Which Boca Raton are you in?
Forty-three percent of the businesses with a Boca Raton address are not in the City of Boca Raton. Here is how to tell, and why it decides who you call.
A "Boca Raton, FL" mailing address does not mean you live in the City of Boca Raton.
Of the 553 businesses published on this site, 236 — about forty-three percent — sit outside the city limits, in unincorporated Palm Beach County. Everybody calls that area Boca. The post office calls it Boca. The city does not, and neither does the county.
This is not a technicality. It decides who you call.
What changes when you cross the line
| City of Boca Raton | Unincorporated county | |
|---|---|---|
| Building permits | City Building Department | County Planning, Zoning & Building |
| Police | Boca Raton Police Services | Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office |
| Fire and rescue | Boca Raton Fire Rescue | Palm Beach County Fire Rescue |
| Code complaints | City code enforcement | County code enforcement |
| Business tax receipt | City receipt and a county one | County only |
The expensive version of this mistake is a permit. People apply to the wrong agency, wait, and are told to start again somewhere else. The slow version is a code complaint filed with a department that has no authority over the address.
How to find out for certain
The property record is the answer, and it is public.
Open the Palm Beach County Property Appraiser and search the address. The parcel record names the municipality it falls in. If it says Boca Raton, you are in the city. If it says unincorporated or leaves the municipality blank, you are in the county.
Do not use the mailing address, the school your children attend, or what the neighbours say. Two houses on the same street can be in different jurisdictions, because the city limits were drawn around annexations rather than around neighbourhoods.
If you are in the county
The county's Planning, Zoning and Building department handles permits for every parcel outside a municipality — see the Permit Center. It is a different portal, different fees and different inspectors from the city's.
The Property Appraiser also publishes a list of permit departments by municipality, which covers the county's incorporated towns. Unincorporated addresses are not on that list, which is itself a useful confirmation: if your address is not served by any of the 39 municipalities, it is the county's.
Why this site tracks it
Every business page here records which of the two it is in, where we have been able to establish it. Where we have not, the page says nothing rather than guessing — a wrong jurisdiction is worse than an absent one, because it sends somebody confidently to the wrong counter.
Where this comes from
Checked against these on 2026-08-31. 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.
- Palm Beach County Property Appraiser — map search
- Palm Beach County permit departments by municipality
- Palm Beach County Planning, Zoning & Building — Permit Center
- City of Boca Raton
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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