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There is no single Florida price, and anyone quoting one before seeing your yard is guessing. What moves the figure most is the shell — gunite costs more than fiberglass and takes longer — then the size, the deck around it, and how much the ground has to be dug out or built up. Screening, heating and lighting are each their own line. Get three written quotes broken down item by item, and compare the lines rather than the totals: two quotes that look the same on the last page are often not buying the same pool.

A gunite pool is the slow one: excavation, steel, the shell sprayed and then left to cure, tile and coping, decking, plaster, and only then water. Fiberglass is faster because the shell arrives finished and the work is the hole, the crane and the plumbing. Both sit behind the same two things that are not the builder’s to control — how quickly your county issues the permit, and the weather. A builder who will put their schedule in writing, with the stages named, is telling you something useful; one who promises a date without mentioning the permit is not.

Yes. A residential swimming pool needs a building permit everywhere in Florida, and separate electrical and plumbing permits are usual. Your contractor pulls them under their own license — that is part of what you are hiring. Florida also requires a pool built at a home with a child under six to carry an approved safety feature before the final inspection passes: a barrier, an approved cover, alarms on the doors, or a self-latching gate. Be wary of any builder who suggests working without a permit. It is their license at risk, and your house that ends up with unpermitted work on its record when you sell.

Check it with the state, not with the builder. Florida’s DBPR keeps a public license search: put the company or the person’s name in and you get the license number, whether it is active, when it was first issued, and any discipline against it. A pool contractor should hold a CPC license — the residential and commercial pool categories are separate, so check the one that matches your job. We show a license on every profile here and say when we last checked it, but the state’s record is the one that counts, and it takes a minute.

It should say what is being built and what is not. Dimensions, depths and the shell type; the finish, the tile and the coping named by product, not by adjective; what equipment is going in, by make and model; who pulls the permits; the deck size and material; and what happens if the ground turns out to be worse than expected. Then the money: a payment schedule tied to stages that have actually finished, not to dates. Then the warranty, in writing, with the shell, the finish, the equipment and the labour listed separately — they rarely run for the same length of time. A contract that leaves the finish as “plaster” and the equipment as “builder’s choice” is a contract that will be argued about later.

Gunite and shotcrete are concrete sprayed over a steel cage in your yard, so the pool can be any shape you can draw — and it is the slowest and usually the dearest to build. The interior is plaster or an aggregate finish and it is resurfaced periodically over the pool’s life. Fiberglass arrives as one moulded shell, so the build is quick and the surface is smooth and easy on chemicals, but you are choosing from the shapes and sizes that are manufactured and it has to fit down your side access. Vinyl liner is the cheapest to install and the liner is replaced every so often. Most Florida builders are set up for one or two of these rather than all three, which is why the choice usually decides who you are hiring.