Miami-Dade County Permit Search by Address (2026)

Every property in Miami-Dade and Broward has a permit history attached to it. Open permits, closed permits, voided permits, plan revisions, inspection records — all of it lives in publicly accessible municipal databases. You can pull most of it yourself for free in about 20 minutes, and every Miami-Dade or Broward homeowner should know how.

This article walks through the exact step-by-step method for pulling your property's permit history in Miami-Dade and Broward. It also covers the limitations of the do-it-yourself approach and when paying for professional research saves enough time and risk to be worth it.

What you'll need before you start

• Your property's folio number (Miami-Dade) or property ID (Broward) — a 13-digit number unique to every parcel. Find it on your most recent tax bill, or look it up using the Property Appraiser's address search.
• The municipality your property is in — this matters because every city in Miami-Dade and Broward keeps its own permit database. Unincorporated properties go through the county. Coral Gables, Doral, Miami Beach, and most other cities maintain their own systems.
• Your address — backup identifier if folio search fails.

Step 1: Find the folio number

Start here even if you plan to search by address. Addresses have been entered inconsistently across decades of records — abbreviations, unit numbers, directionals, and renamed streets all cause a search to miss permits that genuinely exist. The folio is the parcel's permanent identifier and does not have that problem.

1. Open the Miami-Dade Property Appraiser property search at miamidadepa.gov
2. Search by street address, or by owner name if you're not certain of the address format
3. The property record page displays the folio number — 13 digits, usually shown with hyphens
4. Copy it exactly. Note also the municipality shown on that page — this tells you which permit portal to use next, and it is the single most common thing people get wrong

The Property Appraiser record also shows year built, living area, and recorded sale history. Keep the year built handy: it's the fastest way to spot a permit gap later, because a structure that appears in the building sketch but has no matching permit is exactly what you're looking for.

Step 2: Search unincorporated Miami-Dade

For properties in unincorporated Miami-Dade — most of Kendall, Country Walk, The Hammocks, parts of West Kendall and South Dade — permits run through the county's RER (Regulatory and Economic Resources) system.

Note: Cutler Bay, Palmetto Bay and Pinecrest are incorporated municipalities with their own building departments — a county search will not return their permits. Cutler Bay is a common trap because it only incorporated in 2005, so a property there can carry pre-2005 permits at the county and post-2005 permits at the Town. See permit help in Cutler Bay.

1. Go to www.miamidade.gov/permits
2. Click "Permit Lookup" or "Search Permits"
3. Enter your folio number or address
4. The results page lists every permit ever filed on the property, with permit number, type, status, dates, and applicant information
5. Click each permit to see inspection records, plan revisions, and any associated code-enforcement actions

City of Miami

1. Go to iBuild.miamigov.com — the City of Miami's online permit portal
2. Use the address or folio search
3. Click into each permit for full inspection history and document downloads

City of Miami permits often include scanned PDFs of the original plans, inspection sign-offs, and Certificate of Occupancy where issued. This is one of the more transparent municipal portals in South Florida.

Coral Gables, Doral, Miami Beach, and other municipalities

Each city has its own portal. Common patterns:

• Coral Gables — accessible through coralgables.com → Departments → Development Services → Permit Search
• Doral — cityofdoral.com → Services → Building → Permit Search
• Miami Beach — miamibeachfl.gov → Online Services → Permit & Plan Tracking
• Pinecrest — pinecrest-fl.gov → Building & Planning → Permit Lookup
• Hialeah — hialeahfl.gov → City Services → Permits
• Homestead — cityofhomestead.com → Departments → Building → Permit Inquiry

Each portal works slightly differently. Some require account creation; most allow anonymous search. Each shows the same general data: permit number, application date, work type, status (open/closed/expired/voided), inspection history, and the applicant.

Broward County

1. For unincorporated Broward: broward.org/permits
2. For Fort Lauderdale: fortlauderdale.gov → Departments → Sustainable Development → Permit Search
3. For Hollywood: hollywoodfl.org → Departments → Building → Online Permit Search
4. For other Broward cities: each maintains its own portal — check the city's official website

How to read what you find

Once you have the list of permits on your property, look for these patterns:

Open permits

Any permit with status "Open," "In Progress," "Active," or anything other than "Closed," "Finaled," or "Voided." Open permits stay on the property record indefinitely until they're either finaled (passed final inspection) or voided (administratively closed). They surface during title searches, refinance underwriting, and four-point inspections, and they routinely block real estate transactions until resolved.

Expired permits

Permits that lapsed without final inspection. Many municipalities don't auto-close expired permits — they sit on the record indefinitely. Florida HB 803, effective July 1, 2026, will introduce uniform expiration rules for some county permits — see our HB 803 guide for details — but the legacy backlog of expired-but-not-closed permits will remain significant even after the new rules take effect.

Permit gaps

This is what most people miss. Compare the permit list against the visible structures and improvements on your property. If you have a pergola, deck, screen enclosure, room addition, garage conversion, pool, or any meaningful structure that doesn't appear in the permit list — that's a permit gap. It may indicate unpermitted work. Permit gaps are the single most common issue we surface during MyHausFax research.

Inspection failures

Within each permit, the inspection history shows passed and failed inspections. A pattern of failed inspections on a closed permit isn't necessarily a problem — but a failed inspection on an open permit is the reason the permit never closed and is the issue you'll need to resolve to get it closed.

Checking inspection and plan-review status

Permit status and plan-review status are two different lookups, and confusing them is a common source of false alarms. A permit that reads "open" may simply be mid-review rather than abandoned.

• Inspection history lives inside the individual permit record. Open the permit and look for the inspection list: type, date, inspector result. A permit with a passed final and no open items is effectively done even if the summary line hasn't updated.
• Plan review status applies to applications still in process — the drawings are with the reviewing disciplines (structural, electrical, mechanical, plumbing, zoning) and each signs off separately. A single discipline holding a correction is enough to keep the whole application open.
• Correction comments are usually attached to the review record rather than the permit summary. If a permit has been sitting open for months, the reason is almost always an unanswered correction comment nobody followed up on.

If you find a permit stalled on corrections, that's a resolvable situation — see responding to plan reviewer corrections.

Pulling archived plans and older records

Online portals are the weak point for older properties. Many departments digitized their records only from a certain year forward, which means a 1960s or 1970s home can show a suspiciously short permit history online while the original plan sets sit in an archive.

Before concluding that work was never permitted on an older home, request the archived records directly. Miami-Dade handles building plans and permit documents as a public-records request, and the municipalities do the same through their own clerks or building departments. Ask specifically for microfilm or archived plan sets by folio and address, not just the online permit summary.

This distinction matters financially. "No permit on record" and "no permit was ever issued" are different conclusions, and only the second one requires an after-the-fact permit. Treating the first as the second is how people end up paying to legalize work that was permitted correctly forty years ago.

Buyer's checklist before closing

If you're running this search because you're buying, work through all of the following rather than stopping at the permit list:

1. Confirm the jurisdiction on the Property Appraiser record, then search that specific portal — not just the county's
2. Pull the full permit list and flag anything not in "Closed," "Finaled," or "Voided" status
3. Compare permits against what you can see — pool, fence, deck, enclosure, addition, garage conversion, impact windows, roof, AC replacement
4. Check the code-enforcement database separately — it is not the same system as building permits
5. Check the Clerk of Courts for recorded liens, which appear in neither of the above
6. For any building past its recertification milestone, confirm the recertification status — that's tracked separately again
7. Get anything unresolved in writing before the inspection period closes, while you still have leverage to make it the seller's problem

Selling rather than buying? See whether you can sell a house with an open permit in Florida.

What the public portals don't show you

The DIY method has real limitations:

• Code-enforcement files are usually in a separate database from building permits. You have to check both. Code-enforcement liens may be recorded against the property even when the permit history looks clean.
• Recorded liens live in the Clerk of Courts records (different system again). Mortgages, judgments, lis pendens, federal tax liens, construction liens — none of these show up in the building permit search.
• Building recertification status in Miami-Dade is tracked in a separate system from building permits. A building past its recertification milestone (30 years inland or 25 years for qualifying coastal buildings under the post-Surfside program) with no recertification record may be on a Notice of Required Inspection that doesn't appear in standard permit search.
• Flood zone, coastal control line, hurricane evacuation designations are in FEMA and Miami-Dade Emergency Management systems.
• UCC filings and tax-deed cases live in state and county courts systems.
• Cross-municipal history — if your property has been annexed or rezoned over decades, some permit history may be in the previous jurisdiction's records, not the current one.

For a complete property compliance picture, you'd need to check 6–8 different government databases, cross-reference them, and interpret the legal status of each finding. That's roughly 4–8 hours of focused work for a single property if you know exactly where to look.

Broward County: same idea, different portal

If the property is in Broward County (not Miami-Dade), the equivalent permit-search portal is the Broward County Building Code Services portal at dpepp.broward.org/BCS. The interface differs from Miami-Dade's iApply system, but the same approach applies — search by address or folio number, pull the permit list, compare against visible structures, and flag gaps. Some Broward municipalities (Fort Lauderdale, Hollywood, Pompano Beach) maintain their own city-level permit portals in addition to the county portal; verify whether the property's jurisdiction is unincorporated Broward or an incorporated city before searching, because permits filed at the city level may not appear in the county database.

Once you've found an open permit — what to do next

The hardest part of the DIY search isn't finding open permits; it's knowing what to do with one. Open permits don't auto-close, can't be ignored, and surface during every title search, refinance, or 40-year recertification on the property. For the resolution playbook — including how to close out a permit when the original contractor is unreachable, what the four to eight-week close-out timeline looks like, and how lenders treat open permits during underwriting — see what to do once you find an open permit.

When the DIY method is enough

The free public-portal method works well for:

• A quick sanity check on your property before a small project
• Verifying a single permit is properly closed
• Researching the previous owner's history for context
• Confirming an inspection date you remember from years ago

When professional research is worth it

The free method falls short when you need:

• A complete compliance picture across permit, code enforcement, recorded liens, recertification status, and environmental flags
• A documented report you can hand to a title company, lender, attorney, or insurance underwriter
• Identification of permit gaps — work that should have been permitted but wasn't (you can't easily find this yourself; it requires comparing the permit list against on-the-ground reality)
• A reproducible score that quantifies the property's compliance posture for before/after comparison

For this we built the MyHausFax™ Property Compliance Report. We pull from every relevant government database, cross-reference everything, identify the permit gaps, and deliver it as a one-page report with a 0-to-100 HauScore™ on the cover. The report includes the line-item findings, links to the source records, and the resolution path for any issues identified.

It's free with every Permit Solutions Services consultation. If you'd rather not spend an afternoon on six government portals, request a Snapshot and we'll deliver the same picture (and more) within one business day.

Permit Solutions Services is a Miami-based specialist firm resolving permit violations, after-the-fact permits, open permits, and complex compliance cases across Miami-Dade and Broward counties. Request a free MyHausFax™ Snapshot or call 305-600-9422.