Permits
Do You Need a Permit to Replace a Roof?
Short answer: yes. Here is who pulls it, what gets inspected, and why unpermitted work bites years later.
Limited time offer 4 point home inspection or wind mitigation with any new roof See what is includedYes — replacing a roof in Florida almost always needs a permit, because a re-roof is structural work and structural work is inspected. Your contractor normally pulls it. Which office issues it depends on your address rather than your mailing town, and the deck inspection is the one that matters most.
The part that confuses people is who issues the permit, because that depends on exactly where the house sits.
Who issues your permit depends on your address
Several of the places we work run their own building department — Cape Coral, Fort Myers, Sanibel and Naples each handle their own. Unincorporated addresses go through the county instead, and Naples sits in Collier County while the rest of our area is Lee. It matters only because the office you deal with is not the same for every house, and a contractor who works across the area already knows which one yours is.
Your contractor normally pulls it
A licensed contractor pulls the permit in their own name, and that is what you want. It ties the licensed party to the work. If you pull the permit yourself as the homeowner, you take on the responsibility that would otherwise sit with them — which is worth understanding before agreeing to it to save a few days.
What gets inspected
Expect an inspector to look at the work at more than one stage rather than only at the end. On a re-roof that usually means the deck is looked at once the old covering is off and before the new one goes on, because that is the only moment anybody can see it. A roof that is closed up before that inspection may have to be opened again.
Why the deck inspection is the one that matters
Water damage lives in the decking, under the covering, where nobody can see it from the ground or the attic. Tearing off is how it gets found. That is also why an honest quote says what happens if bad decking is discovered — because until the old roof is off, nobody knows how much there is.
What unpermitted work costs you later
It rarely causes trouble the week it is done. It causes trouble when you sell, when a buyer's inspector notices a roof with no permit history, and when an insurer is asked to pay for damage to work that was never inspected. Retroactively permitting finished work is harder and more expensive than permitting it at the time.
A contractor who suggests skipping it is telling you something
Skipping the permit saves them a fee and a scheduling constraint. It transfers a problem to you that surfaces years later, when they are long gone. Take it as information about how the rest of the job will be handled.
How to check what your house already has
Permit records are public. Your city or county building department can tell you what has been permitted at your address, which is worth knowing before you buy a house with a roof somebody says is five years old.
We pull the permit as part of the job and deal with the inspections. Ask us which authority handles your address if you are not sure — CCC 1335152 and CRC 1334301.
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