What They Charge
To Answer You
The same hour of work, priced from $20.00 to $250.00
The Right Is Free.
Exercising It Is Not.
Article I, Section 24 of the Florida Constitution gives every person the right to inspect government records. No fee to ask. No reason required. Chapter 119 then lets an agency charge for its time when a request is genuinely burdensome, and that is a fair rule honestly applied.
We sent one identical request to every agency in this list. Same wording, same technologies, same date range. The replies varied so widely that the figures cannot all be describing the work.
For the same clerical hour, agencies charge between $20.00 and $250.00. For the same request, the time they say it will take runs from two hours to one hundred.
Those are two separate unexplained gaps. The rate differs by more than twelve times. The hours differ by fifty times for a request that was word for word identical. No agency at the top of either range has explained which of its records made the difference.
We are not comparing final bills, because most agencies have not reached one. Some figures below are complete estimates, some are deposits taken before the search starts, and two are hourly rates published in advance with no bill yet. The table says which is which.
We are publishing every fee we have been quoted, including the ones we think are fair, so the comparison can be made by anyone.
Almost Nobody
Charged Anything
A page listing only the agencies that sent a bill would give the wrong impression, because a bill is the rare outcome. Most agencies answered for nothing.
Sixty-three agencies have given a substantive answer about the surveillance technology they run, either by producing documents or by stating in writing that they hold none. Not one of them asked for a penny.
Contracts, invoices, policies, interlocal agreements, a federal task force agreement, a state biometric MOU. Some ran to dozens of files. The Blountstown Police Department forwarded its entire vendor correspondence file, thirty-four emails, without being asked twice and without charging.
Between them the twenty-one have released almost nothing so far. Thirteen have put a figure or a rate in writing; eight have not yet said how much. Two of the thirteen have only published a rate and billed nothing. What the rest are charging for is work that has not been done.
Charging is a decision, and most agencies decided against it.
Every agency that has actually done this work has done it for free. That is the answer to any agency that says a request of this kind is inherently expensive.
Counted from the campaign log on 28 August 2026, across 569 requests filed and 333 agencies that have replied. Each agency is counted once, by the furthest its answer got. No agency appears in both the produced and the charged column.
Every Fee
On The Record
Twenty-one agencies have told us a charge will apply. Thirteen have put a figure or a rate in writing, and those thirteen are below. The other eight have not yet said how much. Highest first.
| Agency | County | What they billed for | Hours | Rate | Amount |
|---|
Quoted in writing in response to Chapter 119 requests, August 2026. Deposit terms and closure deadlines are recorded as each agency stated them.
What The Numbers
Do Not Say
One Agency Showed
Its Working
We asked several agencies the same four questions: which part of the request requires extensive work and why, the classification and hourly rate of each employee charged, the estimated hours and the basis for that estimate, and the arithmetic producing the total.
The Madison County Sheriff's Office answered all four. It named the items, the classification (Administrative Assistant), the pay rate ($24.54), the billing rate ($6.00 per quarter hour, being $24.00 an hour), the hours (two), and set out the multiplication. It charges the two hours up front and refunds or credits whatever is not used. The total was $48.00.
The $48.00 is not the price of the records. It buys two hours of searching, after which the Sheriff's Office says it will issue a cost estimate, and it refunds or credits whatever it does not use. The final figure could be higher. What matters is that the arithmetic was shown before any money was asked for.
That is what a lawful special service charge looks like written down. A small rural sheriff's office with no records division managed a complete, itemized answer in a day. Agencies asking for hundreds or thousands have supplied a single line and a payment address.
Highland Beach quoted $2,025.96, and itemized every hour of it.
Its invoice showed one line, but a separate hour-estimate form broke the work into five categories: twenty hours for six years of vendor email, ten for policies and audit logs, two each for agreements and device locations, one for data-sharing. Thirty-five hours at $55.00. The figure is large because of the twenty hours of email, which is the item a requester can drop. We said in an earlier version of this page that the charge was unexplained. That was wrong, and the correction is ours to make.
The Limits On
Charging You
Section 119.07(4)(d) permits a special service charge only where the nature or volume of the records requires extensive use of information technology resources or extensive clerical or supervisory assistance. The charge must be reasonable and based on the cost actually incurred by the agency. It is not a price the agency is free to set.
Section 119.011(1) excludes the cost of the custodian's own labor from the cost of duplication. Section 119.07(4)(a) caps paper copies at 15 cents a page.
Section 119.07(1)(f) entitles you, on request, to a statement of the reasons with particularity. An agency that will not say which item is expensive, or who is doing the work and at what grade, has not met that.
A fee that is not explained cannot be checked, and a fee that cannot be checked is not a cost. It is a toll.
Several agencies attach a deadline: pay within ten business days, or thirty calendar days, or the request is closed. A requester who queries the charge can lose the request while waiting for an answer.
Four Questions
To Send Back
These are the questions that produced Madison County's itemized answer. Copy them.
If an agency refuses to answer and will not release the records, s. 119.12 provides that a court shall award attorney fees against an agency that unlawfully refuses access, where you gave written notice of the violation to the agency and to the board or council at least five business days beforehand.