By Skip Foster, Red Tape Florida
If you filed for a residential building permit in Tallahassee on New Year’s Day, history says you’d be holding it sometime just after the Fourth of July.
In Gainesville, you’d have it before the Christmas decorations came down.
Tallahassee takes an average of 196.6 days to approve a residential permit and 214.7 days for a commercial one, according to Red Tape Index, the national permitting analysis featured in Part 1 of this series. Gainesville takes 5.2 days. Orlando takes 7.4. The median for Florida’s ranked cities is about 28.
Do the math and Florida’s capital is roughly seven times slower than the typical Florida city, more than 26 times slower than Orlando and 38 times slower than Gainesville.
Out of 539 American cities Red Tape Index scored, Tallahassee ranks 519th.
And before anyone at City Hall cries foul, consider the source.
Red Tape Index is a national permitting data platform built by Labrynth, an artificial intelligence company. It has no affiliation with Red Tape Florida, the City of Tallahassee, the state of Florida or anyone else with a stake in these results. It scored all 539 cities the same way, using the same eight permit categories and the same formula.
This isn’t Red Tape Florida’s opinion of Tallahassee. It’s the verdict of an outside company with no reason to care how Tallahassee comes out. For a city that treats every ‘Best Places’ list as a press release, Tallahassee is about to discover that rankings cut both ways.
No excuses in the data
When a city lands at the bottom of a ranking, the first defense is usually that the numbers are wrong.
Tallahassee doesn’t get that defense.
Red Tape Index publishes only its top 500 cities, and some Florida cities fell below that line because their records were incomplete or unreliable. Tallahassee isn’t one of them. Its data is complete, covering all eight permit categories the index measures with no estimates, and it’s built on 79,567 permits.
In other words, Tallahassee isn’t at the bottom because nobody could measure it. It’s at the bottom because somebody did.
“Tallahassee deserves credit for one thing: its data is complete. We aren’t guessing about Tallahassee. We’re measuring it,” said Shaq Rahman, head of go-to-market for Red Tape Index. “And what the data shows is that a permit there takes months, while cities like Gainesville and Orlando, working under the same state laws, approve them in about a week. That gap isn’t about the rules. It’s about how the work gets done.”
To be precise about what’s being measured: the clock runs from the day an application is filed to the day the permit is issued, so it includes time applicants spend on revisions. The figures reflect each city’s available permit history, generally through August 2025. Every city was measured the same way. Gainesville’s applicants revise their plans, too.
None of this will surprise anyone who has tried to build something in Tallahassee. Red Tape Florida has already documented how a $25 million downtown hotel project was held up over disputed inspection items, including the color of an address label.
And even when building permits are issues, the City has all sorts of other roadblocks to use, as the now infamous “The Amazing Adventures of Midtown Reader and the Sidewalk of Doom” series illustrated.
Remember, this is the city where the Legislature meets every year. Lawmakers who pass bills telling local governments to speed up permitting can see the problem from the Capitol windows.
The rest of the bottom
Tallahassee has company, just not much.
Of the seven Florida cities that were scored but fell outside the top 500, Red Tape Index says four are there because of performance, not data problems:
| City | Rank (of 539) | Residential | Commercial |
| Pensacola | 512 | 94.8 days | 163.8 days |
| North Port | 517 | 219.3 days | 346.6 days |
| Tallahassee | 519 | 196.6 days | 214.7 days |
| Lehigh Acres | 524 | 264.4 days | 258.9 days |
Approval times are averages. Source: Red Tape Index.
North Port deserves its own mention. Its commercial permits average 346.6 days, almost a full year, and its residential permits are even slower than Tallahassee’s. Lehigh Acres, an unincorporated community where Lee County handles permitting, is slower still on homes, at 264.4 days.
Pensacola looks fast by comparison, which says more about the company it keeps than about Pensacola. At 94.8 days for a residential permit, it’s still more than three times slower than the state median.
And some of Florida’s biggest names barely made the published list at all. Miami ranks 477th, at 110.6 days for residential and 122.3 for commercial. Fort Myers ranks 451st, at 99 days residential. Winter Haven squeaked in at 499th, barely inside the cutoff, with commercial permits averaging 158 days.
The ones that can’t, or won’t, show their work
Slow is bad. Unknowable is worse.
Boca Raton’s records show routine plumbing and electrical permits averaging more than 750 days, while neighboring Palm Beach County cities handle the same permits in under two months. Red Tape Index treats Boca’s numbers as a reporting problem and doesn’t rank the city. So either Boca Raton takes two years to approve a water heater, or it can’t accurately report its own permit records. Neither is a good look.
St. Petersburg reported only new-construction permits. Poinciana recorded very few permits at all.
Then there are the 12 Florida cities with more than 50,000 residents that didn’t share enough data to be scored: Coconut Creek, Davie, Doral, Lauderhill, Margate, Miramar, North Miami, Sebring, St. Augustine, St. Cloud, Tamarac and Weston.
Residents and builders in those cities have no way to know how their city hall stacks up. That may be the point.
A state that ranks 41st
Florida likes to think of itself as the place where government gets out of the way. On permitting, the numbers say otherwise.
Red Tape Index ranks Florida 41st among the states. The state ranking takes in permitting across all of Florida’s cities and counties, including many outside the 500 cities in the published list. Florida’s best cities are fast, the company said. The rest of the state is slower, and that’s what drags Florida down.
Part 1 of this series showed that Florida cities can approve a permit in a week. Orlando does it. Gainesville does it. The Villages does it in less than five days.
Which means the cities at the bottom can’t claim it’s impossible. They can only claim it isn’t a priority.