Roofing in Orange County

Orange County has 586,805 housing units, by the Census Bureau's 2020–2024 estimate. Just over a quarter of them, 26.1 percent, were built before 1980. Another 19.3 percent were built in 2010 or later. The rest, the biggest group, went up in the three decades between.

A house's age tells you which rules its roof was first built under. Before March 1, 2002, local codes governed construction; the statewide Florida Building Code replaced them after Hurricane Andrew showed the old codes fell short. When an older roof comes off today, the new one has to meet the current code's deck nailing and underlayment rules, whatever the code was when the house was framed.

The stock is mixed. Single-family detached houses make up 54.1 percent of units and mobile homes 3.1 percent, and 56.8 percent of occupied homes are lived in by their owners. That leaves landlords and associations deciding on a large share of Orange County's roofs.

Age varies a lot by town. In Winter Park, Conway, Fairview Shores, Belle Isle, Edgewood, Eatonville and Pine Castle, the typical house is older than the county's 1994 median. In Horizon West, Oakland, Meadow Woods and Winter Garden, most homes are newer than that, and the county calls Horizon West the fastest growing community in unincorporated Orange County.

Start with whether your address is inside a city. Unincorporated areas, including census places such as Pine Hills, Alafaya, Horizon West, University, Meadow Woods and Hunters Creek, get roof permits from the Orange County Division of Building Safety. The division takes all new permit applications and inspection requests online through its Fast Track portal.

Orlando, Apopka, Ocoee, Winter Garden, Winter Park and Maitland run their own building departments. Three small towns hire theirs out: Belle Isle uses UES, Oakland uses Willdan Engineering and Windermere uses PDCS, LLC. Edgewood permits start with the city, which has the county building department process them, and Eatonville's Planning, Zoning, and Building Department handles its own.

Bay Lake and Lake Buena Vista are a special case. Building permits there go through the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District, so check with the district before planning roof work.

Orlando International Airport averages 51.45 inches of rain a year under the 1991–2020 normals, and 23.20 inches of that falls in June, July and August. That is 45 percent of the year's rain in three months, the same months as the first half of hurricane season.

The burst matters more than the total. NOAA's Atlas 14 puts the 5-minute rate of a 10-year storm at Orlando at 8.71 inches an hour, and the 10-year storm's 24-hour total at 6.1 inches. That is the water your valleys, flashing and gutters have to move.

Gutters in Orange County shows how that rate changes gutter size.

Heat is the slow problem. Orlando International averages 109.9 days a year at 90°F or hotter, and Orlando Executive 110.8. A shingle maker's guidance says sun and heat dry shingles out, and lost granules make them age faster and turn brittle.

The town list on this page covers every Orange County place on our map, from Orlando and Alafaya to Edgewood and Eatonville.

Four Corners and Goldenrod straddle county lines, so they are filed under Osceola County and Seminole County. Bay Lake and Lake Buena Vista appear in the list without pages of their own.