Yard rules in Boca Raton: watering days, trees, fertilizer and the swale
Boca Raton sets its own watering days, has no summer fertilizer ban but stops it before every storm, and lets most homeowners take down a tree in their own yard without a permit. The swale out front is another matter. What applies, and where the city writes it down.
Four sets of rules reach a Boca Raton yard: when you may water, what you may put on the grass, which trees you may take down, and what you may do with the strip of grass between your lot and the street. Each comes from a different place, and the city's pages on them are scattered. This collects them.
As everywhere on this site, this is about homes inside the City of Boca Raton. A Boca address in unincorporated Palm Beach County follows the county and the water district instead. Check which Boca Raton you are in.
Watering days
The city sets its own schedule in its utility code, and it lines up with the water district's year-round rule for Palm Beach County:
| Your house number ends in | Water on | Never on |
|---|---|---|
| An odd digit — 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 | Monday, Wednesday, Saturday | Friday |
| An even digit — 0, 2, 4, 6, 8 — or there is no number | Tuesday, Thursday, Sunday | Friday |
- Only between 4pm and 10am on your days. Nobody waters in the middle of the day.
- Four hours at most on any one day, for a property under five acres.
- Reclaimed water from the city's IRIS system follows its own, looser rule: any day, still outside the middle of the day.
- A new lawn or new planting. The water district's rule allows extra days while it establishes, and allows hand watering at any time. The city's code does not repeat those allowances, so before you lay new sod, ask Utility Services how they apply inside the city — the contact is on the city's water conservation page. The city can grant a variance for hardship.
Set the controller once to your days and check that its rain shutoff works; a system watering in a downpour is the most common way to break these rules without meaning to.
The city's late-September notice about a "temporary water modification" was about how drinking water is disinfected, not about watering. It ended on 11 October.
Fertilizer
Boca Raton has no summer fertilizer blackout, unlike some Florida counties. The city's Florida-Friendly Fertilizer rules stop it by the weather instead:
- Not during a flood, tropical storm or hurricane watch or warning, and not when heavy rain is forecast or the ground is already soaked. In a Boca summer, that rules out a lot of days.
- No phosphorus unless a soil test shows the lawn needs it — the middle number on the bag should be zero.
- A limit on nitrogen per application and per year, set by the type of grass. The city's page has the table.
- Keep it 10 feet from any canal, lake or pond, or three feet with a deflector shield or drop spreader, and sweep up anything that lands on the driveway or road.
- Grass clippings stay out of the storm drain and the water.
Anyone you pay to fertilise has to be trained and certified for it — see our guide to hiring a landscaper.
Trees
In your own yard, usually no permit. The city's tree rules do not cover the yard of an owner-occupied single-family house, an owner-occupied duplex, or a townhouse's enclosed courtyard — unless the tree has been designated a specimen or historic tree. Everything else is covered — vacant land, property being redeveloped, and a house that is rented rather than lived in by its owner — and there the city requires a tree permit and replacement.
When a tree is dangerous, state law goes further. If a certified arborist or a Florida-licensed landscape architect inspects the tree and documents that removing it is the only practical way to make it safe, no local government may require a permit, a fee or replanting to take it down — on any detached single-family house used as one, owner-occupied or not (s. 163.045). Keep that report. Mangroves are excluded and have rules of their own.
Some trees you should take out. Brazilian pepper, melaleuca, Australian pine and poisonwood are invasive, and the city exempts their removal.
Power lines. Do not trim anything near an overhead line yourself, and do not let a crew without line-clearance training do it. FPL trims near its lines on a cycle; a tree within about 10 feet of a line that FPL is not trimming is the owner's to have trimmed, by someone qualified. FPL's page explains the process.
Before the season, not before the storm. The city asks for big tree work to be finished before the end of April. Once a storm is named, do not cut trees or start yard work that makes debris — there is nowhere for it to go. The debris page has the rest, and our hurricane guide covers zones and alerts.
Yard waste
The city collects bagged or bundled yard waste weekly, on your recycling day, from the swale — no cans, piles kept clear of power lines, branches cut to size. It does not collect what a private landscaper cut: that is the company's to haul away, and the contract should say so. The vegetative waste page has the size limits, and our trash guide has the schedule.
The swale
The strip of grass between your property line and the street is city right-of-way, but you maintain it — the grass, the trees in it and the sidewalk across it. What may go there is limited: sod or low ground cover, flush sprinkler heads, an approved mailbox. Artificial turf and loose rock are not allowed, and planting a tree or anything else beyond those basics needs a swale permit from the city's Engineering division, signed with an affidavit that sets distances from water mains, hydrants and meters. If a utility digs it up, the city puts back sod — not your plantings.
If you have a homeowners' association
An association can set standards, but it cannot ban Florida-friendly landscaping — the drought-tolerant, right-plant-right-place approach the state promotes — and its rules cannot contradict the water district's watering orders (s. 373.185, s. 720.3075). It can still review what you plant, so submit before you dig.
Where this comes from
Checked against these on 2026-10-14. Fees, deadlines and portals change — if one of these pages disagrees with this one, the official page is right and we would like to know.
- City of Boca Raton — Water conservation and programs
- South Florida Water Management District — Landscape irrigation
- City of Boca Raton — Florida-Friendly Fertilizer
- City of Boca Raton — Florida-Friendly Landscaping
- City of Boca Raton — Vegetative waste
- City of Boca Raton — Hurricane debris management
- City of Boca Raton — Swale Area Affidavit (PDF)
- Florida Statutes s. 163.045 — tree removal on residential property
- Florida Statutes s. 373.185 — Florida-friendly landscaping
- Florida Statutes s. 720.3075 — homeowners’ association documents
- FPL — Trees and power lines
October 2026 — First published.
We record when a guide was published and when it was last revised. We do not yet record what changed, so this is a dating record rather than a changelog.
Written and checked by a person, and carrying the month they were published and the month they were last revised. Where a rule or a fee applies we link the official source rather than quoting a number that will go stale.
A fee that has changed, a link that has moved, an answer that is no longer right — tell us and we will check it and say we did.
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