Why we looked
People talk about Florida's independent schools as if they were one kind of place, and they aren't. The state's directory puts a 30-year-old accredited PreK-12 campus on the same list as a school that opened last fall in a church fellowship hall. We've worked alongside Florida schools since 1990, and we wanted a clear picture of the whole field rather than the handful of schools everyone already knows, so we built one from public records.
How we built the numbers
We started with the Florida Department of Education's private school directory as it stood in September 2026, which lists 3,604 schools across 66 of the state's 67 counties. For each school, the directory reports its county, grade range, whether it's religious, the accreditation it names, and whether it serves students with disabilities.
The directory doesn't say who owns a school or whether it's a nonprofit, so we searched Sunbiz, the state's corporate registry, for the entity behind each one. We could confidently match 2,239 schools to a corporate record that says whether it's for-profit or nonprofit. Every ownership figure below comes from those 2,239 schools, and the rest of the figures come from the full directory.
Two cautions. Accreditation is what each school reports to the state, and we didn't verify it with the accreditors. And the date a corporate entity was filed isn't always the date the school opened, because schools sometimes reorganize under a new entity.
Most Florida private schools aren't accredited
Only 871 of the 3,604 schools, about one in four, name any accreditation. That surprises families, who tend to assume accreditation comes with being a private school in Florida. It doesn't, because the state registers private schools but doesn't accredit them, and accreditation is a voluntary review a school chooses to go through.
Religious schools are more than twice as likely to be accredited as non-religious ones: 33% compared with 15%. Many church-affiliated schools belong to a denominational association that accredits its members, while independent non-religious schools have to seek out an accreditor on their own. Among accredited schools, Cognia is the name that appears most often, on roughly half of them.
Almost half are for-profit
Of the 2,239 schools we could match, 45% are run by a for-profit company and 55% by a nonprofit. That's a much larger for-profit share than most people expect, because the schools with the longest histories and the most visibility tend to be nonprofits.
The split runs almost entirely along religious lines. Three in four religious schools are nonprofits, while nearly two in three non-religious schools are for-profit. For-profit schools are also far less likely to be accredited, at 13% compared with 29% for nonprofits.
For-profit doesn't mean worse, and nonprofit doesn't mean better. What it changes is who makes decisions and what happens when the founder steps back. A nonprofit school answers to a board, while a for-profit school usually answers to one owner or one family, and that difference matters a great deal when it's time for the next generation of leadership.
A third of them are new
About a third of the matched schools, 752 of them, are run by an entity filed in 2020 or later. Another 404 were filed between 2015 and 2019. Only 199 were filed before 1990.
That's consistent with what anyone in the field has watched happen as Florida widened its scholarship programs, and especially since 2023, when every family in the state became eligible. New schools have opened quickly, many of them small operations in leased space. They're a real option for families, and they're also the schools with the least history, the fewest independent reviews, and the most dependence on a single founder.
Where they are
Florida's private schools are concentrated in the southeast. Miami-Dade alone has 686, about one in five schools in the state, and together with Broward and Orange it accounts for nearly 40% of the total. The character of the schools changes by region, too. Miami-Dade's matched schools are 64% for-profit, while Duval's are 26%, and accreditation ranges from 12% in Osceola to 38% in Duval.
| County | Schools | Accredited | For-profit* |
|---|---|---|---|
| Miami-Dade | 686 | 20% | 64% |
| Broward | 373 | 24% | 53% |
| Orange | 304 | 18% | 47% |
| Hillsborough | 203 | 30% | 36% |
| Palm Beach | 189 | 31% | 42% |
| Duval | 182 | 38% | 26% |
| Pinellas | 151 | 28% | 32% |
| Polk | 125 | 18% | 32% |
| Osceola | 106 | 12% | 42% |
| Brevard | 104 | 24% | 37% |
*Share of the schools in each county we could match to a state corporate record.
Grade levels and special needs
More than half of the directory's schools, 2,073 of them, list a grade range that runs through 12th grade. Some are full PreK-12 campuses, but many are small programs that enroll students across a wide range of ages in a few rooms. Another 731 end at 8th grade, 580 at 5th grade, and 220 serve only preschool and kindergarten.
About half of all schools, 51%, report serving students with at least one category of disability. The most common are specific learning disabilities, occupational therapy needs, autism spectrum disorder, and emotional or behavioral needs.
What this means for families, boards, and founders
For families, the practical lesson is to ask. A school's listing with the state says very little about its quality, and three in four schools haven't been through an outside review. Ask whether the school is accredited and by whom, how long it's operated, and who makes decisions when the founder isn't in the room.
For boards and founders, the numbers describe a field where a large share of schools depend on one person. That's true of most young for-profit schools, and it's true of plenty of older nonprofits whose founder never stepped back from running things. The schools that last are the ones that plan for the next generation of leadership early, while enrollment is steady and the founder still has time to choose.
