Ranked by license standing, permit history, review score, and profile completeness — 26 contractors tracked in Orange County. No paid placements.
One of the more crowded pool-builder markets we track — these Orange County names rise to the top on license standing, permit history, and real reviews, not who paid for placement. Review volume runs a bit behind the state average here, which is exactly why permit history and license standing carry real weight in this ranking.
A look at real project photos from Orange County's top-ranked builders, pulled straight from their own profiles.
A real, recent sample of customer feedback for builders serving Orange County — good and bad, not just the five-star highlights.
“From the very beginning, Larry, Julie & their entire crew were "hands on", professional and very efficient. We are still amazed at how quickly the entire project was completed. In just 8 short weeks we were enjoying our beautiful pool, just as Larry had predicted! In addition, there were no issue along the way. The…”
“I had a great experience with Leron Pools and Ronaldo. From the very beginning, their team was professional, responsive, and easy to work with. They listened to my ideas and helped turn my vision into reality. The quality of the work exceeded my expectations. The pool was built on time, and the attention to detail…”
“I had the absolute pleasure of working with Jaxsin Eddington from Kura Design Pools, and I can say without hesitation that the level of professionalism he demonstrated was exceptional in every respect. From our very first interaction, Jaxsin exemplified what true professionalism should look like. He was punctual, well-prepared, attentive, and consistently courteous. His communication…”
“We cannot say enough great things about Artesian Pools Orlando. Our backyard has a unique footprint and the Artesian team immediately saw its potential and completely transformed it into a true tropical paradise. They designed and built a stunning pool, spa, and sun deck that fit our space perfectly and truly feels like the backyard…”
“Product is fine. Experience is something entirely different. Grumpy attitude and hands off approach making for a hands on experience for the home owner. Pool remodel started 8 months ago and this is where we stand. Also, City of Orlando gets Zero stars”
How the size and activity of the Orange County pool-building market stacks up against the rest of Florida — a busier corner of our directory than most. Review volume per contractor runs a bit behind the state average, though.
Orange County is currently home to 26 pool contractors in our directory — well above the statewide average of roughly 5.2 contractors per Florida county. Contractors here have racked up an average of 68 customer reviews apiece, somewhat below the statewide average of 89 — a reasonable proxy for how active and in-demand local pool builders are, since review volume tends to track real project volume over time.
What the license and permit data tells you about builders serving Orange County, and what still needs a manual check.
85% of contractors serving Orange County (22 of 26) currently hold an active Certified Pool Contractor (CPC) license on file with the Florida DBPR — roughly in line with the statewide rate of 91%. The rest may be unlicensed, expired, pending renewal, or simply not yet verified in our system, so confirming a contractor's license status directly with the state before signing anything is always worth the five minutes it takes. Building permit history is one of the more reliable signals of real, ongoing work: contractors serving Orange County average roughly 167.5 permits each, above the statewide average of 124.8 per contractor — a stronger signal than a star badge on a homepage, which anyone can add regardless of whether it reflects real, permitted work.
Praise like "crew" comes up again and again in Orange County customer reviews, plus a few habits worth adopting before you hire anywhere in Florida.
Across the customer reviews we've indexed for pool builders serving Orange County, the most frequently repeated praise themes are crew, professional, recommend. Patterns like these, repeated across many independent reviews from different platforms, tend to be more trustworthy than any single five-star testimonial — look for the same few themes showing up again and again in a contractor's review history before you hire.
Before you hire a pool contractor anywhere in Florida, a few habits go a long way: verify the CPC or CBC license number directly on the DBPR's public license lookup, ask for the contractor's permit history (or pull it yourself from the county building department), read a mix of recent and older reviews rather than just the top-rated ones, and get at least two or three quotes in writing before committing. Florida's pool construction industry has real regulatory teeth — licensing boards and county permitting offices — and using that public data is the fastest way to separate an established, accountable builder from someone who just built a nice-looking website.
Orange County itself is not the only building authority here — it is more accurate to think of the county as one of several. Beyond Orange County’s own Division of Building Safety, Orlando runs its own Permits & Inspections office, and Winter Garden, Apopka, Ocoee, Winter Park, and Maitland each maintain a fully separate building or community-development department that reviews plans and issues permits for their own residents. Orange County also includes a number of smaller incorporated towns with their own municipal governments, though the six named above are the ones most homeowners in the county are likely to actually run into. None of these offices share a permitting queue with the county or with each other — each reviews its own applications on its own timeline, through its own portal.
This is worth settling before you assume anything about cost, timeline, or process, because jurisdiction depends on which side of a city boundary your specific lot sits on — not on what your mailing address says or which part of town you consider yourself to live in. A property with an “Orlando, FL” address can sit in unincorporated Orange County rather than inside Orlando’s actual city limits, and the same mismatch happens near Winter Park, Maitland, and the other incorporated cities that border unincorporated territory. Unincorporated Orange County runs its permitting through Fast Track, the county’s shared online portal that routes a single application to every reviewing department at once and estimates fees up front. Property inside one of the incorporated cities skips Fast Track entirely and goes straight to that city’s own portal instead — confirming which category your address falls into, before anyone files anything, avoids submitting to the wrong office altogether.
Wherever your permit ends up, Florida’s Residential Swimming Pool Safety Act (Chapter 515, Florida Statutes) applies the same way across every inch of Orange County. Before a new residential pool passes final inspection, it needs at least one approved safety feature: a barrier at least 4 feet high with no gaps or footholds a small child could use to get over or through it, an approved safety pool cover, exit alarms rated at least 85 decibels at 10 feet on doors and windows with pool access, self-closing and self-latching door hardware with its release mechanism set at least 54 inches above the floor, or a certified pool alarm. Skipping this is a second-degree misdemeanor under Florida law — though an owner who adds a qualifying safety feature and completes a drowning-prevention course within 45 days of being cited avoids the penalty.
Chapter 489 of the Florida Statutes puts pool construction licensing under the Department of Business and Professional Regulation (DBPR) at the state level, not the city or county level. A Certified Pool/Spa Contractor (CPC) license, or the broader Certified Building Contractor (CBC) license, is what makes a contractor legally able to build a pool anywhere in Florida — Orlando, Winter Garden, unincorporated Orange County, all of it, under the same credential. DBPR’s public license lookup shows whether that license is currently active and whether it carries disciplinary history, and it takes only a couple of minutes to check directly rather than relying on a company’s own claim about its standing.
The broad shape of the process looks similar no matter which of Orange County’s building departments ends up reviewing your application: plans go in for review, a reviewer checks them against the Florida Building Code, a permit issues once any revisions are resolved, and a series of inspections follow at set points in construction — steel and pre-deck, electrical bonding and grounding, a pressure test on the pool piping, and a final inspection before the permit closes out. How long each step takes depends far more on how busy that specific office is when you apply than on anything about your project itself, so building in schedule flexibility matters more than trying to predict an exact timeline.
Cost is the question that comes up before almost anything else for homeowners shopping for a pool in Orange County, and it shows up in every form imaginable — what a basic pool costs, what a specific size costs, whether a modest budget is even realistic. The honest answer is that no single number applies across Orlando, Winter Garden, Ocoee, or unincorporated Orange County, because pricing swings hard on pool type (gunite, fiberglass, vinyl), size, site conditions, and how much of the project is screening, heating, or an attached spa rather than the pool shell itself. A homeowner asking whether a modest five-figure budget is realistic is usually pointed toward smaller fiberglass or vinyl designs with fewer extras, while a fully custom gunite pool with a screen enclosure commonly runs well past that. Getting quotes from a few licensed contractors for your own lot remains the only way to know what your project actually costs.
Jurisdiction confusion is the second recurring theme, and it is a real practical issue here specifically because of how many separate cities sit inside Orange County. Someone with an “Orlando” mailing address might be inside Orlando’s actual city limits, or might be in unincorporated county territory that only looks like Orlando on an envelope — and the same is true near Winter Park, Maitland, Apopka, Ocoee, and Winter Garden. That distinction decides which building department’s queue a permit application lands in, covered in more detail in the Permits tab, but it is worth flagging here too since it is one of the more common sources of a stalled or misdirected application before construction even starts.
Contractor vetting is where the concern gets sharper, and Orange County has a real, prosecuted case behind that caution rather than an abstract warning. Florida’s Attorney General’s Office of Statewide Prosecution brought criminal charges against the owners of Legacy Pools after the company collected money from more than 300 customers across Orange, Brevard, and Osceola counties between 2019 and 2022 without completing the pools those customers paid for. The charges included a scheme-to-defraud count tied to a victim over 65 and multiple counts of filing false documents. It is the kind of case that makes the standard advice — confirm a CPC or CBC license is active with DBPR before signing anything, be wary of a large deposit tied to vague milestones, and get a written contract with a real payment schedule — worth taking seriously rather than treating as boilerplate.
Timing questions round out the picture, though they carry less weight than cost or vetting. Drier months, roughly November through April, tend to mean fewer weather delays on excavation and gunite work, though pools get built in Orange County year-round and permit queues typically get busier heading into spring as more homeowners apply at once. Applying earlier, rather than trying to compress the timeline into a narrow seasonal window, tends to matter more than picking the theoretically ideal month.
Yes — every in-ground pool, and most above-ground pools past a certain depth, need a permit before construction starts anywhere in Orange County, whether that permit comes from the county's Fast Track system or from a city like Orlando, Winter Park, or Winter Garden that runs its own building department.
It varies more by pool type and site work than by size alone — a 15x30 or 12x24 gunite pool with a screen enclosure and modest decking generally costs more than the same footprint in fiberglass or vinyl, and neither figure holds steady once heating, a spa, or extensive decking gets added. Quotes from a few licensed local contractors are the only reliable way to price your specific lot.
For a smaller fiberglass or vinyl pool with limited extras, it can be. For a fully custom gunite pool with screening and upgraded finishes, thirty thousand dollars is usually a starting point rather than a finish line — the type of shell matters more to that number than almost anything else.
Check directly with the relevant building department rather than assuming based on your mailing address or ZIP code — plenty of "Orlando" addresses actually sit in unincorporated county territory, and the reverse happens too. Orange County's own permitting staff, or the building department of the city you think you might be in, can confirm it quickly before you file anything.
It is the online portal Orange County's Division of Building Safety uses to process permit applications for unincorporated Orange County — it routes a single submission to every reviewing department at once and estimates fees up front. It only applies to unincorporated property; incorporated cities like Orlando or Apopka use their own separate portals instead.
Confirm their CPC or CBC license is active on DBPR's public lookup, ask whether the permit will be pulled in their name or yours, get a written payment schedule tied to completed work rather than one large upfront deposit, and ask for references from jobs finished in the last year or two rather than older ones.
Generally yes for the base structure, though the gap narrows once decking, screening, and equipment are factored in — fiberglass pools also typically install faster since the shell arrives pre-formed rather than being built on site. Which one actually costs less for your project still depends on your specific yard and design choices.
The full, sortable roster of pool builders we track in Orange County — a larger list than in most Florida counties.
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