Unlicensed Contractor Lawyer

If the contractor you hired turns out to be unlicensed, Florida law is firmly on your side. An unlicensed contractor cannot enforce the contract against you (not in court, not through a lien), and you, the owner, can sue for three times your actual damages plus attorney’s fees. If they took a deposit and never pulled a permit, they may also have committed a crime. Whether they walked off the job, never showed up, or left work that failed inspection (or was never inspected, because no permit was ever pulled), the analysis is the same once you confirm the person you hired was never licensed to do the work.

Cory Cannon represents property owners across Tampa Bay (Hillsborough, Pinellas, Manatee, and Sarasota counties) in claims against unlicensed contractors. This page explains each remedy, the conditions attached to it, and the honest limits of what a lawsuit can actually collect.

Step one: confirm the contractor is actually unlicensed

“Licensed” has a specific meaning in Florida construction. It means state certification or registration under chapter 489 of the Florida Statutes: either a certified license issued through the Construction Industry Licensing Board, valid statewide, or a registered license limited to a particular local jurisdiction. General contracting, building and residential contracting, roofing, plumbing, electrical, air conditioning, and pool work all require a license. Trades such as painting, flooring, and cabinet installation generally do not.

Three things are commonly mistaken for a contractor’s license. None of them is one:

• A business tax receipt. This is a local tax registration, sometimes still called an “occupational license.” It says the person pays a local business tax. It says nothing about competency or licensure.
• A local competency card. Under section 489.13, a local certificate is not sufficient for state-regulated trades and does not make the holder eligible to pull a building permit for that work.
• Someone else’s license. A company must have a qualifying agent, the licensed individual legally responsible for its contracting work. If the company you signed with has no qualifying agent, the company is unlicensed, even if someone on the crew personally holds a license.

You can verify a license in minutes through the Department of Business and Professional Regulation’s free online license search. Check the exact name on your contract: the person or company you actually contracted with, not the name painted on the truck. Timing matters too: under Florida law, license status is generally measured when the contract took effect. A contractor who got licensed after signing your contract was still unlicensed for purposes of the remedies below.

What Florida law gives you: the short version

These are the core statutes. Each is covered in detail further down.

Section 489.128: their contract is unenforceable, yours is not

Section 489.128 is blunt. A contract entered into by an unlicensed contractor is “unenforceable in law or in equity by the unlicensed contractor.” In practice, that means:

• They cannot sue you for the unpaid balance of the contract.
• They cannot fall back on equitable theories, suing for the “reasonable value” of the work instead of the contract price. The statute closes that door too.
• They cannot enforce a construction lien against your property. A lien recorded by an unlicensed contractor is not just invalid; recording a claim the lienor knows is baseless can expose them to fraudulent-lien liability under chapter 713.

The unenforceability runs one way. The statute expressly preserves the rights of everyone other than the unlicensed contractor, so you keep your contract, lien, and bond remedies against them. You can sue on the very agreement they cannot enforce against you.

One caution before you act on this: do not simply stop paying based on a hunch. If your license research is wrong (the license is held through a qualifying agent you did not find, for example), withholding payment could put you in breach. Confirm the status first. It is a records question, and it is usually answerable within a day.

Section 768.0425: treble damages, costs, and attorney’s fees

Section 768.0425 is the remedy most owners have never heard of. When a consumer sues a contractor for negligence, malfeasance, or misfeasance (the statute’s words for careless or wrongful performance), and the contractor held neither a state certification nor a local contractor’s license where they were doing business, the consumer is entitled to three times the actual compensatory damages, in addition to costs and attorney’s fees.

“Treble damages” means the court multiplies your proven losses by three. Actual damages in these cases typically include the deposit or progress payments you lost, the cost to tear out and redo defective work, the cost to bring unpermitted work into compliance, and related repair costs. Prove $40,000 in actual damages against a qualifying unlicensed contractor, and the statute provides a $120,000 judgment plus your fees and costs.

Note the two-part license test. A contractor with no state license but a valid local license for a lawfully local trade may fall outside this statute. The door-knocking storm repair crew with no license of any kind (the most common version of this problem) is squarely inside it.

“The unlicensed contractor took my deposit”: section 489.126

The most frequent fact pattern we see: a large deposit, then silence. Florida has a statute written for exactly this. Under section 489.126, a contractor who takes an initial payment of more than 10 percent of the contract price on a residential project must:

• Apply for the necessary permits within 30 days after the payment is made (unless the work requires no permit), and
• Start the work within 90 days after all necessary permits issue,

unless you agreed in writing to longer periods. The statute also gives you a procedural tool: a written demand, sent by certified mail, directing the contractor to apply for the permits, start the work, or refund the payment. If the contractor does none of those within 30 days of receiving it and cannot show just cause, that failure supports the criminal case. The criminal penalties scale with the amount of money involved, from a misdemeanor for smaller sums to felony grades for larger ones.

This statute applies to licensed and unlicensed contractors alike, but with an unlicensed contractor, the demand letter does double duty. It documents the theft-type case, and it starts building the record for the civil claims above. We draft these demands to match the statute’s requirements exactly, because an informal angry letter does not trigger the statutory consequences.

Civil theft: a strong remedy that must be handled carefully

Section 772.11, Florida’s civil theft statute, allows a person whose money was stolen to recover three times their actual damages (minimum $200) plus attorney’s fees. Before filing, you must send a statutory written demand for the treble amount; the recipient gets 30 days to pay and obtain a release.

Two features make this claim different from an ordinary lawsuit, and we say so plainly:

• The proof standard is higher. You must prove by clear and convincing evidence (a heavier burden than the usual civil standard) that the contractor acted with criminal intent, not mere failure to perform. Taking a deposit while never intending to do the work can qualify. A job that fell apart usually does not.
• The fee risk runs both ways. If the court finds the civil theft claim was raised without substantial factual or legal support, the defendant recovers their attorney’s fees from you. That is written into the statute.

So we plead civil theft when the evidence supports intent (forged license numbers, serial victims, immediate disappearance after payment), and we leave it out when it does not. Adding a weak treble-damages count to a strong case is how owners end up funding the other side’s defense.

Criminal complaints and DBPR fines

Unlicensed contracting is itself a crime. Under section 489.127, a first offense is a first-degree misdemeanor, a repeat offense is a third-degree felony, and any offense committed during a state of emergency declared by the Governor is a third-degree felony, first offense or not. Separately, DBPR can impose an administrative fine of up to $10,000 on an unlicensed person under section 489.13.

A criminal case is not a substitute for a civil claim: the prosecutor controls it, and restitution comes on the court’s schedule, not yours. But a well-documented complaint to local law enforcement and DBPR costs little, creates pressure, and sometimes produces repayment faster than litigation. We routinely prepare both alongside the civil demand.

Storm chasers: the post-hurricane version of this problem

Every major storm brings a wave of unlicensed crews into Tampa Bay. After Hurricanes Helene and Milton in 2024, the pattern repeated across Pinellas and Hillsborough: out-of-area trucks, door-to-door solicitation, cash deposits collected on the spot, no permits, and phone numbers that stopped working by spring. The Legislature anticipated this. It is why unlicensed contracting during a declared emergency is a felony on the first offense.

The prevention rule is simple and worth stating even on a remedies page: after a storm, verify the license before signing anything, and be skeptical of any deposit demand above 10 percent from someone you cannot verify. The remedies on this page exist, but the cheapest dispute is the one you never have.

One routing note: if the storm-repair dispute you are actually facing is with your insurance company (an underpaid, delayed, or denied claim, or a contractor who took an assignment of your insurance benefits and is now fighting the carrier), that is a different body of law with different deadlines. Our property insurance claims practice handles those disputes.

The Recovery Fund will not cover an unlicensed contractor

Owners often assume Florida’s Homeowners’ Construction Recovery Fund will reimburse them. Read the eligibility rules first. Under section 489.141, the Fund pays only for losses caused by licensed contractors, and only for specific violations, after you obtain a judgment, restitution order, or arbitration award and exhaust other sources. A claim is barred outright if the contractor did not hold a valid license at the time of the contract.

The caps are also modest relative to real construction losses: for contracts signed on or after July 1, 2024, with claims made on or after January 1, 2025, the maximum is $100,000 per claim for general, building, and residential contractor (Division I) claims; older contracts carry lower caps. The practical point for this page is the first one: if your contractor was unlicensed, the Fund is closed to you. Your recovery comes from the contractor, which is why the collectability analysis below matters.

What if your licensed contractor used unlicensed subs?

A related but distinct problem: you hired a properly licensed general contractor, and you later learn some of the subcontractors on your project were unlicensed. The analysis changes.

• Your contract stands. Section 489.128 tests the license of the party who contracted with you. A licensed general contractor’s contract is not voided by its subs’ status, and neither are your rights under it.
• The contractor remains responsible to you. The general contractor answers for the work product, whoever performed it. Defective work by an unlicensed sub is a claim against your contractor under your contract, and knowingly using unlicensed subs is grounds for DBPR discipline against the contractor’s license.
• The unlicensed sub has no lien rights. If an unpaid, unlicensed subcontractor threatens to lien your home, section 489.128 stands between them and your title.

Disputes with a licensed contractor over responsibility for subcontracted work are contract fights, and we handle them as such. See our construction contract dispute page for how those cases work.

When the problem is the work itself

Unlicensed work is frequently defective work. That is much of why the licensing scheme exists. Unpermitted electrical, structural framing that never saw an inspector, roof-to-wall connections done by guesswork. If your case is less about the money taken and more about a building that now needs repair, the claim overlaps with our construction defects practice, and the same lawsuit can carry both.

Proving these cases is document and field work. We read the permit history, the contract file, and every repair estimate line by line, and we check claimed repair pricing against real bids from licensed local contractors rather than accepting round numbers. Where the failure is structural, we retain independent licensed engineers to document cause and scope. That way of working comes from the firm’s roots (generations in the Florida construction trades), and it matters in unlicensed-contractor cases, where the damages number you can prove is the number the court trebles. For a broader map of owner claims against contractors, see our guide, Can I sue my contractor in Florida?

The collectability question: an honest note

Here is the part many websites skip. The statutes above can produce a large judgment. A judgment is a piece of paper until it is collected, and unlicensed operators are, as a group, the least collectible defendants in construction: no insurance that responds, no bond, thin or hidden assets, sometimes no fixed address by the time suit is filed.

So before we recommend filing anything, we do the collection analysis first: entity records, property records, vehicles and equipment, other judgments, whether a criminal restitution order is realistically the stronger path. Sometimes the right answer is a full civil case. Sometimes it is a statutory demand, a DBPR complaint, and a criminal referral, with the lawsuit held in reserve. We would rather tell you at the first meeting that a case is not worth funding than send you invoices to chase a defendant who cannot pay.

How we handle these cases

A typical engagement runs in this order:

• Confirm the license facts. DBPR records, the contracting entity’s corporate status, the qualifying-agent question, and license status as of the contract date.
• Preserve the record. The contract or proposal, payment proof, texts and emails, advertisements or yard signs claiming licensure, permit records, and photographs of the work.
• Send the statutory demands. The section 489.126 certified-mail demand where a deposit was taken, and the section 772.11 civil theft demand where the evidence of intent supports it.
• File the complaints that cost you nothing. DBPR’s unlicensed activity unit and local law enforcement, with a documented package rather than a phone call.
• Litigate the claims the facts support. Breach of contract, section 768.0425 treble damages, civil theft where warranted, and, where a contractor misrepresented licensure, a claim under Florida’s Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act.

Fee structures vary with the case, and we will tell you plainly which fits yours. Some owner-side cases warrant a contingency or hybrid arrangement; others are better served by a flat-fee demand phase before any suit is filed. Because section 768.0425 and the civil theft statute both allow a prevailing consumer to recover attorney’s fees, fee-shifting is part of the strategy discussion from the first meeting, as is the two-way fee risk that comes with a civil theft count.

Talk to a construction litigation attorney

If you hired an unlicensed contractor in the Tampa Bay area (whether they took a deposit and vanished or left you with work that has to be torn out), the sooner the license facts and payment records are locked down, the stronger every remedy on this page becomes. Cory Cannon handles these cases as part of our construction litigation practice. The initial consultation is free, and the first thing we will do is check the license records with you. Contact us here.