Miami Dade Contractor Registration: What the County Requires

Miami Dade contractor registration depends on the license you already hold. A state certified contractor registers with the county voluntarily and for free, with no county exam. A state registered contractor, or anyone in a trade only the county licenses, such as fence, drywall or painting, first needs a county certificate of competency and its exam.

On this page: a breakdown of local contractor registration fees, a comparison table of state and county license requirements, and a step by step checklist for voluntary registration.

Most of Florida has one layer of contractor licensing. Miami Dade has two, and it has had them since before the state system existed, which is why the county code still talks about occupational licenses and the county still runs its own exams. People arrive with a fresh state license and are told at the permit counter that they need something else, or arrive with a county certificate and are told it means nothing in Fort Lauderdale. Both stories are true, and both are avoidable.

Does Miami Dade really run its own contractor licensing?

It does. Chapter 10 of the Miami Dade County Code requires anyone who works at a trade, engages in business or contracts for work as a contractor in the county to hold a certificate of competency in the right classification, and a local license where one is required. The certificates are issued by the Construction Trades Qualifying Board, usually shortened to CTQB, and administered by the Contractor Licensing Section of the Department of Regulatory and Economic Resources, which everyone calls RER.

The county’s contractor licensing page lists six license types under the board: Building, Building Specialties, Electrical, Maintenance, Mechanical and Plumbing. Within those sit dozens of classifications, each with its own scope of work, its own experience requirement and, for most, its own exam. It even has its own vocabulary: certificate of competency where the state says license, journeyman and master where the state has no such split.

The county code also says that holders of county certificates must be registered with the state under section 489.115 or 489.513 of the Florida Statutes. So the two layers are not alternatives. A county certificate leads to a state registration, and a state certification skips the county exam. Which direction you travel depends on the license you start with.

Do I need a Miami Dade certificate if I hold a state certified license?

No, and this is where the popular version of the story is wrong. Section 489.113(4)(a) of the Florida Statutes says that a certificate holder who wants to contract anywhere in the state is required only to show the local building official or tax collector evidence of a current certificate, and to pay the same occupational license and permit fees as everyone else. No local exam, no local certificate of competency.

Miami Dade agrees, in writing. Its voluntary registration form for state certified contractors states that although no ordinance or statute mandates registration with the local jurisdiction, RER offers a voluntary process that makes it easier for state contractors working in unincorporated Miami Dade to obtain permits. The form says, in capital letters, that no fee is required for registration. It asks for a copy of the qualifying agent’s driver’s license, a copy of the state certified license or temporary authorization letter, and a certificate of insurance for general liability and workers’ compensation, or the exemption, made out to RER at 11805 SW 26 Street, Room 207, Miami 33175.

Why bother with a voluntary form? Because once you are in the county system the permit clerk verifies your license and insurance on screen instead of asking for the paperwork on every permit. Voluntary in law, close to compulsory in practice. The one paid item is the local business tax receipt, which the form still calls an occupational license. Section 205.065 of the Florida Statutes narrows even that: once a DBPR regulated business has paid the current year’s business tax where its permanent business location or branch office is, no other county or city may charge it a business tax, or an equivalent registration or regulatory fee, for work done there on a temporary or transitory basis. Keep a permanent office or branch inside Miami Dade, though, and that office is a business location the exemption does not reach.

What if my license is state registered rather than certified?

Then the county certificate is not optional, it is the foundation. Section 489.117 of the Florida Statutes says a registered contractor may work only in the counties, municipalities or districts where he or she has complied with all local licensing requirements, and only for the type of work covered by the registration. To be registered in the first place you file evidence of having passed the local exam and licensing requirements for the area you want. In Miami Dade that means a CTQB certificate of competency, obtained by the county’s own exam, then a state registration built on it.

This trap catches people from both directions. A Broward registered contractor cannot simply cross the county line, because the registration is tied to Broward’s local license. And a Miami Dade certificate holder who has not filed the state registration is not lawfully contracting either; the county says the result is a restriction of permitting privileges. If you want a license that travels, the certified route through the state exams is the one that does, and we cover it in the full Florida license requirements checklist.

Your license	Miami Dade certificate needed?	What the county wants to see	Where you can work
State certified (passed the state exams)	No. Registration with RER is voluntary and free	State license, driver’s license, insurance certificate, local business tax receipt	Anywhere in Florida, subject to each local permit office
State registered (built on a local license elsewhere)	Yes, through the county’s own exam and application	CTQB certificate, then a state registration under 489.117	Only where your local licenses are held
Miami Dade certificate holder, no state paperwork yet	Already held	State registration under 489.115 or 489.513, or permits are restricted	Miami Dade, plus any jurisdiction that accepts the certificate
Working in a trade the state does not license	Yes. The county certificate is the only license	Experience proof, exam where required, insurance, $315 application fee	Miami Dade County

Which trades does Miami Dade license that the state does not?

Quite a few, and this is the part that surprises contractors moving down from elsewhere in Florida. The county’s building specialty licenses page lists more than twenty specialty categories. Some overlap with state categories, roofing and swimming pool among them, so a state certified roofer is covered. Others have no state equivalent that we could find: fence, drywall, lathing and plastering, screen enclosure, storm shutter, painting and waterproofing, and door contractors among them. A pass on the county exam is 70 percent, and experience requirements run from one to five years by category.

Painting is the clearest example. In most of Florida a painter needs no contractor license of any kind, which is why it appears in our piece on what you can legally do without a license. In Miami Dade, painting and waterproofing is a licensed specialty. It happens to be one of the categories that does not require an exam, but it does require an application, proof of experience, insurance and, the page says, 16 hours of continuing education before the certificate is issued.

What does a Miami Dade certificate cost and what does it take to get one?

The figures below are the ones stated on the county’s own licensing pages on the day of writing. They are application fees. The renewal fee appears on no official page we could reach, so it is not stated here.

Item	Figure	Source
Journeyman application and exam	$240	County contractor licensing page
Master personal certificate	$315	County contractor licensing page
Master business certificate	$315 in addition to the personal certificate	County contractor licensing page
Building specialty application	$315, due when the application is submitted	County building specialty page
Voluntary registration, state certified contractor	No fee	County registration form
Journeyman experience	Three years in the trade, or equivalent education for up to half	County contractor licensing page
Journeyman pass mark	75 percent	County contractor licensing page
Master and specialty pass mark	70 percent	County licensing pages
Continuing education per renewal	16 hours	County renewal page

The master route needs two years as a journeyman plus two years of prior field experience, or six years of specialised training, or registration as a professional engineer. A personal certificate comes first; only then can you qualify a business, for which the county wants a credit report. Insurance proof is due after board approval, not with the application.

Two fee breaks are written on the county’s contractor licensing page. The initial application fee is waived for an honorably discharged veteran who applies within 24 months of discharge, and a holder who goes inactive for active military duty pays no renewal fees until six months after discharge. The penalty runs the other way too: a certificate allowed to become null and void is reinstated only with the renewal fees plus eight classroom hours of continuing education for every year it sat involuntarily inactive.

The county’s renewal page says a notice arrives two months before expiry, that each holder needs 16 hours of continuing education, and that business license holders must present current liability and workers’ compensation certificates. One genuinely nice touch: a qualifying agent aged 65 or over who has held the certificate for 20 years with no violations renews at no cost and skips the continuing education. An earlier version of this page repeated a 30 September expiry date that turned up in county documents through search. Rechecked on 14 October 2026, the only county material we could find tying that date to a certificate of competency sits with product approvals: the county’s Product Control Division issues its own certificates of competency to building product companies, not to contractors. So the date is gone from this page. What the renewal page does say, read on 27 September 2026, is that certificates renew generally every two years, and that no continuing education is due for the term in which a certificate is first issued. Your own expiry date is printed on your certificate and shows in the county’s contractor search. The county renewal sits alongside the state one if you hold both, and how Florida contractor license renewal works at state level covers the other half of that calendar.

How do you book the county exam, and how is it different from the state one?

Applications go to Contractor Licensing at the Herbert S. Saffir Permitting and Inspection Center, 11805 SW 26 Street, by mail or in person. The county offers the forms as PDFs; its only online services are renewal and the contractor search. According to the county’s contractor examinations page, the board reviews your application first, and only once it approves do you get instructions for booking. Exams run several times a month, the deadline to apply is approximately four weeks before the exam date, and the tests come in English or Spanish.

The exams are written and delivered by Prov, Inc., a private testing company, not by the Professional Testing and Pearson VUE pairing behind the state exams. The Prov candidate information bulletin that the county links to, dated 15 June 2023, has you book at scheduler.provexam.com or on 801 733 4455 and lists 34 Prov testing centres in Florida. It also says, without softening it, that a candidate who sits the wrong test does not get the fee back, and that Prov does not decide which test you need. The county does, so get the exam name from Contractor Licensing before you pay.

Rule	Miami Dade county exam	State certification exam	Sources
Who runs it	Prov, Inc., booked online or by phone after the board approves you	Professional Testing approves, Pearson VUE schedules	Prov bulletin, June 2023; DBPR candidate booklet, July 2024
Business exam	Business Procedures: 75 questions in 3 hours, about 2.4 minutes each	Business and Finance: 120 scored questions in 6.5 hours, about 3.25 minutes each	Prov exam descriptions, 2022; DBPR candidate booklet
Pass mark	70 percent, or 75 percent for journeyman exams	70 percent	County examinations page; DBPR candidate booklet
Marking your books	Highlighting, underlining in ink and permanent tabs only	Permanent tabs, highlighting and underlining	Prov bulletin; DBPR 2026 reference lists
What is banned in the book	Pencil notes unless the county allows them, movable tabs, Post-it notes, photocopies, study guides	Written notes	Prov bulletin; DBPR 2026 reference lists
Sitting it again	Two days between attempts at Prov; the county’s own rules decide eligibility	No waiting period; the retake application must reach the vendor 30 days before the exam	Prov bulletin; rule 61G4-16.009
Seeing what you got wrong	A 90 minute review of missed questions for $80 per exam	Review available; not compared here	Prov bulletin

The business exam row is the one worth reading twice. The county’s Business Procedures paper, per the Prov exam descriptions, gives you less time per question than the state’s Business and Finance exam, and 5 of its 75 questions come from Chapter 10 of the county code itself, a book no state candidate opens. A Florida candidate who has already tabbed the state references for the state exam format still has a county book to tab. The state side of the retake row comes from rule 61G4-16.009, and the state marking rules are set out in what you can tab, highlight and write in your books.

One small honesty prize goes to the bulletin. It says plainly that buying study materials is not mandatory, then a page later offers its own practice exams at $25 each. That is still more candid than the prep course banner promising nobody passes without it. The Prov documents are the newest the county links to; if the county has issued newer ones, its examinations page is where they will appear.

What do the cities inside Miami Dade ask for on top?

The county certificate or state license gets you past RER, which handles permits in unincorporated Miami Dade. The cities run their own permit counters and their own contractor registration desks, and each has a list. South Miami, to take one published example, asks a state certified contractor for the state license and the county local business tax receipt, asks a county certified contractor for the certificate of competency and the same tax receipt, and asks everyone for a certificate of general liability insurance naming the city as certificate holder, with workers’ compensation on it or a state exemption certificate alongside.

Homestead publishes a registration form of its own, adding a Miami Dade municipal contractor’s tax receipt to the list. Expect a version of this in every city you pull a permit in. None of it is an exam and none of it is expensive, but it is a morning of paperwork per city, better done before the client is standing on the driveway asking when the work starts.

If your ambitions include the trades the county licenses under the state categories, how to get a Florida general contractor license and the electrical contractor license both explain the state exams involved, and the Florida roofing license covers the trade Miami Dade weather makes busiest.

What has changed since this was first published?

• As of September 2026 the county fees are unchanged: $240 for the journeyman application and exam, $315 for the master personal certificate and $315 more for the business certificate, with pass marks of 75 and 70 percent, per the county’s contractor licensing page, read on 27 September 2026 and matching the figures first published on 5 September.
• Newly confirmed on 27 September 2026: the $300,000 and $50,000 liability minimums, now traced to a municipal government page rather than prep company sites, and the two year renewal cycle, stated on the county’s renewal page.
• Still unconfirmed on 27 September 2026: the renewal fee in dollars, which the renewal page asks for without stating, and the certificate expiry date. Contractor Licensing publishes 786 315 2880 as its number, and a phone call settles both faster than any web page does.
• Corrected on 14 October 2026: the 30 September expiry date was removed, because the only county source for it concerns product approval certificates, not contractor certificates. Added the same day: the county exam route through Prov, Inc. and a rule by rule comparison with the state exam, the veteran fee waiver and reinstatement hours from the county licensing page, and the exact business tax exemption in section 205.065.

What could not be verified for this article?

The two layer structure, the free and voluntary status of state certified registration, the fees, pass marks and experience requirements were read from Miami Dade’s own pages and forms, and the statutory position from sections 489.113 and 489.117 on the Legislature’s own site. Those parts are solid.

Three things are less certain. The renewal fee in dollars appears on no official page we could reach. The insurance minimums for county certificate holders, $300,000 per occurrence for bodily injury and $50,000 for property damage, were first found only on prep company sites; since 27 September 2026 they are confirmed on a government page, the City of Miami Beach contractor requirements, which lists them for Miami Dade licensed contractors, though still not on a county page we could reach. And the county exam formats and rules in the comparison table come from Prov documents dated 2022 and June 2023, the newest the county links to, so check the bulletin you receive with your application.

Frequently asked questions

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Rules and fees change without notice. This page was verified on the date shown and is rechecked regularly. If you hit something different, tell us in the comments.