Florida Just Made Card Acceptance Mandatory for Every Local Government
On June 26, 2026, Florida HB 967 became Chapter 2026-169. It is three pages long, it amends a single section of the Florida Statutes, and the substance of it is one verb.
Until now, section 215.322 said a unit of local government is authorized to accept payment by credit card, charge card, bank debit card, or electronic funds transfer. As of January 1, 2027, it says a unit of local government shall accept those payments. A new paragraph adds a second requirement: whatever you accept, you have to have a way to accept it online.
The bill’s own title is Electronic Payments Made to Units of Local Governments, which is a fairer summary than most bill titles manage.
That is the whole of it. There is no new fee schedule, no state contract to join, no vendor list. Just a date, a requirement, and a list of offices it applies to.
Card acceptance by local government went from permitted to mandatory, and online acceptance was added as a separate requirement. The legislative intent section still only encourages state agencies and the judicial branch. Local government is the only tier the statute compels.
What Florida HB 967 Actually Requires
The list of covered offices is written into the statute rather than left to interpretation, and it is broad. It names municipalities, special districts, and boards of county commissioners or other county governing bodies. It names consolidated and metropolitan governments. Then it names offices individually: any clerk of the circuit court, sheriff, property appraiser, tax collector, or supervisor of elections.
The obligation attaches to financial obligations owing to that unit of government. If a resident owes you money, Florida HB 967 says you have to be able to take a card for it, and you have to offer a way to do that online.
There is one exception in the text, and it is narrow: the requirement does not apply when another form of payment is required by law. That is a real carve-out, but it is a carve-out for specific statutory payment requirements elsewhere in Florida law, not a general convenience exemption. If you think a category of your revenue falls outside Florida HB 967, the burden is on finding the statute that puts it there.
The Florida online payment requirement is the genuinely new obligation here. Plenty of covered offices already take a card at the counter; far fewer can take one at midnight without a phone call. Florida HB 967 closes that gap rather than the acceptance gap alone.
Worth noting what the law does not do. It does not define what counts as accepting payments online, it does not specify a technology, and it does not name an approved vendor. You can read the enrolled text yourself on the Florida Senate bill page; it is short enough to read in five minutes.
“Except when another form of payment is required by law” carves out revenue categories that some other statute already governs. It does not carve out payments that are merely inconvenient to process by card, and it does not carve out an office that has never taken cards before.
The Surcharge Authority Survived, and That Is the Part That Pays for It
The usual objection to a card-acceptance mandate is budgetary: nobody appropriated money for merchant fees. Florida already answered that, and Florida HB 967 left the answer intact.
The same subsection that now requires acceptance also preserves the authority to surcharge the person using the card. The statute enumerates what it covers: taxes, license fees, tuition, fines, civil penalties, court-ordered payments, court costs, and other statutorily prescribed revenues. The permitted amount is one sufficient to pay the service fee charged by the financial institution, vending service company, or credit card company.
Read that ceiling carefully, because it is a ceiling. “Sufficient to pay the service fee” is cost recovery, not a revenue line. An office that sets its convenience fee above its actual processing cost is not operating inside the authority the statute grants. An office that sets it below is absorbing the difference out of its own budget, which is a legitimate choice but should be a deliberate one.
This is also why the pricing structure underneath matters more here than it does for a private business. If your fee is capped at your cost, then your cost is the program. A processor that bundles interchange, assessments, and its own margin into one blended number makes it structurally impossible to demonstrate that your surcharge is set at cost.
Florida law lets the payer cover the processing cost on the enumerated revenue types. A local government complying with Florida HB 967 does not have to find money in its own budget to do it, provided the fee is set at actual cost and the underlying pricing is transparent enough to prove it.
Who This Actually Lands On
Large Florida counties are largely already compliant. A big tax collector or clerk of court has taken cards online for years, usually through an integrated portal tied to the tax or case management system. For them Florida HB 967 changes little.
The mandate binds the offices that have not done it. Small municipalities that take payment at a counter and by mail. Supervisors of elections and property appraisers with narrow fee revenue and no payments infrastructure. And above all, special districts, which the statute names explicitly and which include a long tail of fire districts, water control districts, community development districts, and mosquito control districts across the state, many of which have never held a merchant account.
Those are also the offices with the least procurement leverage and the least in-house payments expertise, which is what makes the next section the real story.
Florida has hundreds of independent and dependent special districts, and the statute names them alongside municipalities and county commissions. A district that collects assessments, permit fees, or connection charges is a unit of local government for the purposes of Florida HB 967.
The Real Risk Is the Rush, Not the Rule
A compliance deadline compresses procurement. An office that starts in September has time to compare rails, pricing models, and reconciliation behavior. An office that starts in late November takes whatever it can get live before January 1, and the path of least resistance is always the payment module the existing software vendor already sells.
That path is how small jurisdictions end up on turnkey aggregators paying north of three percent with no negotiated rate and no visibility into what portion of the fee is interchange and what portion is markup. It is not hypothetical. The failure patterns in this space are well documented: payments that are charged but never post against the bill, reconciliation files that will not tie out to the tax system at close, convenience-fee programs configured wrong, and support with no government expertise during a deadline week.
Brookside has written about these vendors individually, including Xpress Bill Pay in small-municipality utility billing and ACI and Official Payments in county property tax. The complaints repeat across vendors because the underlying dynamic repeats: a jurisdiction with a deadline and no leverage signs whatever is in front of it.
Signing the bundled payment module in December because it is the only thing that can be live by January 1 is how a jurisdiction locks in a rate it cannot justify to its own board and cannot easily exit. The deadline is the leverage the vendor has. Starting early is how you take it back.
What to Decide Before January 1, 2027
Florida HB 967 sets a date and a requirement. It does not set a procurement process, which means the schedule is yours to control. Three decisions determine everything downstream, and none of them requires a vendor to be selected first.
First, which rail. There are three ways a local government can accept a payment, and they differ in integration burden rather than in citizen experience. A real-time API integration pulls balances live and posts payments instantly. Bill presentment works from an exported roll and reconciles by batch file. A standalone portal takes payments with no integration at all and posts them by hand. For a small district with a few hundred transactions a year, the third option is often the honest answer, and HB 967 does not require more than that.
Second, who pays. Decide deliberately whether to surcharge under the authority the statute preserves or to absorb the cost, and document the basis for whichever fee you set. That decision belongs to the board before it belongs to a vendor.
Third, what it actually costs. Ask for pricing that separates interchange from markup rather than a single blended rate. If you cannot see the split, you cannot show that your fee is set at cost, and you cannot tell whether a renewal quote got worse. The arithmetic that answers this is your effective rate, and it is the only number that survives a change of vendor.
Deciding whether you need live integration or can post by hand narrows the field before any demo happens, and it is the single decision that most affects cost. A district that does not need an API should not be paying for one.
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes. The statute names special districts explicitly, alongside municipalities, county governing bodies, and the individually listed constitutional offices. The only exception in the text is where another form of payment is required by law.
The statute preserves that authority for taxes, license fees, tuition, fines, civil penalties, court-ordered payments, court costs, and other statutorily prescribed revenues. The permitted amount is one sufficient to pay the service fee, which is cost recovery rather than a revenue source.
The statute does not define it. It requires a method for accepting the payment online and leaves the implementation open, which means a hosted payment page is as compliant on its face as a fully integrated portal.
Send Us What You Charge Today. We’ll Show You What It Should Cost.
If your office already takes cards, send Brookside one recent processing statement and we will separate interchange from markup and tell you what your effective rate actually is, which is the number that shows whether your convenience fee is set at cost. If you are starting from nothing before January 1, tell us your transaction volume and which system holds your balances, and we will tell you which of the three rails you actually need. Reading a statement takes us about fifteen minutes.
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