Evictions are nobody’s favorite topic. But if you own rental property long enough, you’ll probably deal with one. And when that day comes, how well you understand the process will determine whether you’re back to collecting rent in three weeks or six months.
We talk to owners all the time who assume eviction is just a matter of telling a tenant to leave and changing the locks if they don’t. That thinking leads to lawsuits. Florida has strict rules around how evictions work, and even a small mistake, like serving a notice the wrong way, can send you back to square one.
This guide walks through the Florida eviction process from the first missed payment to the final lockout. We’ll cover the legal steps, the real timelines, the fees, and the mistakes we see owners make that cost them weeks and thousands of dollars.
“$2,083/mo avg rent at risk per eviction”
In This Guide
Who This Is For
If you own a single-family home, a townhome, or a condo in the Orlando area and you’ve never been through a Florida eviction, read this before you need it. And if you’re already mid-situation, stick around. We’ll cover some issues that trip people up even after they’ve started the process.
Florida’s Eviction Law Is Actually Landlord-Friendly
Before we get into the steps, here’s something worth knowing: Florida’s eviction statute (§83.56) is one of the more landlord-friendly frameworks in the country. There’s no rent control in Orlando. The state preempts local municipalities from adding layers on top, which means you won’t face the kind of city-level delays you’d see in New York or Los Angeles.
The process moves fast when it’s handled correctly.
The catch is “correctly.” Florida law is specific about timing, delivery methods, and documentation. Get those right, and you can have a non-paying tenant out in as little as four to six weeks. Get them wrong, and you’re restarting the clock.
Step One: Determine Which Notice to Serve
Not all evictions start the same way. The type of notice you serve depends on why you’re evicting.
- Non-payment of rent: Serve a 3-Day Notice to Pay or Quit. Under Florida Statute §83.56, the tenant has three business days (not counting weekends or legal holidays) to pay the full amount owed or vacate.
- Curable lease violation: Serve a 7-Day Notice to Cure. This applies to things like an unauthorized pet or repeated noise complaints. The tenant gets seven days to fix the issue or leave.
- Incurable violation: Serve a 7-Day Unconditional Quit Notice for repeat violations of the lease under Florida Statute § 83.56(2)(a). Unlike the standard 7-day cure notice, this applies when the tenant has already been given a prior opportunity to cure a similar violation — no second chance to fix it. Tenant has seven days to vacate.
Getting the right notice on paper matters. Serving a 7-Day Cure notice for nonpayment, or a 3-Day notice for a lease violation, gives the tenant grounds to challenge your filing.
Step Two: Serve the Notice Correctly
This is where more evictions fall apart than you’d expect.
Florida law is specific about how a notice must be delivered. Acceptable methods include:
- Hand delivery directly to the tenant
- Leaving the notice at the property if the tenant isn’t home (posting it to the door)
- Mailing it, which requires adding additional days to the notice period
What is not acceptable includes text messages, emails, verbal warnings, or sliding a note under the door without proper posting.
We worked with an owner in Lake Nona who tried to handle an eviction on his own before coming to us. He served the 3-Day Notice by text. The tenant didn’t pay. He filed with the Orange County Clerk of Court. The case was dismissed at the courthouse because the notice wasn’t properly served. He had to restart the entire process, and by the time he got a new notice served and refiled, the vacancy had stretched nearly six weeks past where it should have been.
That’s one text message that cost him around $4,000 in lost rent.
Never serve eviction notices via text or email in Florida. The case will be dismissed in Orange County court, adding 3–6 weeks to your timeline and forcing you to pay filing fees a second time.
Step Three: Wait Out the Notice Period
Once the notice is properly served, the clock starts. You cannot file for eviction until the notice period has fully expired.
For a 3-Day Notice: no filing until three full business days have passed and the tenant has neither paid nor vacated.
Do not contact the tenant with offers to accept partial payment during this window. This is a critical point.
If you accept any payment after serving a 3-Day Notice, even a partial payment, Florida courts have consistently treated that as voiding the notice. You’ll have to reissue, restart the three-day clock, and in some cases pay to refile. On a property renting at $2,083 per month (which is around our portfolio average), a two-week delay from a voided notice runs you roughly $1,000 in missed rent before you even count filing costs.
We had one owner who had been accepting partial rent for three consecutive months before calling us. Because those payments had been accepted without a written reservation of rights, we had to be very careful about how we reissued the notice. It added about two weeks to the process and cost the owner an estimated $1,500 in delayed recovery.
Step Four: File the Eviction Lawsuit
After the notice period expires with no payment and no move-out, you can file a Complaint for Eviction at the county courthouse where the property is located.
Know Your County Before You File
This matters more than people realize. Most of our managed properties fall under Orange County, but we also manage units in Kissimmee and Celebration (Osceola County) and Davenport (Polk County). Each county has its own clerk’s office, its own docket, and slightly different processing timelines.
For Orange County, you’ll file at the Clerk of Court located at 425 N. Orange Avenue in Orlando. Filing fees for a residential eviction in Orange County vary depending on whether the case is filed in county or circuit court. Across Florida, filing fees differ by county and case type, so landlords should check with their local clerk of court for current figures.
LLC Owners Must Use an Attorney
Here’s something a lot of owners don’t know until they show up at the courthouse. If your rental property is held in an LLC, you cannot represent that LLC yourself in eviction court. Florida law requires a licensed attorney to represent a corporate entity.
We estimate that about a significant portion of our 350 owner clients hold properties in LLCs for liability protection purposes. That’s smart structuring. But it means budget for attorney fees. In the Orlando market, you’re typically looking at $500 to $1,500 in legal fees on top of court costs.
Step Five: Tenant Is Served and Has Five Days to Respond
Once you file, the court issues a summons and the tenant gets served. From the date of service, the tenant has five business days to file a written response.
If they don’t respond, you can move for a Default Final Judgment. In Florida, assuming the tenant doesn’t contest, you’re typically looking at two to four weeks from filing to judgment. The process moves quickly when the documentation is clean.
If the tenant does contest, the case goes to a hearing. This is where thorough documentation before filing makes the biggest difference. Lease agreement, payment ledger, photos, the notice itself with proof of delivery. Our team logs all of this through AppFolio so that if a case ever goes to hearing, we’ve got a clean paper trail already assembled.
Step Six: Obtain the Final Judgment and Request a Writ of Possession
Once the court enters a Final Judgment for Possession, you’re not done yet. You still can’t just walk in and tell the tenant to leave.
You need to request a Writ of Possession from the clerk, then pay a separate enforcement fee — currently $180 — directly to the Orange County Sheriff’s Office to have a deputy carry out the removal. The clerk issues the Writ, which then goes to the Orange County Sheriff’s Office to be executed.
Once the Writ is issued, the sheriff will post it, giving the tenant 24 hours to vacate the premises before the sheriff returns to remove them., but scheduling in Orange County usually pushes the actual lockout to three to seven business days after the Writ is issued. In Osceola County, we’ve seen that stretch a bit longer due to smaller court staffing.
Once the sheriff executes the Writ, the tenant must leave. At that point, the property is legally back in your hands.
From a correctly served 3-Day Notice to a completed sheriff lockout, a non-contested eviction in Orange County realistically takes four to seven weeks. Add another two to four weeks if the tenant contests. Every delay costs you roughly $500 to $700 per week in lost rent at our market average.
Step Seven: Handle Abandoned Property the Right Way
The eviction is done. The tenant is gone. But if they left furniture, clothes, or personal items behind, you are not legally free to throw them out or donate them. Florida Statute §715.104 requires landlords to follow an abandoned property notice procedure before disposing of anything.
We dealt with this exact situation with an owner in Winter Garden whose tenant vacated mid-eviction but left behind a pile of furniture. The instinct was to haul it out immediately and start the turnover. Our team stopped that, sent the proper written notice through AppFolio, and walked the owner through the waiting period before anything was touched.
Skipping that step would have created fresh legal exposure just when the owner thought they were finally in the clear.
The Mistake That Turns a Four-Week Process Into a Three-Month Problem
Most eviction disasters we see don’t come from the eviction itself. They come from what happened at the leasing stage.
Owners who complain that the Florida eviction process is slow are often the ones who approved a tenant with thin income documentation or glossed over a prior eviction flag in the background check. Florida’s eviction process is genuinely fast compared to most states. The real problem tends to trace back to screening.
Gloriluz Feliciano, one of our property managers who oversees several units in the Poinciana and Kissimmee area, talks to owners about this regularly. The owners who have clean, smooth-running portfolios are not the ones who got lucky. They’re the ones who held firm on screening standards even when a unit sat vacant for an extra week.
One longtime client said it directly: Gloriluz and Susana have been managing his rental in the Solivita Community for years, and he specifically calls out their responsiveness and professionalism as the reason things stay on track. That kind of consistency doesn’t happen by accident. It’s a function of catching problems before they become evictions.
What Landlords Cannot Do: Florida’s Self-Help Eviction Prohibition
This section is short because the rule is simple. You cannot evict a tenant by:
- Changing the locks without a court order
- Shutting off utilities
- Removing the tenant’s personal belongings yourself
- Blocking access to the property
Florida Statute §83.67 prohibits all of it. Violations expose the landlord to actual and consequential damages or three months’ rent—whichever is greater—plus attorney’s fees. We had an owner with a townhome in Poinciana call us to ask whether they could start removing a non-responsive tenant’s belongings after the tenant stopped answering. The back rent owed was real. The frustration was valid. But the legal exposure from doing that would have exceeded the rent they were owed.
The legal process exists to protect you too. Using it correctly is the only path that doesn’t create a second problem on top of the first one.
How Professional Management Changes the Eviction Equation
Handling this yourself is possible. But every step in this process requires precise timing, correct paperwork, and court filings in the right jurisdiction. One misstep at any stage can reset the clock by weeks.
Our team manages around 550 properties across Orlando, Kissimmee, Winter Garden, Lake Nona, and surrounding areas. We’ve been doing this for 57 years. Evictions aren’t common in our portfolio, partly because of how seriously we screen tenants upfront, and partly because we enforce leases the way they’re written.
When an issue does escalate, we coordinate with local attorneys, track every notice through AppFolio, and handle the Writ of Possession process from filing to sheriff execution. Owners don’t have to figure out which courthouse to file at, how to structure the notice, or what to do when a tenant leaves belongings behind.
One tenant described working with our team this way: repairs that used to be a fight at their previous rental got handled quickly through Trust Home. That kind of response comes from having Alexa Orellana managing maintenance coordination and a full team behind every property, not a solo landlord juggling a day job and a rental.
If the Florida eviction process feels more complicated than you expected, you’re not wrong about that. And if you’d rather have experienced eyes on your lease enforcement before you’re standing outside a courthouse, we’re open to a conversation.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does the eviction process typically take in Florida?
In Orange County, a non-contested eviction from the date a properly served 3-Day Notice expires to the final sheriff lockout typically takes four to seven weeks. If the tenant contests the eviction and a hearing is scheduled, add another two to four weeks on top of that.
Can I evict a tenant in Florida for reasons other than non-payment?
Yes. Florida law allows eviction for lease violations, including unauthorized occupants, unauthorized pets, repeated noise complaints, and criminal activity on the premises. The notice period and whether the tenant gets a chance to cure the violation depends on the type and severity of the infraction.
What happens if I accept partial rent during an eviction notice period?
Accepting any payment after serving a 3-Day Notice to Pay or Quit can legally void that notice in Florida, forcing you to restart the process entirely. If you need to accept a partial payment for any reason, work with an attorney first to document a written reservation of rights.
Do I need a lawyer to file for eviction in Florida?
Individual landlords can represent themselves in eviction court. However, if your property is held in an LLC or other corporate entity, Florida law requires a licensed attorney to represent that entity. Attorney fees in the Orlando market typically run $500 to $1,500 for a standard residential eviction.
What is a Writ of Possession and when does it come into play?
A Writ of Possession is the court order that authorizes the sheriff to remove a tenant from the property after a Final Judgment has been entered. In Orange County, the landlord requests the Writ from the clerk, and pays a separate enforcement fee — currently $180 — directly to the Orange County Sheriff’s Office, which typically executes it within three to seven business days of issuance.
Can I remove a tenant’s belongings from the property after they’ve been evicted?
No, not immediately. Even after a lawful eviction, Florida Statute §715.104 requires landlords to follow an abandoned property notice procedure before disposing of items left behind. Skipping this step can create additional legal liability at a point when you’re trying to get the unit turned over.
What is a self-help eviction and why is it illegal in Florida?
A self-help eviction is any attempt by a landlord to remove a tenant outside the legal court process, such as changing the locks, cutting off utilities, or removing personal property. Florida Statute §83.67 strictly prohibits these actions. Landlords found to have done this can be held liable for actual and consequential damages or 3 months’ rent, whichever is greater, plus attorney’s fees.
