Do Florida Contractors Charge Sales Tax? What the Trades Need to Know

Usually, no. Florida contractors working on real property — building, remodeling, or repairing anything attached to land or a structure — generally don't charge the customer sales tax on the job. Instead, you pay sales tax on the materials when you buy them, as the "final consumer." But retail sales of goods are different, and the contract type decides everything.

That one distinction — real-property improvement versus retail sale — is where most Jacksonville contractors get sales tax right or wrong. Here's how the rules actually work, what they look like at the supply house, and why the Florida Department of Revenue's version of "wrong" arrives with a bill attached.

First, the rate: what sales tax costs in Jacksonville

Florida's general state sales tax is 6%. Duval County adds a 1% discretionary surtax on top, which puts Jacksonville at roughly 7%. Surtax rates vary county by county and do change, so confirm the current rate with the Florida Department of Revenue before you build it into a bid.

That county-by-county part matters more than most trades realize. If you run jobs across Northeast Florida — Duval one week, St. Johns or Clay the next — the surtax on your material purchases can differ depending on where you take delivery. It's one more reason every supply-run receipt needs to land in your books instead of the dashboard of the truck.

The main rule: on real-property work, you don't charge the customer

When you contract to improve real property — a new roof, a kitchen remodel, framing, a concrete driveway, cabinets fastened to the wall — Florida generally treats you as the final consumer of the materials. Under a lump-sum contract (and most common contract forms), that means three things:

• You pay sales tax on materials when you buy them — at the supply house, at checkout, at roughly 7% in Duval County.
• You do not charge the customer sales tax on the improvement — not on the materials, not on the labor.
• The tax is a job cost. It belongs inside your material costs when you price the work. You recover it in the bid, not as a line item on the invoice.

Rule of thumb: if what you install becomes part of the building or the land, you're usually the consumer. The tax gets paid at the supply house — not collected on your invoice.

One caution: Florida's treatment can shift with the contract form — lump-sum, cost-plus, retail-sale-plus-installation, and itemized contracts aren't all handled identically. If your contracts are anything other than plain lump-sum, confirm the specifics with your accountant or the Department of Revenue before you assume.

The resale-certificate trap

This is the mistake that shows up in audits again and again. A contractor gets a Florida resale certificate, hands it to the supplier, and buys materials tax-free — for a remodel. That's not what a resale certificate is for. If those materials went into a real-property job, you were supposed to pay tax on them at purchase, and the DOR will assess that tax later, with penalty and interest on top. Resale certificates are for goods you actually resell as goods.

When you DO collect sales tax

The flip side: some contractor transactions are retail sales of tangible goods, and on those you generally must register, collect tax from the customer, and remit it:

• Selling goods that stay goods. A free-standing appliance, a window unit, surplus material sold to another contractor — that's retail. Collect the tax.
• Retail sale plus installation. Sell a customer an appliance and install it, and the sale of the goods is generally taxable even though installation is part of the deal.
• Repairing tangible personal property. Fixing equipment or items — as opposed to the building itself — is generally a taxable transaction too.

Notice the line between the two isn't your trade — it's the transaction. A single Jacksonville business can have both kinds in the same month: a remodel where no tax is charged, and an appliance sale where it must be. That's why "contractors never charge sales tax" and "contractors always charge sales tax" are both wrong, and why your records need to show which was which.

Use tax: the quiet one that catches material buyers

Buy materials online or from an out-of-state supplier and pay no Florida sales tax at checkout? You owe use tax — the same combined rate, roughly 7% in Duval — self-reported on the same sales-and-use tax return (the DR-15). Nobody sends you a bill for it; you're supposed to accrue it yourself.

This is one of the most commonly missed items in contractor audits. An auditor who finds out-of-state material invoices has one question: where's the use tax? If the answer is "the what?", every untaxed purchase in the lookback window becomes part of the assessment.

What getting it wrong actually costs

The Florida Department of Revenue can generally look back three years in an audit — longer if returns were never filed. An assessment isn't just the missed tax: penalties and interest stack on top, multiplied across every transaction in the window. The common triggers are all avoidable:

• Resale-certificate misuse — tax-free materials that went into real-property jobs.
• No use-tax accrual — years of online and out-of-state purchases, nothing self-reported.
• Tax collected but not remitted — if you charge a customer tax, even when you shouldn't have, that money belongs to the state.
• Mixed transactions, no records — retail sales and improvement contracts blended together with nothing to show which was which.

Clean books make DOR filings painless

Every rule above gets decided by records. The contractor who wins an audit isn't the one with the cleverest argument — it's the one whose books already show the answer. In practice that looks like:

• Materials coded to each job with tax-paid receipts attached — job costing does double duty here, protecting your margins and your audit file at once.
• A use-tax habit — every untaxed purchase flagged and accrued monthly, not reconstructed in a panic.
• Retail sales separated from contract income, so collected tax is tracked and remitted on time.
• Filings built from reconciled numbers, not estimates.

And if the books are months behind, the fix starts one step earlier: get current first. That's exactly what catch-up bookkeeping for Jacksonville contractors exists for — once you're caught up, sales tax turns into a small monthly chore instead of an annual gamble.

Seaside Business Solutions handles this for Jacksonville construction and trades businesses every week, in English and Spanish, from the Arlington office on Rogero Road. If you're not sure your setup would survive an auditor's first hour, a free first look at your books will tell you where you stand. And for your specific contracts, always confirm the details with your accountant or the Florida Department of Revenue — this is general guidance, and the rules hinge on contract type.