New Smyrna Beach Glass · New Smyrna Beach, Edgewater & southeast Volusia County, FL
The licensing rule here is not what almost anyone assumes.
Call (386) 273-1970Less than most owners assume. Florida had a Certified Glass and Glazing Contractor license until the 2012 legislature removed the category from the mandatory state license types, so putting glass into an existing frame, or hanging a mirror, needs no state contractor certification at all.
The licensed work is structural: installing windows and doors, storefront framing, and structurally anchored opening protection. That takes a Division I contractor or an appropriate specialty license, plus whatever your city or county requires locally.
If you own from out of town, this is worth more of your attention than it would be otherwise. You are hiring somebody to work on a building you cannot walk into, often on a recommendation from a cleaner or a neighbor, sometimes under time pressure from a booking. Ask which lines of the quote are replacement work, get the license number for those, and check it at the state license search before anyone starts. It takes a minute and it is the only verification available to you at a distance.
Everything here is harder at a distance, so do it in an order that fails early and cheaply.
Establish which job it is first. Glass into a frame that stays, or the whole opening out? That single answer decides whether a license, a permit and an inspection are even in play, and it is the answer you cannot get by looking at a photograph a cleaner sent you.
Run the license yourself. Not a picture of a card, not a number read out on the phone — typed into the state search by you. It is the only verification available to somebody who cannot visit the yard.
Make the insurer send the certificate. General liability, plus workers' compensation if anyone but the owner will be on site. Forwarded documents are the ones that turn out to have expired, and on a property you rent to the public this is a document to actually file rather than glance at.
Then the permit. "No permit needed" for a window replacement is either an error or an intention, and both leave you holding an unpermitted alteration that turns up at closing.
Any one of these on its own. A firm price before anybody measured. A big deposit against work with no date. A price that dies tonight. The words hurricane-proof or unbreakable. Refusal to put the license number, the permit responsibility or the warranty terms in writing.
And the one aimed squarely at you. In the fortnight after a named storm this island fills with crews from out of state who work fast, take deposits, and are gone before an inspector asks anything. The owner who is not here, cannot see the damage, has a booking in nine days and is desperate for somebody to answer the phone is the ideal customer for that operation. That is precisely the fortnight to slow down and spend the two minutes on the license search.
No. Florida removed Certified Glass and Glazing Contractor from its mandatory license types in 2012, so non-structural glass work carries no state certification requirement. Local licensing can still apply and is worth a question. Taking the window out as a unit is where the answer flips.
Read the exemption carefully before counting on it. Florida lets owners act as their own contractor on owner-occupied property, and requires them to appear and sign the application in person. An investment property you do not live in is not obviously what that provision was written for, and you would be signing personally for work you cannot supervise. Volusia County publishes the conditions.
It is a reasonable starting point and a poor stopping point. A manager's regular contact is genuinely valuable — they turn up and they know the building. What a recommendation does not establish is a license for structural work or current insurance, and the manager is not the one carrying the risk if either is missing. Take the introduction and still run the checks.
Because glass is cut to measurements rather than picked off a shelf, and because on a barrier island the frame is often in worse condition than the pane. A company willing to commit to a firm number sight-unseen is either quoting a stock item or quoting a number that will change once somebody arrives.
Written August 2026. General background on Florida contractor licensing as it applies to glass, glazing and window work — not a code ruling, not a permit decision, and not advice about one building. Wind maps get redrawn and code editions change, and on the island the answer can differ between two properties on the same street.
Get the requirement for your address from the building department with jurisdiction over it, and run any contractor's license through the state search yourself. Both links are on this page. If the property is in an association, its rules sit on top of all of this and are not optional either.