Payday loans are legal in Florida. The state does not ban them with a rate cap. It licenses them and limits them by size, fee and term: $500 per loan, a fee of 10 percent plus $5, and 7 to 31 days to repay. The Florida Office of Financial Regulation sets out these limits.

Florida law calls a payday loan a deferred presentment transaction. You hand the lender a check, you get cash, and the lender agrees to wait an agreed period before cashing, or "presenting," that check. The lenders must be licensed under Chapter 560, Florida Statutes, and the Office of Financial Regulation's Division of Consumer Finance supervises them.

The limits Florida sets on each loan

Rule Florida payday loan
Maximum loan $500
Maximum fee 10% of the amount borrowed plus a $5 verification fee
Term 7 to 31 days
Rollovers or renewals Prohibited
Loans at once One, tracked in a statewide database
Wait before the next loan 24 hours after repaying in full
If you can't repay 60-day grace period at no added charge, with credit counseling

On a full $500 loan the fee comes to $55. Credizen puts that at roughly 286% APR on a 14-day term. DebtHammer puts a 14-day, $100 loan at about 391%. Both figures follow from the same rules. The flat $5 weighs more heavily on a small loan, so the smaller the loan, the higher the annual rate.

There is a second product. A 2018 law signed by then-Governor Rick Scott added installment loans of up to $1,000 over 60 to 90 days, American Banker reported. By its estimate, a 60-day, $1,000 loan runs about $215 in fees. Two back-to-back 30-day, $500 loans cost $110.

How Florida stops loans from stacking

Every licensed lender must run each loan through the state's Deferred Presentment Transaction System at fladpp.com. If the database shows an earlier loan as unpaid, no lender can make you a new one. If it wrongly shows a loan you repaid, OFR has a dispute process to correct the record.

The grace period comes from Section 560.404(22). To get it, you notify the lender in person before the due date and schedule counseling with a state-approved nonprofit agency within 7 days.

Did the 2026 session change anything?

Apparently not. HB 1221 included language on payday loan redemptions, but it was laid on the table on March 11, 2026. Its companion, SB 1452, became Chapter 2026-174, effective June 26, 2026. No payday provisions appear in that law's published summary. The enacted text is what would settle the question for certain. As of September 2026, the limits above are the ones the regulator publishes.

Online and tribal lenders

Florida's protections apply only to loans from state-licensed lenders, OFR warns. DebtHammer reports that online tribal lenders can operate without a Florida license. Those loans sit outside the $500 cap, the database and the grace period. Before you borrow online, check the lender's license by calling OFR at (850) 487-9687.

The sources used for this page do not document Florida-specific alternatives, such as credit union payday-alternative loans or state assistance programs. We won't quote figures for them. A credit union can tell you directly what small-dollar loans it offers.

If you are closing on a house soon

An underwriter reads your bank statements line by line. A deposit from a payday lender, followed by a debit to repay it, is the kind of entry that tends to draw a request for a letter of explanation. If the loan is still open, it may also be counted as a payment in your debt-to-income ratio. How each lender treats a debt this short varies, and the sources here don't settle it, so ask your loan officer directly.

The simplest file is one where the loan is already gone. Pay it off, keep the lender's payoff receipt, and don't take another one before closing. If the state database still shows the loan as open after you've paid, use OFR's dispute process to correct it.