Highlands County, FL Business Licensing & Operations: Massage Establishments (2026)

Section 4-109 sits in article IV of Chapter 4, the county's Sexually Oriented Business Ordinance, among a short run of sections in which the Board of County Commissioners expressly declines to occupy fields already covered by state law. The immediately preceding section, 4-108, makes the same choice for obscenity, deferring to Florida Statutes Chapter 847, and section 4-109 does the same for massage establishments, naming Florida Statutes Chapter 480 and the state's department of professional regulation, board of massage, as the licensing authority. Because the county never adopted a Chapter 4 licensing scheme for massage, provisions elsewhere in article IV, such as sections 4-141 through 4-142 that route sexually oriented business licenses through the county administrator, and the health, fire, building and zoning inspections in division 2, do not extend to a stand-alone massage establishment that is not itself a sexually oriented business under section 4-102's definitions.

A massage service offered inside a licensed sexually oriented business, however, still falls under that establishment's article IV license and the operational rules in division 5. Practically, this means a massage therapist or clinic seeking to open in unincorporated Highlands County applies to the state board of massage for licensure and does not file a separate county application, register with the county administrator, or pay a county massage license fee. Any zoning or building permit needed to occupy the space still runs through Development Services under Chapter 12's Land Development Regulations, but that permitting is generic to the building's use classification and not massage-specific.