Sumter County, FL Accessory Structures: Shed & Carport Rules (2026)

Section 13-517 limits a storage building accessory to a conventionally built home to 1,000 square feet, and restricts its use to storing construction materials and equipment during a project or the property owner's own personal items, not a separate business or rental use. The principal home's building permit has to be issued before the storage building can be placed or built, and the shed itself needs its own building permit even when another part of the code would otherwise exempt that type of structure. Section 13-510 supplies the setback that applies to most sheds: in a residential zoning district, an accessory building of no more than 100 square feet can sit as close as one foot from a lot line as long as it is no taller than ten feet, though that reduced setback never applies in the front yard.

Larger accessory buildings fall back on the setback that applies to the principal use. The code separately bans converting vehicles, mobile homes, travel trailers and shipping containers into a storage building, with narrow exceptions for shipping containers on ten-plus-acre agricultural parcels, capped at two per parcel and never stacked, and for temporary construction-material storage for up to thirty days after a certificate of occupancy issues. In every residential district outside agriculture and rural residential, no more than three accessory structures total are allowed on one site, and their combined size cannot exceed sixty percent of the principal building.