Tall timber construction, now allowed in 44 states, will stay out of Florida’s building code, after the state’s Building Commission voted down provisions its own fire and structural experts recommended. That is according to the American Wood Council, which confirmed the commission rejected the changes after two advisory committees backed 22 of the council’s 29 proposals for the 2026 Florida Building Code.
“Influenced heavily by competing material interests and misleading testimony” is how the council’s annual report describes that vote, which it says came despite the strongest technical backing the provisions have carried in the state. After weighing other routes through the rules and the legislature, the council has issued a Florida guide that bridges the gap between the code and the 2024 International Building Code.
“That is a position a building official does not want to be in,” said Scott McAdam, the Indian River County building official who co-chairs the code development committee of the Building Officials Association of Florida. Because the statewide code stays silent, McAdam says a jurisdiction’s first mass timber project must run through the alternative means and methods process, leaving the local official to judge a national building system alone.
Known as Types IV-A, IV-B, and IV-C, the rejected construction types allow mass timber buildings of up to 18, 12, and 9 storeys, and cleared the International Code Council’s consensus process. Mass timber assemblies have already passed the world’s first three-hour fire-resistance test, the rating the tallest type requires, and every Florida timber project must still satisfy the wind, hurricane, floodplain, termite, and life-safety rules demanded of steel and concrete.
“The Florida Building Code doesn’t include a provision for mass timber,” Mo Madani, a technical director of the Florida Building Commission, told the University of Florida’s Warrington College of Business. Under the code’s alternative materials clause, now the industry’s side door into the state, cities and counties can clear projects whose methods match the quality, strength, fire resistance, durability, and safety of standard construction.
It comes as Hines topped out the six-storey T3 FAT Village in October last year, giving Fort Lauderdale its first mass timber office building through that same case-by-case route. Across the Panhandle, approved plans at Pensacola’s Maritime Park carry the 16-storey Rhythm Lofts and the 11-storey Reverb by Hard Rock hotel, a US$200 million scheme, its structural engineer ranks as the tallest mass timber structures in the state.
Backing those towers are NFL Hall of Famer Emmitt Smith’s EJ Smith Enterprises and The Dawson Company, whose Gensler-designed pair would still sit beneath the 25-storey timber tower billionaire Jeff Greene has proposed for downtown West Palm Beach. Officials in three cities must now judge the state’s tallest timber schemes one application at a time.
Letters supporting the code changes came from the Building Officials Association of Florida, the Florida Cattlemen’s Association, the Florida Forestry Association, the Florida Fruit & Vegetable Association, and The Nature Conservancy of Florida. At the time, Agriculture Commissioner Wilton Simpson and Senator Erin Grall backed the push, and the Commission received supportive positions from the National Association of State Fire Marshals and the International Association of Fire Chiefs.
“The Commission is fully aware of this hardship,” said Gary Hiatt, the chief building official for the City of Winter Park, who told Florida Politics the panel disapproved the proposals without technical reasons. Publisher Peter Schorsch writes that commissioners demanded testing that does not exist, imposing benchmarks never asked of any other building material.
Lawmakers have already tried to force the issue, with Grall’s 2025 construction bill ordering the Commission to recognise tall mass timber by 1 January 2026, only for the mandate to be stripped and the measure to become law without it in June 2025. Wood Central understands that the statute now carries no mass timber requirement, though section 553.73 allows the Commission to approve statewide technical amendments once each year, opening a route before the next full code cycle.
History gives the code’s backers little comfort: commissioners voted 9-4 in favour of mass timber in 2022, only to fall short of the 75 per cent supermajority Florida requires. The 9th Edition code takes effect on 31 December 2026 without the provisions, leaving the annual amendment window and the 2027 development cycle as the American Wood Council’s next openings to return its 22 expert-backed changes to a vote.
