ePermits in South Florida: The Complete Online Permitting Guide (2026)
- Endless Life Design
- 1 hour ago
- 9 min read
Not long ago, getting a building permit in South Florida meant a morning in line at a government counter, an armful of rolled drawings, and a numbered ticket. Today the counter is a login screen. From Miami-Dade's e-permitting menu to Broward's ePermits OneStop, Fort Lauderdale's LauderBuild, Palm Beach County's ePZB, and the Accela portals of the Treasure Coast, every permit in the region now begins, moves, and closes online — and the owners who understand these portals hold a real advantage over those still learning them one rejection at a time. This guide maps the major e-permitting systems from Miami-Dade to St. Lucie County: how to open an account, upload plans, survive digital plan review, and track a permit to final inspection. And if you would rather never touch a portal at all, Endless Life Design operates these systems daily on clients' behalf. Call (305) 680-3283.
In This Guide
What E-Permitting Is — and Why South Florida Went Online
Miami-Dade E-Permitting: County Portals and the City of Miami's iBuild
Broward E-Permitting: ePermits OneStop, LauderBuild, and City Portals
Palm Beach, Martin, and St. Lucie: ePZB and the Accela Portals
Your First Online Application, Step by Step
Digital Plan Review, Electronic Seals, and the Corrections Cycle
E-Permit Fees and Realistic Timelines
Why Online Permit Applications Get Rejected
The Done-for-You Option: Government Permit Processing by Endless Life Design
What E-Permitting Is — and Why South Florida Went Online
E-permitting — searched as epermit, epermits, e permitting, or e-permitting — is the delivery of the entire permit lifecycle through a web portal: application intake, document upload, plan review, fee payment, permit issuance, inspection scheduling, and final closeout. Instead of a physical folder moving desk to desk, a digital record moves discipline to discipline, and the applicant can watch it happen. In South Florida, where every review is conducted under the Florida Building Code 8th Edition (2023), the portals also serve as the system of record: the approved plans, the permit card, the inspection results, and the certificate that closes the job all live in the same account that opened it.
The counties did not go online for convenience alone. Permit activity across Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach generates an enormous volume of records, and paper could not keep pace — especially during hurricane season, June 1 through November 30, when roofing, shutter, and generator applications surge all at once. Digital intake lets multiple reviewers examine the same plans simultaneously, cuts the resubmittal cycle from courier runs to an overnight upload, and gives buyers, insurers, and title companies a public window into any property's permit history. The portals are genuinely better — but only for applicants who know how each one behaves.
Miami-Dade E-Permitting: County Portals and the City of Miami's iBuild
Miami-Dade County routes unincorporated-area permits through the Building online services on miamidade.gov, where the county's e-permitting menu lets owners and registered contractors apply for permits, pay fees, schedule inspections, and print permit cards, while construction documents for plan review are submitted electronically through the county's online plan status and application submittal system. In-person help still exists at the county's Permitting and Inspection Center, but the file itself is digital from intake to closeout. Because Miami-Dade sits in the High-Velocity Hurricane Zone, uploads here must include product approval documentation — typically Miami-Dade Notices of Acceptance (NOAs) — for windows, doors, roofing, and shutters, and reviewers check those documents as closely as the drawings.
The county portal is not the whole story. The City of Miami runs its own building department and its own portal, branded iBuild, with its own plan review workflow and fee schedule — a Miami-Dade County account does nothing for a Brickell or Coconut Grove address. Coral Gables, Miami Beach, Hialeah, Doral, and the county's other municipalities likewise maintain their own systems. The first e-permitting decision in Miami-Dade is therefore jurisdictional: identify which government owns the address, then open the account in that system. Filing in the wrong portal is not a small error; it costs weeks before a reviewer ever sees the plans.
Broward E-Permitting: ePermits OneStop, LauderBuild, and City Portals
Broward County's portal is ePermits OneStop on broward.org, the intake point for permits under county jurisdiction — including county-level reviews that can attach to a project regardless of city. But Broward's defining feature is fragmentation: more than thirty municipalities each operate their own building department and their own portal. Fort Lauderdale runs LauderBuild, an Accela-based system where applications, uploads, inspection scheduling, and public record searches all live under one login; Hollywood, Pompano Beach, Coral Springs, and the rest maintain systems of their own. Like Miami-Dade, Broward lies within the High-Velocity Hurricane Zone, so product approval documentation — including Miami-Dade NOAs — accompanies nearly every exterior application.
Operating in Broward means managing a portfolio of accounts, each with its own registration requirements, naming conventions, and quirks. Contractors must typically register with each city before its portal will accept an application in their name, and several cities require notarized owner authorizations or city-specific forms uploaded alongside the standard package. The practical advice is unglamorous: before starting any Broward application, read the host city's electronic submittal requirements page top to bottom, because a package that sails through LauderBuild can bounce in Hollywood over a checklist line no one warned you about.
Palm Beach, Martin, and St. Lucie: ePZB and the Accela Portals
Palm Beach County consolidated its planning, zoning, and building operations into the ePZB portal, and the county now encourages fully online applications for permits in its jurisdiction, supported by an e-permits site for inspections, records, and contractor services. Boca Raton, Delray Beach, West Palm Beach, Jupiter, and the county's other cities run their own portals. North along the coast, Martin County operates Accela Citizen Access with an integrated ePermitHub Digital Plan Room, the City of Stuart maintains its own system, and St. Lucie County likewise runs its permitting through Accela Citizen Access, while the City of Port St. Lucie offers its own suite of building online services. Different brands, same anatomy: account, record, upload, review, payment, inspection.
One accuracy point matters enormously in these counties. Palm Beach, Martin, and St. Lucie sit outside the High-Velocity Hurricane Zone, so reviewers there do not ask for HVHZ compliance — they ask for statewide Florida Product Approval showing impact-rated, product-approved assemblies suitable for the wind-borne debris region. Products carrying Miami-Dade approvals are commonly accepted because they meet or exceed the requirement, but the paperwork you upload must match what the jurisdiction actually requires. Uploading the wrong approval format — or none — is among the most common correction comments issued on the Treasure Coast.
Your First Online Application, Step by Step
Every portal differs in skin, but a first application follows the same spine:
Confirm jurisdiction — county or city — before creating anything; the property appraiser's record and the municipality's website settle it.
Create the portal account and complete any contractor registration the jurisdiction requires, with license and insurance certificates on file.
Select the permit type and complete the application with the legal description, valuation, and scope exactly as the plans show.
Upload the document package: signed and sealed construction plans, site plan, energy calculations, product approvals, boundary survey, and the owner's authorization.
Pay the intake or upfront fee so the record enters the review queue.
Record the Notice of Commencement when required and track every review result in the portal.
The document that most often arrives late is the boundary survey. Additions, pools, fences, seawalls, and new construction all need a current one, and a proper survey follows a deliberate seven-day process — plat and deed research, a field visit to locate corners and improvements, data processing, and a signed-and-sealed drawing the reviewer will accept. Order it the day the project becomes real, not the day the portal asks for it. Endless Life Design coordinates the survey alongside the plans so the upload happens once and completely. Call (305) 680-3283 to have the entire package assembled for you.
Digital Plan Review, Electronic Seals, and the Corrections Cycle
Behind every portal sits an electronic plan review engine — ePermitHub digital plan rooms, ProjectDox, or workflows built around Bluebeam markups — where each reviewing discipline examines the same file set simultaneously and posts comments directly onto the drawings. Plans must be uploaded in the format the jurisdiction specifies, usually searchable PDF with specific file naming conventions, and sealed by a Florida-licensed architect or engineer. Most South Florida jurisdictions now accept — and many prefer — digitally signed and sealed plans, where the design professional's electronic seal and third-party digital certificate replace the ink and embossment of the paper era.
When a discipline issues comments, the record flips to a corrections status and the clock becomes yours. The efficient response answers every open comment from every discipline in a single resubmittal, with a written response letter and revised sheets that clearly identify the changes; the slow response fixes one reviewer's comment while another's sits unanswered, adding a full cycle each time. Reviewers are consistent about this across every county: complete resubmittals move, partial resubmittals stall. Watch the record after each cycle, because no portal will call you when comments post.
E-Permit Fees and Realistic Timelines
Permit fees across South Florida are set by each jurisdiction's adopted fee schedule and most commonly scale with construction valuation, with separate components for plan review, inspections, and state-mandated surcharges — plus, in many portals, a modest electronic processing or technology fee. Small trade permits carry modest fees, while new construction and major renovations scale with project value. Fee schedules are amended regularly, so confirm current amounts on the issuing jurisdiction's own site before budgeting; any specific number printed in a blog post ages fast.
Timelines follow completeness, not hope. Simple trade permits filed clean can issue in days in many systems; complete single-family or commercial packages commonly take weeks through first review; and every correction cycle adds days to weeks more. Queues also swell before and during hurricane season, June 1 through November 30, when storm-protection work floods intake. The single best predictor of a fast e-permit is boring: a complete, correctly formatted, correctly sealed package that never earns a correction letter. That is the entire strategy — and the entire reason experienced applicants seem to move faster in the very same portals.
Why Online Permit Applications Get Rejected
The rejection reasons repeat across every system: an application filed in the wrong jurisdiction; plans missing a required signature or seal; files in the wrong format or violating the portal's naming conventions; product approval documents absent or mismatched to the assemblies drawn; energy calculations that contradict the plans; site plans that disagree with the survey; an expired contractor registration; and a missing Notice of Commencement discovered at the first inspection. None of these is an engineering judgment — they are process failures, and they consume most of the calendar time owners attribute to slow government.
The portals themselves add failure modes paper never had. Uploads that exceed size limits, scanned plans that are not searchable, seals applied as flat images instead of valid digital signatures, documents loaded into the wrong slot, and resubmittals that overwrite the wrong file version can each bounce a package without a human ever reviewing the design. Every jurisdiction publishes its electronic submittal standards; treating that document as seriously as the building code is what separates a two-cycle permit from a six-cycle one.
The Done-for-You Option: Government Permit Processing by Endless Life Design
Everything above is work you can do yourself — and work you never have to. Endless Life Design's Government Permit Processing Service, a flat $4,500, is the done-for-you answer to South Florida e-permitting: we operate every county and municipal portal in our service area daily on clients' behalf — Miami-Dade's e-permitting systems and the City of Miami's iBuild, Broward's ePermits OneStop and Fort Lauderdale's LauderBuild, Palm Beach County's ePZB, and the Accela portals of Martin and St. Lucie. We open the accounts, prepare the applications, assemble and format the documents, coordinate the seven-day boundary survey, upload digitally sealed plans, answer every reviewer comment, schedule the inspections, and drive the permit to final sign-off while you receive status updates instead of homework.
You are also protected by how we do business. Endless Life Design is a licensed Florida general contractor — verify us yourself at myfloridalicense.com — and on residential work we cap the deposit at 10%, in line with Florida's consumer protections. Whether the project is one stubborn correction letter, a full new-construction package, or a portfolio of properties across three counties and a dozen portals, the service is the same: one team, one fee, every portal handled. Call (305) 680-3283 and hand the logins to someone who lives in them.
Skip the Line That Moved Online
E-permitting replaced the counter, not the complexity. The portals are faster for applicants who know them and merciless to applicants who do not — and every jurisdiction in South Florida now assumes you are one of the former. Learn the systems, file complete, respond fast, and track everything; or hand the whole process to a team that does exactly that every business day from Miami-Dade to the Treasure Coast. Endless Life Design files, tracks, corrects, and closes permits through every portal named in this guide. Call (305) 680-3283 and start your project with the permit already in motion.
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