Highlands County, FL Building Setbacks & Zoning: Setback Rules (2026)

212) sets four residential yard setbacks measured from the nearest lot line: a 25-foot front yard, a 25-foot rear yard, side yards of seven and one-half feet, and a 15-foot side yard on a corner lot's side street. These are the same setbacks used in the single-family R-1A and R-1 districts, since R-2 borrows the R-1 district's base standards for any use it does not specifically list. Permitted nonresidential uses within R-2, such as a church, face larger setbacks under the same section: a 30-foot front yard, side yards equal to ten percent of the lot's frontage width, never less than ten feet or more than 20 feet, a 25-foot rear yard, and 20 feet along a corner side street.

A property owner building a duplex or two one-family dwellings under the R-2 permitted-use list still has to meet the residential setback figures for each structure. Development Services checks these setbacks against the submitted site plan before issuing a building permit, and the county's minimum lot dimensions for R-2, 10,000 square feet with 80 feet of frontage, are sized to make the standard front, side and rear setbacks workable on a typical lot.