South Florida Home Services Report: September 2026

We're looking at roofing, HVAC, plumbing, and pest control in South Florida, focusing on Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties, though we use statewide Florida numbers when county data isn't published. Most of the figures come from public sources like county permit records, federal building permit and employment statistics, federal disaster declarations, the national hurricane record, and industry shipment data. The website section is from Pixedi's own audit of home-service sites, and we flag it everywhere that source is used.

Key findings

• The Miami-Dade County Building file shows 10,617 re-roofing permits in the last twelve months, down 8.4% from the 11,585 issued a year earlier.
• Mechanical (HVAC) permits in Miami-Dade rose 4.3% year over year to 5,709, while plumbing permits were flat at 5,894.
• Single-family units authorized in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach combined rose 23.8% in January to August 2026, to 4,569, even as statewide authorizations fell 11.2%.
• Florida received major disaster declarations for 11 separate hurricanes with incident start dates in 2016-2025, against 2 in 2006-2015.
• The state had 5,266 private roofing shops in 2025, which is 36.0% more than in 2019, but the total jobs in that sector only grew 9.1% between those years.
• Average annual pay in Florida plumbing and HVAC contracting reached $68,502 by 2025, up 35.7% since 2019, though that trails the 40.6% jump across all Florida industries.
• In the Miami-Dade permit file, the top tenth of roofing license holders pulled 55.4% of the re-roof permits, but 40.2% of the license numbers only pulled two or fewer.
• In Pixedi's audit, 82.4% of working home-service websites pass four basic checks, but only 12.0% actually embed a third-party online scheduling platform.

Permit demand in Miami-Dade

The Miami-Dade County Building permit file holds 139,133 permits from the last two years and shows where the work actually is. Re-roofing permits dropped 8.4% to 10,617 in the twelve months to late September 2026, while mechanical permits, which cover HVAC replacements, rose 4.3% to 5,709. Plumbing stayed flat at 5,894, just 0.6% above the 5,857 from a year earlier. That leaves roofers with a slightly smaller pool of jobs this year, but HVAC contractors seeing a modest expansion.

• Re-roofing-8.4%
• Mechanical (HVAC)4.3%
• Plumbing0.6%

Source: Miami-Dade County Building

Anyone working through the county numbers should note a coding change. Starting in October 2025, the county started labeling most re-roof jobs as "Miscellaneous," which is why the RE-ROOF/REPAIR permits look like they dropped from 9,092 to 3,458 between the two twelve-month windows. That 62.0% drop is a labelling artifact; the 8.4% figure describes actual re-roofing volume.

In the permit mix, 78.9% of re-roofing permits in the last year were for homes, so roofing in the county is really a homeowner business. Mechanical permits were only 44.8% residential, while plumbing came in at 61.9%. So if you're an HVAC contractor in Miami-Dade and you only pitch homeowners, you're missing more than half of the permitted work.

April is when the re-roofing volume peaks in the county, with 2,273 permits showing up across April 2025 and April 2026, which is 10.6% of the total for the 23 full months from October 2024 to August 2026. Roofers who want to be booked for spring need to be visible before that peak, since the homeowner deciding in April has usually started looking earlier.

New housing and the storm record

South Florida is running against the state on single-family building. Florida authorized 178,297 new housing units in 2025, which is 16.5% below the 2021 peak of 213,494, and units authorized statewide from January to August 2026 were 11.2% below the same months of 2025, dropping from 123,124 to 109,323. Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach combined saw single-family authorizations rise 23.8% to 4,569 in that same period. Palm Beach County drove that increase, with 2,483 single-family authorizations, up 50.0%. That's a growing base of new homes that will need maintenance contracts and, eventually, replacements for trades working there.

• 2006-20152 hurricanes
• 2016-202511 hurricanes

Source: FEMA

The storm record may explain some of the pressure on roofing and HVAC over the past decade. Florida received major disaster declarations for 11 separate hurricanes with incident start dates in 2016-2025, against 2 in 2006-2015. Broward and Palm Beach counties were each designated in 6 hurricane major disaster declarations in 2016-2025, and Miami-Dade in 4. NOAA's HURDAT2 record shows 6 hurricanes making landfall in Florida in 2020-2025, double the 3 of the whole 2010s. These figures describe the recent past, and they may help explain why so many firms entered the roofing trade over the same years, as the next sections show.

Equipment demand for HVAC

National shipment data gives HVAC owners a read on the equipment side of their market. U.S. shipments of central air conditioners and air-source heat pumps reached 5,633,518 units in January to July 2026, up 5.5% on the same period of 2025, and July 2026 alone shipped 916,830 units. These are national figures, so they describe what manufacturers are shipping and not South Florida installs directly, but they move in the same direction as the 4.3% rise in Miami-Dade mechanical permits.

Heat pumps are close to half the market. They were 47.0% of U.S. central AC and heat pump shipments in 2025 (3,644,596 of 7,749,529 units), and heat pump shipments grew 5.8% in January to July 2026 versus 5.2% for air conditioners. For a contractor, that points to heat pump installation and service being a routine part of the job now, and something customers may search for by name.

Labor, firm size and pay

Roofing is splitting into smaller firms. In Florida, private roofing establishments jumped 36.0% from 2019 to 2025, reaching 5,266, but roofing employment only grew 9.1% to 41,220 jobs. The average roofing establishment shrank from 9.8 to 7.8 employees over that time. Miami-Dade shows it even more clearly, with county roofing employment falling 11.4% between 2019 and 2025 while the county's roofing establishment count rose 21.0%. That means more shops are chasing the same work with fewer hands, so you'll likely see more small operators bidding on the same jobs.

• Roofing establishments36%
• Roofing employment9.1%
• Plumbing and HVAC employment19.2%
• Pest control employment19.8%

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages

Plumbing and HVAC grew on a steadier footing. Florida plumbing and HVAC contractors employed 106,398 people in 2025, up 19.2% from 2019, across 10,921 establishments statewide, and residential work accounts for 63.8% of that employment. Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach together counted 2,786 plumbing and HVAC establishments and 1,236 roofing establishments in 2025. Pest control grew as well, with Florida employment up 19.8% from 2019 to 2025, to 20,855 jobs in 2,482 establishments.

For a South Florida owner, the competition on most jobs is another small shop. The 2023 data, which is the latest we have, shows that 62.0% of Florida plumbing and HVAC establishments had fewer than 5 employees, while roofing sat at 55.5% and pest control at 59.7%.

Pay in the trades has gone up, just not as fast as the rest of the state. From 2019 to 2025, average annual pay in Florida plumbing and HVAC contracting climbed 35.7% to $68,502, but across all Florida industries it went up 40.6% to $72,772. Roofing averaged $59,565 in 2025. When you're trying to hire a crew, that gap matters: the trades now pay below the statewide average ($68,502 for plumbing and HVAC and $59,565 for roofing, against $72,772), which makes recruiting harder when other industries compete for the same workers.

How concentrated each trade is

In the Miami-Dade permit file, 1,412 different license numbers pulled re-roofing permits over two years. The ten busiest accounted for only 11.7% of that volume. The top tenth of license holders took 55.4% of the permits, while 40.2% of the license numbers pulled two or fewer. The picture is a broad middle tier of active roofers doing most of the work, with a long tail of license holders who appear only occasionally. Almost all of it, though, goes through certified contractors, since 97.3% of those re-roofing permits were pulled under a certified roofing (CCC) license.

We see that HVAC work is more concentrated among the ten busiest license numbers in Miami-Dade, where the ten busiest license numbers accounted for 24.1% of mechanical permits and the top tenth of contractors pulled 55.1%. Across two years, 1,441 distinct contractor license numbers pulled at least one mechanical permit, and 47.7% of them pulled two or fewer. Plumbing sits between the two, with 1,315 license numbers pulling plumbing permits in two years, and the ten busiest holding 19.1%.

If you run a small HVAC or plumbing shop, you'll notice the ten busiest license numbers hold a bigger share of the permitted work than they do in roofing. Roofing is a bit different; it's less about a few big names and more about a broad middle tier of active roofers bidding on the same jobs.

Websites and digital presence

We checked 282 Florida home-service sites from OpenStreetMap in late September 2026. A basic HTTP request loaded 216 of them: 80 HVAC, 78 roofing, 38 plumbing and 20 pest control pages. Another 7.4% of the listed domains didn't connect at all, and 24 more returned HTTP 403 errors, usually from bot protection, so we left those out of the dead count. If your listing points to a dead site, you're losing work, and it is a quick thing to check.

• HTTPS98.6%
• Click-to-call link94%
• Quote or booking call to action (preliminary)85.6%
• LocalBusiness structured data (preliminary)43.1%
• Chat or messaging widget (preliminary)13.9%
• Online scheduling platform (preliminary)12%

Source: Pixedi

The basics are mostly in place, with 98.6% using HTTPS, 94.0% including a click-to-call link, and 99.5% declaring a mobile viewport. Preliminary figures show 85.6% display a quote or booking prompt next to a form or embedded widget, and 82.4% pass all four of those checks. We noticed 69.9% mention emergency or 24/7 service on the homepage, though that drops to 30.0% for pest control sites. Financing is widely advertised, appearing on 59.3% of all sites, 72.5% of HVAC sites, and 70.5% of roofing sites (preliminary), so an HVAC or roofing page without it is in the minority.

The gaps sit in the next layer. On preliminary figures, only 12.0% of working sites embed a third-party online scheduling platform, 13.9% run a chat or messaging widget, and only 43.1% carry LocalBusiness-type structured data on the homepage, which helps search engines read a business's name, location and service details. Spanish is rare: 6.0% of working sites offer Spanish content or a Spanish version, and in the South Florida subsample of 41 sites it is 9.8%. That subsample is small, but for businesses serving Miami-Dade and Broward households, a Spanish page is an easy way to stand apart.

On preliminary figures, 60.6% of the sites we checked carry a 2026 copyright date, while 22.2% show no year at all and another 5.6% are stuck on 2023 or earlier. Most of them, 70.4%, run on WordPress. The median server response time was 0.64 seconds and the median homepage HTML weight was 231 KB. The median page also loads 13.5 external script files. All three of these figures are preliminary, and a site loading a dozen or more outside scripts may be carrying tools the owner no longer uses.

What changed since the last edition

We're putting out the first edition of the South Florida Home Services Report, and we'll use these numbers as the baseline for whatever changes next. The data has different cutoffs, like Miami-Dade permits running through late September 2026, state and county building permit authorizations up to August 2026, and national equipment shipments through July 2026. Employment and pay figures are for 2025, establishment size comes from 2023, and Pixedi's website audit is from late September 2026.

Methodology and sources

Permit figures come from the Miami-Dade County Building permit file, covering permits issued over the two years to late September 2026, grouped into re-roofing, mechanical and plumbing work. Contractor concentration figures count distinct license numbers on those permits. Housing authorization figures come from the U.S. Census Bureau Building Permits Survey, with annual Florida totals for 2021 and 2025 and year-to-date comparisons for January to August of 2025 and 2026.

Disaster figures come from FEMA major disaster declarations for hurricanes, counted by incident start date for 2006-2015 and 2016-2025. Landfall counts come from NOAA's HURDAT2 hurricane database. Equipment figures come from AHRI's national shipment statistics for central air conditioners and air-source heat pumps, covering 2025 and January to July 2026.

Employment, establishment and pay figures come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, comparing 2019 with 2025. Establishment size figures come from the Census Bureau's County Business Patterns for 2023.

Website figures come from Pixedi's own audit, run in late September 2026, of Florida home-service businesses listed in OpenStreetMap with a website. Pages were fetched with a plain HTTP request, and domains that returned HTTP 403 were excluded. The following audit figures are preliminary: online scheduling platforms, quote or booking calls to action, structured data, Spanish content, chat widgets, financing, copyright year, server response time and page weight, external scripts, and the four-basics pass rate. All other figures in this report are drawn directly from the published data.

Sources

1. U.S. Census Bureau Building Permits Survey
2. FEMA Disaster Declarations
3. NOAA HURDAT2
4. AHRI
5. Bureau of Labor Statistics Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages
6. U.S. Census Bureau County Business Patterns
7. OpenStreetMap

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