Moving to Boca Raton
The first question is not the removal van. It is whether the address you are moving to is in the City of Boca Raton at all, because that decides your water bill, your bin day and your beach permit.
Do one thing before anything else: find out whether your new address is inside the City of Boca Raton.
A "Boca Raton, FL" mailing address does not answer that question. Of the 554 businesses on this site, 236 sit outside the city limits in unincorporated Palm Beach County. Thousands of homes do too. Everyone calls it Boca. The city does not.
It takes about a minute to settle, using the public property record, and there is a guide to exactly that. Do it before you set up a single utility, because the answer changes who you are setting them up with.
What the answer changes
| City of Boca Raton | Unincorporated county | |
|---|---|---|
| Water and sewer | City Utility Services | County or a private utility |
| Bin collection | City sanitation, billed on the water bill | County's hauler |
| Police | Boca Raton Police Services | Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office |
| Building permits | City Building Department | County Planning, Zoning & Building |
| Beach parking permit | City resident rate | Not a city resident for this purpose |
That last row surprises people who have lived here for years. Beach permit access is set by residency inside the city limits, and the city says so on its own permit page.
If you are in the city
Water. City Utility Services, 1401 Glades Road, on 561-338-7300. Their department page covers starting an account, the bill and the annual water quality report.
Bins. Residential curbside collection covers rubbish, recycling, garden waste and bulk items, and it is charged on the same bi-monthly bill as the water rather than separately — which is why new residents sometimes cannot find a bin invoice. Collection runs on an area schedule; the city's curbside page has the map and the current rate.
Paying the bill. The city runs more than one portal and it is not obvious which is which. We wrote that one up.
If you are in the county
Your services come from Palm Beach County rather than the city, and the city's pages above will not apply to you. Start from the Property Appraiser record for your parcel, which names the authority you fall under.
Worth knowing in the first month
- The beaches — the permit is a resident thing and the rules are not obvious
- Parking — three separate systems, one of them free
- Farmers markets — two of them, both Sunday morning
- What is on — 161 events from the city's and the CRA's published calendars
- City services — 107 things the city does, with the phone number for each
What this page will not tell you
Rates, deposits and fees. Every one of them is a number that moves, and a new resident budgeting off a stale figure on a stranger's website is precisely the harm this site is arranged to avoid. Each link above goes to the authority that sets the number.
Where this comes from
Checked against these on 2026-09-15. 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 — Utility Services
- City of Boca Raton — Residential Curbside Collection
- City of Boca Raton — Beach Permits & Daily Rates
- Palm Beach County Property Appraiser
September 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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