claim. Codified through is the publisher’s word for when the code was last compiled, not a promise the compilation is complete. Whether an online code is the official one is recorded only where the page says so, because most Florida codes do not say. The 44 rows marked not confirmed are exactly that and are not a finding of absence, and each says what was checked so the next person can start where this stopped. And this dataset tells you where the law is, never what it says.

Licence and citation

Licensed CC BY 4.0. Use it commercially, modify it, build on it. Attribution is what keeps corrections flowing back, which is how a table of moving links stays right. Cite as: Klagge, Kevin D. “Florida local codes of ordinances, 2026.” StepUpLaw.

The ordinances themselves carry no copyright. They are edicts of government, and the Supreme Court settled that in Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, 590 U.S. 255 (2020). This dataset holds only where they are published and how current they are, never their text.

If the code is the problem rather than the search

A code enforcement lien on an inherited house, a violation that started before the death, or an ordinance that blocks the sale you planned are all things worth talking through before the daily fine compounds. Start with the property owner guides, or get in touch.

Updated 2026-09-03. Compiled by Kevin D. Klagge, Esq., Fla. Bar No. 99502. This is reference data, not legal advice, and using it creates no attorney-client relationship. Ordinances change, publishers change, and the official pages control.