The Florida Real Estate Commission publishes every final order it signs, with the statute violated, the discipline, the fine and the costs. We pulled the 2025 and 2026 reports and counted them one by one: 208 final orders across the twelve 2025 meetings and 73 more across the first two of 2026.
The first figure already changes the conversation. Of those 208 orders from 2025, 83 ended in revocation. Four in ten. This is not a file with a warning letter attached: by the time a case reaches a final order, the single most likely outcome is losing the licence.
What gets cited most is not what everyone fears
Ask an agent what could cost them their licence and they will say escrow, or an advertisement with the wrong name on it. The numbers say otherwise. Setting aside the catch-all clause, the rule that appears most often in the 2025 orders is failing to tell the commission about a conviction within 30 days: 53 of the 208, or 25.5%.
Two rules carry the same duty. Statute 475.25(1)(p) requires written notice to the commission "within 30 days after pleading guilty or nolo contendere to, or being convicted or found guilty of, any felony". And 455.227(1)(t) extends that same 30 day clock to any conviction, felony or not, regardless of adjudication.
Read that slowly, because it is the cheapest trap on this list to avoid. The discipline is not for the crime. It is for not having said so. The clock starts at the plea, not at sentencing, and it does not wait for anyone to remind you.
Another 22 orders cite 475.25(1)(f), which is the conviction itself: having been convicted of or pleaded to a crime "which directly relates to the activities of a licensed broker or sales associate" or involves moral turpitude or dishonest dealing. So the crime and the silence are two separate violations, and both can be charged.
Escrow: one case in four, and climbing
Other people’s money is the second theme: 49 of the 208 orders from 2025, or 23.6%. The rule is 475.25(1)(d), which disciplines a licensee who "has failed to account or deliver to any person" money or property that came into their hands and is not theirs, at the agreed time or, where no time is fixed, on demand.
And here is the shift worth watching. Across the first two 2026 meetings, escrow appears in 33 of the 73 orders: 45.2%. From one case in four to almost one in two.
A warning before drawing conclusions: two meetings is 73 orders, a small sample, and a jump like that can be a batch of cases that happened to arrive together. We publish it because the difference is large and because it can be checked in the same report, not because we can call it a trend.
Advertising, the thing everyone talks about: one case
Of the 208 orders from 2025, one cites the advertising rule. One. In 2026 there are three across two meetings.
That does not mean the rule goes unenforced. It means almost nobody reaches a final order through it, and what sits behind that is probably a good deal of administrative correction that never becomes a disciplinary case. Still, it puts the risk in proportion: a badly built advertisement is far less likely to cost you a licence than an unreported conviction or a mishandled deposit. What the rule requires exactly is in the advertising guide.
Lying on the application surfaces years later
Forty orders from 2025, 19.2%, cite 475.25(1)(m): "has obtained a license by means of fraud, misrepresentation, or concealment". Nearly one in five cases across the whole year.
That is the price of having answered no to the record question. And one detail makes it worse: in 2026 that ground nearly vanishes, one order out of 73. What you see in a given year is not what happened that year, it is what the commission finished resolving, and these take time.
And fraud, which ends worst
475.25(1)(b) covers "fraud, misrepresentation, concealment, false promises, false pretenses, dishonest dealing by trick, scheme, or device, culpable negligence, or breach of trust". It appears in 41 orders from 2025 and in 27 of the 73 from 2026, which is 37%.
Note the combination: fraud and escrow rise together, and in 2026 revocations go from 39.9% to 53.4% of orders. When the case is about somebody else’s money, the ending tends to be revocation.
The fine is not the bill
Here is the figure almost nobody reports and that changes how the risk gets calculated. In 2025 the commission imposed $138,375 in fines and, separately, $135,591 in costs. Almost the same amount.
Costs are the bill for investigating and prosecuting the case, and statute 455.227(3)(a) allows them to be assessed on top of the discipline, excluding attorney time. They are neither discretionary nor symbolic: across the first two 2026 meetings the fines add up to $24,107 and the costs to $86,400. Three and a half times more.
The median 2025 fine was $379.50 and the largest was $5,000, which is exactly the ceiling statute 475.25(1) allows "for each count or separate offense". So the number you end up paying does not come from the fine. It comes from how many counts they charge and what it cost to investigate you.
What this means for a brokerage
Looking at the 281 cases together, the ones that reach a final order resemble each other, and they do not resemble what usually fills a team meeting:
- Ask about convictions when you hire, and ask again every year. The most cited violation is not a crime: it is not reporting one within 30 days. And the duty sits with the licensee, not with you, which means you can find out once the window has closed.
- Escrow has no "I will fix it Monday". The rule speaks of accounting at the agreed time or, absent one, on demand. A delay is the violation, not the run-up to it.
- What was signed on the application comes back. One in five 2025 cases is somebody who concealed something when applying, sometimes years earlier.
- Your people practise under your name. Twenty-four orders from 2025 cite statute 475.42: practising unlicensed, collecting outside the employer’s name, or working for someone not registered as the employer.
The last one deserves a note of its own, because it lands on you directly. Statute 475.25(1)(u) makes it a broker’s violation to fail to direct, control or manage a sales associate, and presumes you employ them from the moment the registration exists. What that ties you to is in the independent realtor guide.
How these numbers were counted
From the DBPR FREC Final Order Report, one PDF per year with a row per final order. We counted them with a script that lives in the repository, and three things are worth knowing before quoting any of these figures:
- The year is the year of the commission meetings, not of the conduct. An October 2025 order resolves a complaint from 2023 or 2024. This does not measure how much rule-breaking happens. It measures what got resolved.
- One order cites several statutes. The percentages are "orders citing that theme", which is why they add to more than a hundred. They are not exclusive categories, so they cannot be drawn as a pie.
- We left out 475.25(1)(e), which appears in 84 of the 208 and is the catch-all for violating any provision of the chapter. As a category it says nothing: what informs is the specific rule it drags along, which is what is in the chart.
One more thing, in case anyone compares: three 2025 rows cite a "455.277(1)(t)" that does not exist. It is a typo in the report itself for 455.227(1)(t). We count them for what they are and say so here rather than correcting them quietly.
What this guide cannot tell you
How many complaints get filed or how many are dismissed. The report carries only the ones that ended in a final order, so we do not know what share of the total this is or how long a case takes to resolve.
Nor what happened in any individual case. The report gives the city, the name, the statutes and the discipline; it does not give the facts. So we can say which rule was cited and we cannot say what that person did, and we publish no names: the PDFs carry the name and licence number of every disciplined licensee, and only aggregates come out of them.
What we do know, and what changes a decision: four in ten orders end in revocation, the most cited violation is a 30 day deadline nobody will remind you about, escrow accounts for a quarter of cases, and costs can run to three times the fine.