What the Florida permit records cover

The records behind this site are collected from Florida jurisdictions that publish their permit data. Some have published for years and describe each permit in detail. Others started recently, or publish a shorter description. A jurisdiction that publishes nothing is not a jurisdiction where nothing is built.

That is why nothing here is described as a statewide total. The numbers are what the Florida permit records we analyzed contain, and every panel on the site is scoped to that.

The yearly record count is small at the start of the span and much larger later on. Most of that change is coverage rather than construction: jurisdictions join the dataset at different moments, and a jurisdiction contributes nothing to a year before it begins publishing.

Read the early years as thin and the recent ones as broad. A difference between two years that straddles a change in coverage is not a difference in building activity, and we do not present it as one.

A permit matches a term when its published description contains that term or one of its recorded variants. Matching is textual, so a permit that describes the same work in unusual words can be missed, and a permit that mentions a term in passing can be counted.

One permit can match several terms, which is why counts on this site are never added together, and why a share of matching records is not a share of construction.

No page here states that a term is rising or falling as a fact about the market unless it comes from the comparable read described on the method page. The records are evidence about what was filed, and that is the claim they support.