It surprises people every time: in 2026, a meaningful number of Florida municipalities still will not process a lien request or a payoff without a physical, mailed check. Not a card, not an ACH transfer, a paper check in an envelope. Understanding why, and how to work with it, keeps it from derailing a closing.
Why paper still exists
Smaller municipal offices often run on legacy billing systems that were never wired for electronic payments. Adding card or ACH processing means new software, new reconciliation, and new staff training that a small office has little budget for. So the check persists, not out of stubbornness, but out of infrastructure that never got replaced.
The check-only rule is office-by-office, not county-by-county. One city's utility department may take a card while its building department, across the hall, still wants an envelope.
What it does to a closing
A check has to be cut, mailed, delivered, and then processed on the other end. That is days, sometimes a week, added to the timeline.
Once a check is in the mail, someone has to confirm it arrived and cleared, or the request simply sits.
When a finding has to be paid to clear title, a mailed check can be the slowest step in the entire closing.
The slowest part of a modern closing is sometimes a stamp.
How the payment actually gets handled
Done manually, the paper step is a small project of its own:
- Identify up front that the office is check-only, before the request stalls.
- Cut the check for the exact fee, payable to the right entity.
- Mail it to the correct department, not just the municipality's main address.
- Track it until the office confirms receipt and the request starts moving.
- Keep the record, so the payment can be shown on the file later.
DataRunner does exactly this automatically: it flags the check-only municipalities up front, issues and tracks the payment, and keeps a record of it, so the paper step is managed instead of forgotten. For how this factors into overall timing, see the turnaround guide.
If a municipality is check-only, get the payment in the mail the same day the order opens. The mail time runs in parallel with the rest of the file instead of after it.