Two things about Florida sales tax catch out businesses that are otherwise well run. The first is nexus — the point at which you are obliged to register and collect at all. The second is the county surtax, which is where most of the money actually goes missing, because it is not one rate and it is not sourced the way people assume.
This covers both, and the specific places we see them go wrong.
When Florida says you have to register
There are two independent routes into a collection obligation, and either one is enough on its own.
Physical presence. An office, a warehouse, an employee, a contractor performing services on your behalf, inventory sitting in a third-party fulfilment centre in the state, or repeated attendance at Florida trade shows. Inventory is the one that surprises people: goods stored in a Florida fulfilment centre create nexus even though the business has never set foot in the state.
Economic presence. Since July 1, 2021, a remote seller with more than $100,000 in taxable retail sales delivered into Florida in the previous calendar year has to register and collect. Note what is absent: unlike most states, Florida has no transaction-count threshold. Two hundred small orders do not trigger anything. One large one can.
Marketplace providers — Amazon, Etsy, and the rest — are separately required to collect on sales made through their platform. That does not automatically excuse the seller from registering for its own direct sales, and it does not remove the obligation to report.
The surtax is a county tax, and it is not optional
Florida’s state sales tax rate is one rate. On top of it, counties levy a discretionary sales surtax, and those rates differ from county to county and change from year to year as local referenda pass and expire. The Department of Revenue publishes the current table each year as form DR-15DSS. A rate you memorised two years ago is a rate you are now getting wrong.
Two rules do the damage:
- The surtax is sourced by destination, not by where you are. A Weston business delivering to a customer in another county charges that county’s surtax, not Broward’s. For a business that sells across the tri-county area, that means the applicable rate changes from invoice to invoice.
- On tangible personal property, the surtax applies only to the first $5,000 of a single sale. Sell a $40,000 piece of equipment and the surtax is due on $5,000 of it, not on all of it.
The $5,000 cap applies to tangible personal property. It does not apply to taxable services, admissions, or transient rentals — those are subject to the surtax on the full amount. Applying the cap where it does not belong is the mirror image of the more common error, and it shows up in audits just as reliably.
Where it actually goes wrong
Four recurring problems, in rough order of how much they cost:
- One surtax rate hard-coded into the invoicing system. Usually the home county’s. Every out-of-county delivery is then wrong, in one direction or the other, on every invoice, until someone checks.
- The $5,000 cap not applied at all. Common in businesses selling equipment or bulk orders. This one over-collects, which sounds harmless and is not: tax collected is tax owed to the state, and the customer has a claim on the difference.
- Registering late after economic nexus was crossed. The obligation starts when the threshold is met, not when you notice. Uncollected tax on past sales does not disappear; it becomes the seller’s liability, plus penalty and interest.
- Exemption certificates not on file. A resale or exemption certificate you cannot produce at audit is a sale you collected no tax on and now owe tax on. Certificates need to be current and retrievable, not filed once in 2019.
If you are already behind
Florida operates a voluntary disclosure programme. Coming forward before the Department contacts you generally limits the look-back period and abates penalty, where an assessment that starts with an audit notice does neither. The arithmetic almost always favours disclosing.
The practical first step is smaller than it sounds: pull twelve months of sales by delivery county, compare the surtax actually charged against the DR-15DSS rate for that county in that period, and see whether the two agree. In our experience they usually do not, and the size of the gap tells you how urgent the rest of the conversation is.
