Florida recorded 2,211 federal tax lien filings naming 2,380 debtors between January 5 and August 19 this year. Broward County took 462 of them, more than Miami-Dade's 404, even though Miami-Dade holds 1.77 times as many registered businesses. Adjust for that and the map rearranges completely: Volusia, Lake and Alachua counties record roughly six times the rate that Hillsborough and Pinellas do.
2,380 federal tax lien records naming Florida debtors were filed so far in 2026, and 91% of them name a company rather than a person. Broward leads on raw count. Measured against the number of businesses registered in each county, the concentration sits along the I-4 corridor and the Atlantic coast, not in South Florida.
Key findings
- Broward outfiles Miami-Dade. 462 lien records against 404, from a county with 966,592 registered active entities against Miami-Dade's 1,706,351.
- Per business registered, Volusia County runs highest among the larger counties at 77.8 liens per 100,000 active entities. Hillsborough runs lowest at 11.4, a factor of nearly seven between two counties in the same state.
- These are business liens. 2,171 of the 2,380 records carry a corporate suffix: 943 Inc, 854 LLC, 292 Corp, 82 PA. Most of the remainder are trade names rather than individuals.
- There is no usable trend line here, and that is a finding. Two whole years are missing from the filing history and a third holds 141 records. Anyone charting this data year over year is charting a collection gap.
What is a federal tax lien, and why is it public?
A federal tax lien is the government's legal claim against property when a tax debt goes unpaid. The IRS describes the sequence: it assesses the liability, sends a bill, and the lien arises when the bill is neglected or refused. The lien itself is automatic. What gets filed publicly is the Notice of Federal Tax Lien, and the IRS is direct about its purpose, calling it "a public document, the Notice of Federal Tax Lien, to alert creditors that the government has a legal right to your property."
For a business the reach is wide. The IRS states the lien "attaches to all business property and to all rights to business property, including accounts receivable." It also notes that the public notice "may limit your ability to get credit." Payment in full triggers release within 30 days, and a separate withdrawal process can remove the public notice while the underlying debt stands.
Florida records these notices through the Department of State, which is why they sit alongside corporate filings in the same public dataset rather than in a court docket.
Who is named on them?
Companies, overwhelmingly. Sorting the 2,380 debtor records by legal suffix gives a clean picture, and the residual bucket is mostly restaurants, clinics and shops filed under a trading name rather than private individuals.
| Form | Records | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Inc or Incorporated | 943 | 39.6% |
| LLC | 854 | 35.9% |
| Corp or Corporation | 292 | 12.3% |
| PA, professional association | 82 | 3.4% |
| No corporate suffix | 209 | 8.8% |
| Total | 2,380 | 100% |
The Inc share is the surprise. Florida formed 385,884 LLCs between January and July this year against 36,705 domestic profit corporations, a ratio of better than ten to one, and the gap has widened for a decade. We traced that arc in new Florida corporations fell 35% in a decade. Yet corporations and professional associations together account for 55% of the lien debtor records here, against 36% for LLCs. A lien names the entity that carried the liability, and liabilities take years to reach this stage, so the mix on a lien filed in 2026 reflects the businesses that were operating and employing years earlier rather than the ones being formed now.
Where do they land?
Raw counts follow population, with one clear exception at the top. Broward records more federal tax liens than Miami-Dade despite having roughly 57% as many registered entities.
| County | Lien records | Active entities | Per 100,000 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Broward | 462 | 966,592 | 47.8 |
| Miami-Dade | 404 | 1,706,351 | 23.7 |
| Palm Beach | 233 | 627,190 | 37.1 |
| Orange | 198 | 555,610 | 35.6 |
| Volusia | 97 | 124,644 | 77.8 |
| Duval | 77 | 263,511 | 29.2 |
| Brevard | 75 | 129,021 | 58.1 |
| Lake | 56 | 79,642 | 70.3 |
| St. Lucie | 54 | 85,289 | 63.3 |
| Seminole | 54 | 129,383 | 41.7 |
| Hillsborough | 52 | 455,204 | 11.4 |
| Pinellas | 51 | 411,941 | 12.4 |
| Alachua | 38 | 54,102 | 70.2 |
| Collier | 37 | 130,751 | 28.3 |
| Lee | 34 | 220,113 | 15.4 |
| Pasco | 34 | 130,677 | 26.0 |
| Osceola | 26 | 123,443 | 21.1 |
| Polk | 25 | 164,671 | 15.2 |
| Leon | 25 | 70,121 | 35.7 |
| Okaloosa | 24 | 53,820 | 44.6 |
| Marion | 23 | 77,901 | 29.5 |
| Martin | 21 | 47,088 | 44.6 |
Read the last column and the state looks different. The two counties with the most registered businesses after Miami-Dade and Broward, Hillsborough and Pinellas, sit at the bottom. Volusia, Lake, Alachua, St. Lucie and Brevard, none of them among the state's largest commercial centres, sit at the top.
Some of that gap is an artifact worth naming. A lien names the debtor's own address, which is where the business actually is. A corporate filing names the address on the filing, which for a large share of Florida entities is a registered agent's office rather than a place of business. Pinellas is the extreme case: one St. Petersburg building accounts for tens of thousands of registrations, which we documented in one St. Petersburg address registered 21,984 companies. Counties that host agent services carry inflated denominators, and their rates read artificially low as a result.
That explains part of Pinellas and some of Miami-Dade. It does not explain Volusia at 77.8 or Alachua at 70.2, because those counties host no comparable agent concentration. Something real is happening in central and coastal Florida that is not happening on the Gulf coast.
Which cities?
Miami leads with 244 records, then Orlando with 153. Broward's total is spread across several mid-sized cities rather than concentrated in Fort Lauderdale, which is a large part of why the county tops the table.
| City | Records |
|---|---|
| Miami | 244 |
| Orlando | 153 |
| Pompano Beach | 84 |
| Jacksonville | 75 |
| West Palm Beach | 60 |
| Coral Springs | 47 |
| Sunrise | 41 |
| Hialeah | 38 |
| Fort Lauderdale | 38 |
| Melbourne | 34 |
Pompano Beach at 84 is the number that stands out, ahead of both Fort Lauderdale and Hialeah, each of which has a considerably larger population. Coral Springs and Sunrise put another 88 between them, so three Broward cities that rarely lead a statewide business table account for 172 records on their own.
Why is there no chart of liens over time?
Because the history will not support one, and publishing a trend line from it would be inventing a pattern out of a collection gap.
The Florida lien file in our dataset holds 104,518 filings, the earliest dated January 5, 2009 and the latest August 19, 2026. Sounds continuous. It is not. 2019 and 2022 are absent entirely. 2020 holds 141 debtor records against 15,288 in 2011. The first four months of 2025 hold two, three, three and five records respectively, then May 2025 jumps to 109 and the series becomes plausible from there.
Chart that and you produce a story about a collapse and a recovery in federal tax enforcement that did not happen. What actually changed is when and how the file was collected. The honest reading is that filings from roughly May 2025 onward are usable and everything before that is a partial record, which is why every lien figure in this article is drawn from 2026 alone.
Two other limits belong here. The file carries no lien amounts anywhere, so there is no way to distinguish a $4,000 liability from a $4 million one. And the cancellation date field is empty on all 104,518 rows, which means a lien that has been paid and released looks identical to one still outstanding. A lien record proves a notice was filed. It does not prove a debt is currently owed.
How to use this if you are checking a company
Treat a lien as a question rather than a verdict. It tells you the IRS assessed a liability, billed for it, and did not get paid, at a point in time. It does not tell you the size, and in this file it does not tell you whether the matter was settled afterwards. A single lien on a twenty-year-old contracting firm and a lien on a two-year-old company with no other filing history are different facts.
What it does justify is a closer look at everything else on the record: the entity's status, its filing history, whether officers have changed recently, and whether the registered agent has resigned. Those signals sit in the same public record, and they read very differently with a lien next to them.
The company side of that check costs nothing. sneyk.com/tools/business-search returns a Florida company's status, formation date, registered agent and county, and sneyk.com/counties carries formation and dissolution data for all 67 counties.
About these numbers
Figures come from Florida Department of State federal tax lien filings and corporate filings as republished in the sneyk dataset. The lien window runs from January 5 to August 19, 2026, which is the full extent of 2026 data at the time of measurement on August 22, 2026. The description of what a federal tax lien is, what it attaches to and how it is released is quoted from the IRS page on understanding a federal tax lien.
Counts are of debtor records, of which there are 2,380 across 2,211 distinct lien filings, since a single notice can name more than one debtor. County comes from the ZIP-derived county of the debtor's own address, and all 2,380 records carry one. Active entity counts are distinct corporation numbers with an active status and a ZIP-derived county, taken from the same dataset on the same day.
The table lists every county with more than 20 lien records and more than 40,000 registered entities, which is 22 of the 67. Two counties clear the record count and fail the second test, and they are the reason the second test exists. Levy County recorded 28 lien records against 7,667 registered entities, which computes to 365 per 100,000. Flagler recorded 23 against 27,848, or 82.6. Both would top the table on rate, and neither means much at that sample size: Levy's 28 records are spread across seven months and three towns.
