Slip and Fall on Government Property in Florida: Public vs. Private Property

You slipped and fell in Florida, and then found out the property belongs to the government. Maybe it was a courthouse hallway, or a library, or a public pool, or the sidewalk outside one of them. What you want to know is whether you can still sue.

You can, but three things change. A slip and fall on government property in Florida runs under a different statute from the one covering a restaurant or a store. You have to send a written claim before you can sue, and wait while the agency reads it. And a government body cannot be made to pay more than a ceiling the statute sets, whatever a jury decides your case is worth.

So which deadline is yours, who gets the notice, and how much of a case does that cap take? By the end you will know what changes when the owner is the government, how to tell whose property you fell on, the notice you have to send and when, why three years is not your real deadline, and the cap on what the government pays. I am Al Ventura-Coffey, a trial attorney at Wolf & Pravato, and slip and fall claims are a large part of what I do.

Key takeaways

• Florida slip and fall law splits in two: a fall in a store runs under Florida Statute 768.0755, and a slip and fall on government property runs under 768.28.
• Before you can sue a Florida government body over a fall, you have to present a written claim to that agency, which then gets six months to answer.
• A private business has no ceiling on what a jury can make it pay. A Florida government body does, whatever the jury awards.
• Your two-year deadline to file suit keeps running while the agency reads the claim, so the real deadline to send notice is well short of three years.

What changes when you slip and fall on government property in Florida

You can still bring the claim, but Florida Statute 768.28 wraps a written notice, a six-month wait and a hard dollar cap around it. None of the three exist when you fall in a business.

• You present a written claim to the agency first. A suit filed before that is filed too early.
• The agency gets six months to answer. Six months of silence counts as a written denial.
• A jury can award more than the cap. Getting the rest takes an act of the Legislature.

Where that comes from: the statute itself, Florida Statute 768.28, which is how Florida waived sovereign immunity in tort cases.

Here is the comparison in one place. The private side is one deadline. The government side is three steps and a ceiling.

The statute leaves the proof of the fall alone. What 768.28 adds is a ring of steps around the case, and missing one ends a good claim on a step rather than on the facts.

How to tell whether the property is government or private

Start here, because everything below depends on it, and the answer is not always what the building looks like. A building that feels public can be run day to day by a private company under contract. A park with a city's name on it can be maintained by an outside firm. Where a government owns the land and a contractor maintains it, both can be defendants.

You can sue a city for falling on a sidewalk it let break up, and people do. What you cannot do is handle it like a claim against the store on the corner, which is why suing a county over a bus accident works nothing like suing a driver.

Two checks answer it in an afternoon:

• Look up the parcel. Every Florida county property appraiser puts ownership records online, searchable by address.
• Ask who employs the cleaner. A janitorial contract is the commonest reason a public building has a private defendant.

The written notice you have to send before you can sue

If you were injured on government property, the notice is the first thing to get right. Section 768.28(6)(a) blocks a lawsuit until two things have happened. You put the claim in writing to the right agency, and that agency turns it down in writing.

Why three years is not your real deadline

The notice window is three years. The deadline to file the lawsuit is two. Florida Statute 95.11(5)(a) gives you two years for a case founded on negligence, and sending notice does not move it. The statute says the notice requirement "shall not affect the date on which the cause of action accrues."

The cap: $200,000 per person and $300,000 per incident

This is the part you plan a case around from week one. Section 768.28(5)(a) says the state and its agencies cannot be made to pay any one person more than $200,000, or more than $300,000 for everybody hurt in the same incident.

What the same fall looks like against a private business

A slip and fall on private property runs on one deadline and no ceiling. Put the identical puddle on a restaurant floor and almost none of the above applies. No notice, no waiting period, no ceiling written into law. You get two years to file, and the shop's insurance policy rather than a statute is the practical limit on the case.

Discretionary function immunity, the argument the government makes first

Even inside the waiver, Florida courts keep one kind of decision out of reach. In Commercial Carrier Corp. v. Indian River County, decided in 1979, the Florida Supreme Court split government conduct in two: planning-level choices, which stay immune, and operational-level conduct, which does not.

In plain terms, how a city spends its maintenance budget citywide is planning. Nobody gets to sue over it. Whether the crew told to fix one broken step went and fixed it is operational, and somebody can. Expect the government's lawyers to put your facts on the planning side of that line, early.

What we do in the first weeks of a fall case

Most of what decides a fall claim happens before anybody argues law. The job is proving how long the hazard sat there, and those records belong to somebody else.

• The video gets locked down before it is gone. We send a preservation demand the week we are hired. Most camera systems record over themselves within weeks, some in days.
• You get the paper that shows the timing. Cleaning logs, inspection sheets, staff schedules and earlier complaints about that spot turn "there was a puddle" into how long it sat.
• The deadlines stop being yours to track. On a government claim that means the notice, the copy to the Department of Financial Services when the law calls for one, and the wait after.

Questions people ask me about falls on public property

Does my attorney's fee change when the defendant is a government body?
Yes, and in your favor. Section 768.28(8) caps attorney fees at 25 percent of any judgment or settlement brought under that section.

Find out which kind of case you have before a deadline decides it

Wolf & Pravato represents injured people across Florida, from offices in Fort Lauderdale, Miami, West Palm Beach, Boynton Beach and Fort Myers. If you fell and you are not sure who owned the floor, bring us your photos and the incident report. We work out which statute applies and which deadlines are running.

Request a free case review. There is no fee unless we win money for you.

This article is general information about Florida law, not legal advice, and every fall turns on its own facts and on who owned the property. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome.