Premises Liability in Florida: Business Invitees, Fla. Stat. 768.0755, and Slip-and-Fall Proof

A fall inside a grocery store, restaurant, hotel lobby, or shopping center in Miami is not automatically the owner's fault. Florida law asks two questions before a business pays anything: what duty did the business owe you, and can you prove the business knew, or should have known, about the hazard? For falls on liquids and other transitory substances, the second question is controlled by a single statute, Fla. Stat. § 768.0755. This page explains that statute, the categories of visitors Florida recognizes, the deadlines that apply, and the evidence that decides these cases in Miami-Dade courtrooms.

Who Counts as a Business Invitee

Florida sorts people on someone else's property into three groups, and the duty owed depends on the group.

• Invitee: A person on the premises by express or implied invitation, typically a customer. Shoppers at a Brickell supermarket, guests at a Miami Beach hotel, and patrons of a Wynwood restaurant are all business invitees.
• Licensee: A person present for their own purposes with the owner's permission but without a business purpose, such as a social guest.
• Trespasser: A person present without permission. Fla. Stat. § 768.075 sharply limits an owner's liability to trespassers, particularly those who are intoxicated or committing a felony.

A business owes an invitee two separate duties. First, the owner must use reasonable care to keep the premises in a reasonably safe condition. Second, the owner must warn of concealed dangers it knows about or should know about, where the invitee cannot discover the danger through ordinary care. A breach of either duty can support a claim. The first duty is the one most often at issue in a slip-and-fall, because a wet floor that is cleaned up promptly is safe, and a wet floor left for forty minutes is not.

What Fla. Stat. § 768.0755 Requires

Before 2010, Florida courts had shifted part of the burden to the business once a plaintiff showed a fall on a transitory substance. The Legislature reversed that approach. Section 768.0755(1) now provides that a person who slips and falls on a transitory foreign substance in a business establishment must prove that the establishment had actual or constructive knowledge of the dangerous condition and should have taken action to remedy it.

Actual knowledge is straightforward: an employee saw the spill, a customer reported it, or a manager logged it. Constructive knowledge is where most cases are fought. The statute allows constructive knowledge to be proven by circumstantial evidence showing either:

1. The dangerous condition existed for such a length of time that, in the exercise of ordinary care, the business should have known of it; or
2. The condition occurred with regularity and was therefore foreseeable.

Subsection (2) preserves the ordinary common-law duty of care, so the statute does not eliminate other theories, such as a defective floor mat or a negligently designed entryway. It governs the specific situation of a substance on the floor.

The Third District Court of Appeal, which hears appeals from Miami-Dade County, held in Kenz v. Miami-Dade County, 116 So. 3d 461 (Fla. 3d DCA 2013), that § 768.0755 is a substantive statute that applies to falls occurring on or after its July 1, 2010 effective date. Every Miami slip-and-fall on a transitory substance since that date has been judged under this standard.

How Length of Time Is Actually Proven

You will almost never have a witness who watched the puddle form and timed it. Courts accept circumstantial proof, and the same categories of evidence appear case after case.

• Condition of the substance: Liquid that is dirty, has cart-wheel tracks running through it, or shows footprints supports an inference that it had been there long enough for others to pass through. Clear, clean liquid with no marks cuts the other way. In Encarnacion v. Lifemark Hospitals of Florida, 211 So. 3d 275 (Fla. 3d DCA 2017), the Third District reversed a summary judgment for the defendant where the plaintiff described the liquid as dirty and tracked through.
• Surveillance video: Most Miami retail locations record their floors. Footage showing the spill occurring, followed by employees walking past it, is the strongest evidence in the case. Footage is often overwritten within 30 days, so a written preservation demand should go out immediately.
• Inspection logs and sweep sheets: Many chains require floor inspections at fixed intervals. A gap in the log, or a log filled in after the fall, is evidence in itself.
• Employee proximity: Testimony that a stocker was working in the same aisle for twenty minutes before the fall supports the inference that ordinary care would have revealed the hazard.

Consider a worked example. A shopper falls near the produce misters at 4:15 p.m. The store's sweep log shows an inspection at 3:00 p.m. and nothing afterward, even though policy calls for hourly checks. Video shows a customer knocking a water bottle off a display at 3:38 p.m. and three employees passing the area between then and the fall. That is 37 minutes of an unaddressed hazard with staff nearby, and it satisfies the length-of-time prong under § 768.0755(1)(a).

The Regularity Prong

The second route to constructive knowledge asks whether the condition occurred with regularity. A grocery store with self-serve ice or a produce section that mists every few minutes has a recurring source of water on the floor. Restaurants with drink stations and hotels with pool decks opening into tiled lobbies present the same pattern. Proof comes from prior incident reports, employee depositions acknowledging the recurring problem, and the store's own placement of warning cones or mats. If the business knew water collected at the same spot every afternoon, the specific puddle you fell on did not need to be observed for the business to be on notice. Our page on building a slip-and-fall case walks through how to gather this evidence in the first weeks after a fall.

Deadlines and Procedure in Miami-Dade

Since the 2023 tort reform law (HB 837), negligence actions in Florida must be filed within two years under Fla. Stat. § 95.11. This applies to falls occurring on or after March 24, 2023. A fall at a Doral warehouse store on August 10, 2024, must be filed by August 10, 2026. Missing the deadline ends the claim regardless of its merits.

If the fall occurred on property owned by a governmental entity, such as a Miami-Dade County transit station or a City of Miami park building, Fla. Stat. § 768.28(6) requires written notice of the claim to the agency and to the Department of Financial Services before suit, and the agency has a statutory period to respond. Damages against government defendants are also capped.

Claims valued at $50,000 or less are filed in Miami-Dade County Court. Larger claims go to the Circuit Court of the Eleventh Judicial Circuit. Under Fla. Stat. § 768.81(6), also added by HB 837, a plaintiff found more than 50 percent at fault recovers nothing. Defendants routinely argue that the plaintiff was texting, wearing unsuitable footwear, or ignoring an obvious hazard, so the comparative-fault evidence matters as much as the notice evidence. A related change in Fla. Stat. § 768.0427 limits medical damages evidence to amounts actually paid or owed rather than amounts billed, which affects how the value of the claim is calculated. The same 2023 law created a separate presumption for property owners in negligent-security cases, covered on our page about the HB 837 presumption against liability.

Mistakes That Lose Otherwise Good Cases

Three errors appear repeatedly. Injured customers leave the store without an incident report, which lets the business later deny the fall happened on its premises. They give a recorded statement to the insurer describing the liquid as clear or saying they did not see it, language that is later used to argue there was no evidence of time on the floor. And they wait weeks to seek counsel, by which point the surveillance footage has been overwritten. We cover these and other slip-and-fall pitfalls in more detail, and our Miami premises liability page addresses non-slip hazards such as broken stairs, inadequate lighting, and parking lot defects.

You can contact the Law Offices of Albert Goodwin by phone at 786-522-1411 or by email at [email protected].