Florida debt collection laws: commercial debt collection rules, the statute of limitations, and when a Florida business needs a collection license

Look up the Florida statute of limitations on debt and you will be told five years. That figure comes from Fla. Stat. 95.11(2)(b), which covers an action on a contract, obligation or liability founded on a written instrument. It is correct as far as it goes, and for a great many Florida businesses it is the wrong number.

The provision that catches most suppliers is Fla. Stat. 95.11(3)(j). It sets four years for an action on a contract not founded on a written instrument, and it says so expressly, including an action for the sale and delivery of goods, wares, and merchandise, and on store accounts. That language describes the ordinary open account relationship: the customer sends a purchase order, you ship, you invoice, nobody signs a master agreement. There is paper, but there is no written instrument in the sense the five year rule means.

A second statute arrives at the same place from a different direction. Fla. Stat. 672.725, Florida's enactment of UCC 2-725, sets four years for an action for breach of any contract for sale of goods. It applies whether or not you have a signed contract. The parties may shorten it by original agreement to not less than one year, but they cannot extend it.

So the practical rule is this. If you sell goods, assume four years. If you sell services under a signed written agreement, five years is available to you. If you sell services with no signed agreement, you are back to four. The difference is not academic: a supplier who believes it has five years and files in year four and a half has lost the claim entirely, and the court will not care that a chart on the internet said otherwise.

The clock starts on breach, which for an invoice is the day after payment was due, not the invoice date. If your terms are net 30 and you invoice on March 1, the breach date is April 1. Our guide to net 30 payment terms works through how that date is actually computed, and the broader statute of limitations on unpaid invoices covers how the rules differ across states.

Two separate rules operate here, and creditors routinely miss the first one.

With no agreed rate, interest still runs. Fla. Stat. 687.01 provides that in all cases where interest accrues without a special contract for the rate, the rate is the one provided in Fla. Stat. 55.03. You do not have to have said anything about interest in your terms to be owed it on a liquidated commercial sum. Many Florida businesses write off that interest because they assume silence means zero.

The rate is published and it moves. Under Fla. Stat. 55.03 the Chief Financial Officer sets the rate by averaging the discount rate of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York for the preceding twelve months and adding 400 basis points, adjusting on January 1, April 1, July 1 and October 1. Recent quarters:

There is a mechanic here that trips up people calculating a payoff. The rate is fixed at the time the judgment is obtained, and then adjusted annually on January 1 in line with whatever rate is in effect that day. It does not float quarterly once your judgment exists. The quarterly figures decide what rate a new judgment picks up.

A commercial contract can do better than the default. Florida's usury statutes in chapter 687 are aimed at loans and forbearances of money. A late charge on a trade invoice is generally neither, which is why commercial terms routinely carry rates well above the statutory figure. The safe practice is to state the rate in your terms and repeat it on the invoice, because 15 USC 1692f(1) and ordinary contract law both come back to whether the amount was authorized by the agreement that created the debt. How to word it is covered in our note on late fees on invoices.

No, and the reason is worth understanding because Florida is unusual here.

Most states regulate only consumer collection. Florida does that in chapter 559 Part VI, and it also runs a separate regime in chapter 559 Part V, Commercial Collection Practices, sections 559.541 through 559.548. Very few states regulate commercial collection at all.

Fla. Stat. 559.543 defines a commercial collection agency as any person engaged, as a primary or secondary business activity, in the business of soliciting commercial claims for collection or in the business of collecting commercial claims asserted to be owed or due to another person. The same section defines a credit grantor as any person or entity to whom a commercial claim is owed or due.

Those two definitions settle it. When you chase your own invoice you are the credit grantor, not an agency, because the claim is not owed to another person. And in case there were any doubt, Fla. Stat. 559.544(5) lists the exemptions from registration and credit grantors appear on it expressly, alongside Florida Bar members, financial institutions, licensed real estate brokers, title insurers, consumer finance companies and out of state collectors.

The registration requirements are still useful to you as a buyer of collection services. A registered Florida commercial collection agency pays a $500 registration fee under Fla. Stat. 559.545 and must show evidence of a current $50,000 surety bond, valid for the year of registration, issued for the use and benefit of any credit grantor who suffers or sustains any loss or damage by reason of a Part V violation. That bond exists to protect you, the creditor, not the debtor. Fla. Stat. 559.546 caps the surety's aggregate liability at the bond amount regardless of how many claims are filed, and directs the Office of Financial Regulation to hold and distribute funds pro rata among valid claimants within six months of the first claim.

Two practical consequences. First, if you place Florida commercial accounts with an agency, check that it is registered with the Office of Financial Regulation and that the bond is current, because that is your recourse if the agency mishandles your money. Second, if you ever consider buying delinquent commercial paper rather than collecting your own, look hard at Part V before you do, because the analysis changes once the claim was owed to someone else.

This is the part of Florida law that most creditor-side guidance gets wrong, and it is the mirror image of the finding on our Texas commercial debt collection laws page.

The federal FDCPA mainly regulates third party collectors. It defines a debt collector at 15 USC 1692a(6) around collecting debts owed to another, which is why a business collecting in its own name is generally outside it. Creditors then assume the state analogue works the same way. In Florida it does not.

Fla. Stat. 559.72 begins: In collecting consumer debts, no person shall, and then lists the prohibited practices. Liability is not predicated on the defendant being a debt collector. It is predicated on being a person attempting to collect a consumer debt who commits a prohibited act. Florida courts have read it that way consistently. The registration requirements are limited to debt collectors, but the conduct rules are not.

So the question is never whether you are an agency. It is whether the debt is a consumer debt under Fla. Stat. 559.55, meaning an obligation of a consumer arising from a transaction for money, property, insurance or services primarily for personal, family or household purposes.

Where does that bite in practice? Mixed books. A Florida company selling to limited liability companies, to sole proprietors trading under their own names, and occasionally to households is running consumer debt and commercial debt through the same accounts receivable process. The commercial accounts are unregulated. The consumer accounts are governed by a statute that binds you directly and carries a private right of action. If your collection emails, call scripts and escalation letters are identical across both, you have imported consumer-grade risk into a commercial process for no reason. Segment the ledger. Our comparison of first party and third party debt collection explains why staying first party keeps most of these questions simple in the first place.

Florida sorts civil cases by amount in controversy, and the thresholds moved recently enough that older guidance is unreliable.

• Small claims, up to $8,000. Florida Small Claims Rule 7.010 applies to county court actions demanding money or property not exceeding $8,000, exclusive of costs, interest and attorney fees. That exclusion matters: a $7,500 invoice carrying two years of statutory interest and a fee claim still belongs in small claims, and the judgment can land well above $8,000.
• County court, up to $50,000. Above $8,000 and at or below $50,000, standard county civil procedure applies rather than the simplified small claims rules.
• Circuit court, above $50,000.

One Florida advantage worth naming. A Florida corporation or LLC may bring a small claims action. That is not true everywhere. A New York business entity is barred from regular small claims entirely and pushed into the Commercial Claims Part with a $5,000 cap and a limit of five filings statewide per month, as our page on New York commercial debt collection laws sets out. Florida imposes no equivalent restriction, which makes the small claims track genuinely usable for a business chasing several mid-sized invoices.

On fees, Fla. Stat. 57.105(7) makes a unilateral attorney fee provision reciprocal. If your terms say the customer pays your fees when you enforce the contract, the customer can recover its fees if it prevails against you. The Florida Supreme Court has confirmed the two conditions: the contract must award fees to a party required to take action to enforce the contract, and the other party must prevail in an action with respect to the contract. This is a reason to have the clause, not a reason to drop it. Without it neither side recovers fees under the American rule, and you are the one more likely to be enforcing.

Before filing, send a real demand. A dated, specific, final-notice letter resolves a meaningful share of commercial accounts and creates the record you want if it does not. Ours is set out at demand letter for payment.

A Florida money judgment is enforceable for twenty years. Getting paid on it depends on three instruments.

The judgment lien certificate, Fla. Stat. 55.202. Filed with the Florida Department of State, it creates a lien on the debtor's personal property statewide. It lapses five years after filing. You may file one renewal certificate, in a window that opens six months before the original lapses and closes six months after, which takes the personal property lien to roughly ten years total. Miss the window and you lose the lien and your priority against competing creditors, even though the underlying judgment survives. Put the renewal date in a calendar the day you file.

Writ of garnishment, chapter 77. The standard route to a bank account or to money a third party owes the judgment debtor. Against a corporate debtor this is usually the fastest path, because a company's operating account is a much easier target than an individual's wages.

Proceedings supplementary, Fla. Stat. 56.29. This is the distinctive one. Where a judgment creditor holds an unsatisfied judgment or judgment lien under chapter 55, it may file a motion and affidavit identifying the court, the case number and the unsatisfied amount, and stating that the execution is valid and outstanding. That entitles the creditor to proceedings supplementary to execution. The power is that it reaches property of the judgment debtor held by third parties in the same case the judgment came from, instead of requiring a fresh fraudulent transfer lawsuit. Where a debtor company has moved assets to an affiliate or an owner, this is the tool.

The national picture, including domesticating a Florida judgment elsewhere, is covered in how to collect a judgment against a business.

Honest assessment: Florida is a good state in which to hold a commercial judgment against a solvent company, and a difficult state in which to collect from an individual. If your file rests on a personal guarantee from an owner operator, read this before you spend money on enforcement.

The head of family wage exemption, Fla. Stat. 222.11. All of the disposable earnings of a head of family whose disposable earnings are $750 a week or less are exempt from attachment or garnishment. Above $750 a week, the earnings of a head of family may not be garnished unless the debtor has agreed to it in writing. Head of family means providing more than one half of the support for a child or other dependent. The exemption is not automatic and must be claimed in response to the writ, but in practice it is claimed. This is the most creditor-adverse wage rule in the country, and it is why wage garnishment is rarely the play in Florida.

Where the exemption does not apply, the federal Consumer Credit Protection Act at 15 USC 1673 still caps garnishment at the lesser of 25 percent of disposable earnings for the pay period or the amount by which those earnings exceed thirty times the federal minimum hourly wage.

Homestead. Florida's constitutional homestead protection is effectively unlimited in value, subject to acreage limits. A judgment lien on real property will not reach the debtor's protected homestead.

The practical conclusion is not that guarantees are worthless. It is that in Florida the corporate judgment plus garnishment of the operating account, backed by proceedings supplementary if assets have moved, is a far more productive route than pursuing an individual's paycheck. Price your credit decisions accordingly at the front end rather than discovering it at the back end.

If you sell across state lines, the debtor's state law generally governs collection conduct. These are the four largest commercial markets and they differ more than most creditors expect.

Two things stand out. Florida's statutory interest is the second highest of the four and roughly a third better than Texas. And Florida is the only one of the four with a dedicated commercial collection registration statute, which means the agency you place with is bonded for your benefit rather than being effectively unregulated.

The federal layer sitting under all of this, and the states we have not covered, are in the pillar page on commercial debt collection laws. The California analysis, where a 2025 statute was substantially undone by a 2026 one, is at California commercial debt collection laws.

Everything above is worth less than it looks if the account is never actually worked. Recovery data is consistent across the industry: commercial invoices chased inside ninety days recover at roughly seventy percent or better, and accounts left past a hundred and eighty days often recover below fifteen percent. The four year statute is a backstop, not a plan.

What a defensible Florida file contains:

• The terms the customer accepted, showing the payment period, the interest rate and the attorney fee clause. A signed credit application is what moves you from the four year bucket toward the five year one, and it is the cheapest legal work you will ever do.
• The purchase order, proof of delivery and the invoice, because on an open account the sale and delivery is what you are suing on.
• A dated contact log. Every email, call and letter, with dates. This is what defeats a claim that the debt was disputed and ignored, and it is what an attorney needs on day one.
• The breach date, calculated and recorded, with the four year and five year dates both noted so nobody has to reconstruct them in year three.
• A written acknowledgment if you can get one. A partial payment or a signed acknowledgment of the debt restarts the limitation period in most states. It is the single most valuable thing to extract during a payment plan negotiation.

Most of that is clerical, which is exactly why it does not get done. The businesses that recover well are not the ones with better lawyers, they are the ones where the day 3, day 15, day 30 and day 60 contacts go out without anyone remembering to send them.

The default answer for a past due commercial account is a collection agency, and in Florida you at least get a bonded, registered counterparty under Part V. What you do not get is your margin. Commercial contingency rates run 25 to 50 percent of what is recovered, tiered by claim size, and most agencies apply a minimum balance of $500 to $1,000 plus a per file minimum fee. On a $4,000 invoice a 25 percent rate is $1,000 gone from a sale you already delivered and already paid to produce.

Placement also costs you the position the statutes above give you. Once the claim is assigned, you are no longer the credit grantor working your own account. You have handed the relationship to a third party, and the customer knows it.

DebtAgent runs the collection sequence in your name, as creditor of record, on a flat monthly fee starting at $49 rather than a share of recoveries. It sends the day 3, day 15, day 30 and day 60 contacts, escalates the tone on schedule, applies your interest and late fee terms, and keeps the dated contact log that the file above requires. You stay first party, you stay outside Part V, and what comes back stays yours. The full breakdown against agency economics is on the pricing page, and the wider category is compared honestly at best debt collection software.