Business Debt Restructuring in Florida: 7 Laws That Change Your Leverage (2026)

The Florida Statutes Are Not Neutral in This Fight

Your funding agreement almost certainly says New York law governs it, and your funder’s collector will tell you that settles the question. It does not. Choice of law decides how the contract is read; it does not decide what a judgment creditor may seize inside Florida, which exemptions apply to you personally, how long a lien lasts, or what a Florida judge may order a third party to hand over. Those questions run on Florida statutes no matter what the funder wrote on page eleven, and they are the questions that determine what your file is worth in a negotiation.

Some of what follows helps you. Florida has an unlimited-value homestead, an entireties presumption that survives into bankruptcy, and a disclosure statute that at least forced your funder to write down the total dollar cost of the deal before you signed. Some of it cuts the other way, and pretending otherwise would be useless to you. Florida’s proceedings supplementary statute is one of the most aggressive post-judgment tools in the country, and the disclosure statute says in plain words that a violation of it changes nothing about whether your contract is enforceable.

Seven laws, in the order a restructuring actually encounters them, starting with the two that govern the paper you signed and ending with the one that lets your own company sue a funder.

1. The Disclosure Statute That Covered Your Deal

Chapter 2023-290 gave Florida the Florida Commercial Financing Disclosure Law, cited at Fla. Stat. §559.961. The definition that pulls an advance in sits at §559.9611(6), which treats a commercial financing transaction as a commercial loan, an accounts receivable purchase transaction, or a commercial open-end credit plan, so long as it is also a business purpose transaction. An advance structured as a purchase of future receivables is an accounts receivable purchase transaction under §559.9611(1), which means the funder cannot argue its way out of the statute by insisting the deal was not a loan. That argument works on usury. It does not work here.

Whether your paper is covered turns entirely on §559.9612, and there are two facts to check before anything else. The part applies to transactions consummated on or after January 1, 2024, so every agreement signed before that date sits outside it, which for most readers is the majority of their stack. And the statute exempts anything above $500,000, along with federally insured depositories and their affiliates, Farm Credit Act lenders, deals secured by real property, licensed money transmitters, and any provider that closes five or fewer transactions with Florida businesses in a twelve-month window. A small funder can be entirely outside the law.

What a covered funder owed you is at §559.9613, and it must be delivered at or before consummation: the total amount of funds provided, the amount actually disbursed after fees and payoffs, the total you will pay back, the total dollar cost calculated as the difference between the two, the manner and frequency and amount of payments or the methodology behind them if they vary, and whether prepayment carries a cost or a discount together with a pointer to the contract provision that creates it. Notice what is absent. Florida requires no annual percentage rate, unlike New York and California, so the arithmetic converting total dollar cost into a rate is yours to do.

2. The Fee Your Broker Was Not Allowed to Take

Fla. Stat. §559.9614(1) says a broker may not assess, collect, or solicit an advance fee from a business to provide services as a broker. An advance fee is defined at §559.9611(2) as any consideration assessed or collected by a broker before the closing of a commercial financing transaction, and a broker under §559.9611(3) is anyone who, for compensation or the expectation of it, arranges a transaction or an offer between a third party and a business. The one carve-out is narrow: you can be asked to pay for an actual service such as a credit check or an appraisal, provided the payment goes to an independent third party by check or money order rather than into the broker’s pocket.

This is the provision most often violated in the files we see, because the broker economy runs on it. The tells are a wire or Zelle transfer to a name that is not the funder, a “processing” or “due diligence” deposit taken while the application was still out to four shops, or a line deducted at funding for a service nobody performed. Pull your bank statements for the thirty days on either side of funding, the broker’s emails, and the funding-day settlement statement showing what was withheld, and put them next to §559.9614. The other three subsections matter too: (2) and (3) prohibit false statements and material omissions in the broker’s dealings, and (4) requires a broker’s advertising to disclose its actual address and telephone number.

Now the honest part. Enforcement of the entire part belongs to the Attorney General exclusively under §559.9615, and the same section says the part creates no private right of action. You cannot sue your broker on this statute and you cannot use it to unwind the funding. What it gives you is a documented regulatory exposure that a funder’s counsel would rather not have attached to a file it is trying to collect, which is a different thing from a claim, and it is worth exactly what a negotiator can make of it. That distinction is worked through in more depth on our page about Florida disclosure defects and what they are actually worth.

3. Eighteen Percent, Twenty-Five Percent, and the Line Past Both

Florida’s civil usury cap is framed around the size of the loan. Fla. Stat. §687.02(1) makes a contract usurious where more than 18 percent per annum simple interest is charged, and it writes the rule against loans of $500,000 or less, with anything above that figure governed by §687.071 instead. Fla. Stat. §687.03 states the same prohibition operationally, makes it unlawful to reserve, charge or take more than the equivalent of 18 percent simple, and allows a 5 percent delinquency charge on a commercial contract once payment is ten days late. All of it presupposes a loan, which is why every usury fight over an advance begins as an argument about substance rather than labels.

If the advance is recharacterized as a loan, Florida’s remedies are unusually painful for a funder. Fla. Stat. §687.04 provides that a willful violation of §687.03 forfeits the entire interest charged or contracted to be charged, leaving only the actual principal sum enforceable, and where usurious interest has actually been taken or reserved the lender forfeits double the amount to the borrower. Two exceptions run the other way: a bona fide holder who bought negotiable paper before maturity without notice is protected, and a lender who notifies the borrower of an overcharge and refunds it with interest before suit escapes the penalty.

Past 25 percent the statute stops being a civil matter. Fla. Stat. §687.071(2) makes interest above 25 percent and up to 45 percent a second degree misdemeanor, §687.071(3) makes anything above 45 percent a third degree felony, and §687.071(4) reaches an extortionate extension of credit as a second degree felony. The subsection that matters most to you is §687.071(7): no extension of credit made in violation of that section is an enforceable debt in the courts of this state. That is where a genuine voidness argument in Florida comes from, and it is a very different argument from a disclosure defect.

4. The House, and the Half Your Spouse Owns

Article X, §4 of the Florida Constitution exempts a homestead from forced sale with no dollar ceiling at all, and it goes further by providing that no judgment, decree or execution shall be a lien on it. The limits are spatial rather than financial: one half acre of contiguous land inside a municipality, 160 acres outside one, ownership by a natural person, and three carve-outs for property taxes, obligations contracted for the purchase or improvement or repair of the property, and labor performed on the realty. A guarantee on an advance is none of the three. We treat the acreage rules, the residency question and the bankruptcy caps at length on our page about how a personal guarantee lands against Florida homestead.

The companion doctrine is tenancy by the entireties, which is available only to a married couple and which a creditor of one spouse alone cannot execute against. Florida presumes entireties ownership for real property conveyed to a husband and wife, and Beal Bank, SSB v. Almand & Associates, 780 So. 2d 45 (Fla. 2001), extended the presumption to bank accounts titled in both names where the traditional unities are present and the signature card does not say otherwise. It carries into a bankruptcy case through 11 U.S.C. §522(b)(3)(B), which exempts an entireties interest to the extent it is exempt from process under nonbankruptcy law.

For a restructuring, the practical effect of both doctrines is that the funder’s collector is pricing your file against a shorter list of reachable assets than it would be in almost any other state, and a competent negotiator makes sure the collector knows that early rather than late. Two cautions. If both spouses signed the guarantee, the entireties shield is gone, because the creditor is then a creditor of both. And moving assets around now to build the protection is the fraudulent conversion problem covered further down, not a plan.

5. Florida Never Adopted the Voidable Transactions Revisions

This one matters because a lawyer working from a New York or California template will use the wrong vocabulary. Fla. Stat. §726.101 still reads that the act may be cited as the Uniform Fraudulent Transfer Act, and chapter 726 still carries the 1984 uniform structure rather than the 2014 revisions that renamed the act and shifted the burden language in a number of other states. If a memo about your restructuring talks about voidable transactions and cites section numbers in the 270s or the 3439s, it is describing New York or California law, not the statute a Florida judge will apply to your transfers.

The two operative tests are worth knowing before you move anything. Fla. Stat. §726.105(1)(a) reaches a transfer made with actual intent to hinder, delay or defraud any creditor, whether the creditor’s claim arose before or after, and §726.105(2) lists the badges of fraud running from paragraph (a) through paragraph (k) that a court weighs on intent, including transfer to an insider, retention of possession, concealment, a pending suit, a transfer of substantially all assets, and insolvency at or shortly after the transfer. Fla. Stat. §726.105(1)(b) needs no intent at all: no reasonably equivalent value, plus unreasonably small remaining assets or debts beyond the ability to pay. Fla. Stat. §726.106(1) adds the present-creditor version keyed to insolvency, and §726.106(2) reaches an insider paid on an antecedent debt.

The remedies at §726.108 are avoidance to the extent necessary to satisfy the claim, attachment, an injunction against further disposition, appointment of a receiver, and levy on the transferred asset or its proceeds once judgment enters. The deadlines at §726.110 are four years from the transfer for an actual-intent claim or one year from when it was or could reasonably have been discovered, whichever is later, four years for the constructive claims, and only one year for a §726.106(2) insider transfer. None of this is a reason to reorganize in secret, and every asset move contemplated during a workout needs a Florida attorney to date it and value it before it happens.

6. Proceedings Supplementary, Which Reaches Past Your Entity

Fla. Stat. §56.29 is the reason a Florida judgment is worth more to a creditor than the same judgment in most states, and almost no business owner has heard of it until it happens to them. A judgment creditor holding an unsatisfied judgment or a judgment lien under chapter 55 files a motion and an affidavit describing property of the judgment debtor that is not exempt from execution and is in the hands of any person, identifying the court, the case number, and the amount still owed with costs and interest. It is a motion in the case that already exists, not a new lawsuit, which means no new filing, no new service of process on you, and no new answer deadline.

The engine is the Notice to Appear. Under §56.29(2) the court directs it to any person holding property of the judgment debtor or owing an obligation to it, and that person must file an affidavit by a date certain that cannot be less than seven business days from service. The notice has to describe the property, debt or obligation with reasonable particularity and tell the recipient about discovery rights and the availability of a jury trial. Under §56.29(6)(a) the court can then order property of the judgment debtor levied on and applied toward the judgment, and can enter money judgments against any person to whom a Notice to Appear was directed. Your customer, your affiliate, your landlord, or the buyer of your equipment can end up a judgment debtor without ever having been sued.

There is a burden shift built in. Fla. Stat. §56.29(3)(a) provides that where, within one year before service of process on the judgment debtor in the original action, the debtor had title to or paid the purchase price of personal property that was transferred to a spouse, a relative, or a confidential business associate, the judgment debtor carries the burden of proving the transfer was not fraudulent. You are not defending a claim in that posture. You are disproving one.

Two consequences follow for anyone restructuring. First, the transfers that need to be clean are the ones in the twelve months before you were served, not the ones you are contemplating now, so the diligence has to look backward. Second, §56.29(8) permits reasonable attorney fees to be taxed against the judgment debtor, which means the creditor’s cost of running this machinery can land on you. The full enforcement sequence, including what a judgment lien certificate and a charging order actually deliver, sits on our page about what a Florida creditor can seize.

7. Florida’s Deceptive Practices Act Counts Your Company as a Consumer

Most state unfair practices statutes stop at a natural person buying something for personal use, which is why the New York analogue struggles in a commercial dispute. Florida wrote its definition differently. Fla. Stat. §501.203(7) defines a consumer as an individual, a child by and through a parent or guardian, a business, a firm, an association, a joint venture, a partnership, an estate, a trust, a business trust, a syndicate, a fiduciary, a corporation, any commercial entity however denominated, or any other group or combination. Your trucking LLC is a consumer under FDUTPA by definition rather than by argument.

The private remedies are at §501.211. Subsection (1) lets anyone aggrieved by a violation seek declaratory relief and an injunction, and subsection (2) lets a person who has suffered a loss recover actual damages plus attorney’s fees and court costs. Fees also run under §501.2105 to the prevailing party after judgment and the exhaustion of appeals, which is a genuine two-way risk and the reason nobody files one of these casually. Note also §501.203(3), which allows a violation to rest on Federal Trade Commission standards of unfairness and deception rather than on a Florida rule alone.

Check the exclusions before getting attached to the theory. Fla. Stat. §501.212 removes from FDUTPA any act required or permitted by federal or state law, banks and credit unions and savings and loans regulated by the Office of Financial Regulation or by federal agencies, insurers regulated by the Office of Insurance Regulation, personal injury and property damage claims, and utilities regulated by the Public Service Commission. An unlicensed, unregistered advance funder appears nowhere on that list, which is the whole point. FDUTPA carries no limitations period of its own, so it falls into chapter 95, where §95.11(3)(e) gives four years to an action founded on a statutory liability.

Who Should You Call? Our Top-Rated Business Debt Firms

One firm on this list works the entire lifecycle of a business debt file, from stopping the daily debits through attorney-led negotiation, UCC lien removal, and a signed release. The other two cover broader debt categories that often sit alongside the advances. Choose accordingly.