How to Start a Cleaning Business in Florida

Florida is one of the easier states in the country to start a cleaning business — no state income tax, no statewide cleaning license, and a steady customer base across snowbird condos, vacation rentals, residential subdivisions, and a deep commercial sector. The piece operators most often get wrong is the sales-tax rule: commercial cleaning is taxable, residential isn't, and the way you invoice a mixed customer determines whether the whole thing gets taxed. That, plus the 4-employee workers' comp threshold and the September 30 minimum-wage step-up, covers most of what's distinctive about doing business here.

1. Pick a business structure

Most Florida cleaning operators land on an LLC. A sole proprietorship is free and has no annual report, but it offers no liability shield — a slip-and-fall at a client's house, a damaged piece of furniture, or an employee-driving-on-the-job claim can reach your personal bank account. An LLC costs $125 to form and $138.75 a year to keep alive, in exchange for keeping business liability and personal liability in separate buckets.

To form one, file Articles of Organization with the Florida Division of Corporations through Sunbiz. The fee is $125 total — $100 for the Articles plus a $25 mandatory registered-agent designation. Sunbiz typically processes online filings within a few business days. There is no official SLA.

Once active, your LLC files an annual report through Sunbiz every year between January 1 and May 1 for $138.75. The $400 late penalty after May 1 is non-waivable; missing the report by the third Friday in September results in administrative dissolution. Set the calendar reminder now.

If formation paperwork isn't where you want to spend your first afternoon, services like Northwest Registered Agent will file the Articles and serve as your registered agent for a modest annual fee.

2. Register with the state

Run a name search in Sunbiz to confirm the name you want is distinguishable from existing Florida entities. The Articles ask for your manager(s) or member(s), your principal place of business, your mailing address, and your registered agent — a person or business with a physical Florida street address (no P.O. boxes) who signs accepting the designation.

If you intend to operate under any name other than your legal name or your LLC's exact registered name, file a Fictitious Name registration with Sunbiz. The fee is $50 for a five-year term, and Florida requires you to advertise the fictitious name at least once in a newspaper in the county of your principal place of business before filing — you certify compliance on the application rather than submitting proof. That newspaper-ad step catches more new operators off guard than any other piece of Florida formation paperwork.

3. Get your EIN and a business bank account

Apply for a free Employer Identification Number at irs.gov. There is no fee, despite what several copycat sites suggest, and the application takes about ten minutes. With the EIN letter and your stamped Sunbiz Articles in hand, most Florida banks will open a business checking account the same day. From day one, run every dollar of cleaning income and every supply purchase through that account — paired with QuickBooks, that single discipline makes sales-tax filings and the annual report dramatically easier.

4. Business licenses and permits

Florida has no statewide cleaning-business license. The Department of Business and Professional Regulation doesn't regulate routine cleaning; only adjacent specialties like mold assessment or mold remediation require DBPR licensure. What you do file in Florida is a Local Business Tax Receipt — and you typically file more than one.

A Florida operator inside city limits usually needs both a city BTR and a county BTR. The tax year runs October 1 through September 30; renewals are due by September 30. The largest metros:

• Miami-Dade — Apply for the county BTR through BTExpress, then file the city BTR with whichever Miami-Dade municipality you work in (City of Miami, Miami Beach, Coral Gables, Hialeah, etc.). Miami Beach also requires a Certificate of Use before issuing a BTR.
• Orlando / Orange County — Apply for the city BTR through the City of Orlando, plus the county BTR through the Orange County Tax Collector.
• Tampa / Hillsborough County — Apply for the City of Tampa BTR through Tampa's online business portal, plus the Hillsborough County Local Business Tax separately.
• Jacksonville / Duval County — Jacksonville and Duval are a consolidated government, so most operators file a single Local Business Tax with the Duval County Tax Collector. Beach municipalities — Jacksonville Beach, Atlantic Beach, Neptune Beach — and Baldwin add their own city BTRs on top.

Late renewals carry a 10% penalty in October plus 5% per month after, capped at 25%, with additional penalties after 150 days delinquent. The amount is small. The interruption from a delinquency notice is not.

5. Sales tax on cleaning services

This is the section that has its own line item in Florida statute. Under Fla. Stat. §212.05(1)(i)1 and the implementing Fla. Admin. Code R. 12A-1.0091, the state treats cleaning services by who you're cleaning for:

• Commercial / nonresidential cleaning is taxable. Offices, retail, restaurants, warehouses, hospitals, hotels (the common areas) — taxable at 6% state sales tax plus the county discretionary sales surtax, which ranges from 0.5% to 1.5% depending on the county. The DR-15DSS surtax table is updated annually in November and lives on the FL DOR site.
• Residential cleaning is exempt. Single-family homes, apartments, condos, and nursing homes used as living accommodations are explicitly carved out of the cleaning-services tax by Rule 12A-1.0091.
• Pressure washing of buildings, parking lots, and parking structures is not taxed as a cleaning service under the rule. (It can be taxed differently if it qualifies as something else — verify before invoicing pressure-washing work.)
• Cleaning of tangible personal property (drapes, furniture, area rugs) is treated separately from real-property cleaning services.

The mixed-contract gotcha is the trap. If you bill one customer for both an office (taxable) and a home (exempt) on a single invoice without separately stating the charges, FL DOR's position is that the entire combined charge becomes taxable. The fix is mechanical: split the invoice. The Department's brochure GT-800015 ("Sales and Use Tax on Cleaning Services") is the document to keep on file.

Register for sales tax using Form DR-1 with the Florida Department of Revenue (there is no fee), then file your sales-tax returns on Form DR-15 on the schedule the Department assigns based on your collections.

6. Insurance and bonding

Carry general liability before your first paying job. Florida doesn't require it, but commercial clients and property managers almost universally ask for $1M per occurrence / $2M aggregate on a Certificate of Insurance. Next Insurance is one of the easier paths to a fast online quote for a small janitorial GL policy; a broker is usually worth talking to once you sign multi-location commercial accounts.

Workers' compensation has different thresholds depending on what kind of work you do:

• Non-construction cleaning — required when you have four or more employees, including full-time, part-time, corporate officers, and LLC members. Officers and LLC members can file a Notice of Election to be Exempt to avoid counting toward the four.
• Construction-classified cleaning — required at one or more employees. Routine janitorial doesn't fall under construction, but post-construction final-cleans tied to a contractor's job and mold remediation pulled in under specialized class codes can.

Penalties for being out of compliance start at the greater of $1,000 or twice the premium you would have owed for up to two years, plus the risk of a stop-work order. The Florida Division of Workers' Compensation page is the authoritative source.

Florida does not require any kind of state cleaning bond. Janitorial service bonds in the $10,000–$25,000 range are a market expectation for higher-end residential and many commercial accounts, but they are a sales credential, not state law.

7. Hiring and payroll

Florida's minimum wage steps up mid-year in 2026 under Amendment 2:

• $14.00/hour from January 1 through September 29, 2026 (tipped cash wage $10.98).
• $15.00/hour effective September 30, 2026 (tipped cash wage $11.98).
• After September 30, 2026, the rate indexes to inflation each year.

Your payroll system needs to handle the step-up automatically — running the second half of the year at the old rate is a wage-and-hour exposure.

Florida has no state paid family leave and no state paid sick leave, and Fla. Stat. §218.077 preempts most local paid-sick-leave mandates. The reemployment tax (Florida's name for state unemployment insurance) is 2.7% of the first $7,000 in wages per employee for new employers, paid quarterly to FL DOR.

Worker classification follows the IRS common-law / 20-factor test for federal purposes and a comparable framework for Florida reemployment tax — there is no AB 5-style ABC presumption in Florida. That gives operators more flexibility than they have in California or New Jersey, but it doesn't license sloppy classification. Cleaners working scheduled shifts on your accounts, under your supervision, with your supplies, generally read as employees under the IRS test no matter what the contract says. Gusto handles federal payroll, Florida reemployment tax, and new-hire reporting out of the box; the hiring guide covers the structural decision of when to bring on your first W-2 employee.

8. Get your first clients

Florida's cleaning market has more variety than most. Three veins to know about:

• Suburban residential and recurring maid service in places like Tampa, Jacksonville, the Orlando suburbs, Naples, and the Cape Coral / Fort Myers area, where Nextdoor, Google reviews, and realtor referrals carry most early bookings.
• Vacation rental and short-term rental turnover cleaning in Orlando (Disney-area), Miami Beach, the Florida Keys, and the Gulf Coast resort towns. Property managers and the Airbnb cleaning playbook matter more than reviews here; reliability and same-day turnover capacity win the contract.
• Commercial and office cleaning in the Miami, Tampa, Jacksonville, and Orlando CBDs, driven by direct outreach to property management firms.

In every vein, online reviews compound — set up the Google Business Profile the week you incorporate, ask every happy client within 48 hours of the job, and use a tool like NiceJob to automate the ask once the volume justifies it. Gated communities and HOAs in South Florida often require vendors to register with the management office and show a Certificate of Insurance before the first visit; budget time for that onboarding paperwork per community. The lead generation page has the longer playbook.

9. Pick your software stack

For a Florida operator whose work skews residential and short-term rental, the residential-cleaning-business stack is the right reference point. The two pieces that earn their keep first are a field-service platform like Jobber — or ZenMaid for an operator focused specifically on residential maid service — and a books platform that handles Florida's sales-tax-on-commercial-cleaning rule without manual workarounds. Payroll, insurance, and reviews fill in around those two.

A note on accuracy

Every fee, threshold, and rule above is current for Florida as of May 2026. Sunbiz filing fees, the Florida DOR discretionary sales surtax rates, the minimum wage step-up schedule, and Division of Workers' Compensation thresholds all change over time — verify with the Florida Division of Corporations, Department of Revenue, Division of Workers' Compensation, and your county tax collector before relying on a specific number for a filing or a tax decision. This guide is editorial, not legal or tax advice.