It is the first question in almost every call we take, and the one that attracts the vaguest answers. “Budget a hundred thousand dollars” gets repeated endlessly on expat forums. Sometimes that is true. Often it is not. And it means nothing at all until you say which project you are talking about: taking over a bakery that is already trading has almost nothing in common with building a full-service restaurant in an empty shell.
Here are the real ranges we see on the ground, line by line, with Florida’s official figures where they exist. Every figure below concerns your restaurant project.
Three orders of magnitude
Before the detail, three reference points that cover most of the projects brought to us.
- Taking over a small trading business — café, bakery-pâtisserie, sandwich shop, tea room: $100,000 to $150,000. The premises, the kitchen and often the customer base already exist.
- A quick-service franchise: $150,000 to $350,000 to get in, franchise fees included — and considerably more for the best-known brands.
- An independent full-service restaurant, built from scratch or heavily renovated: $250,000 to $500,000, and it is common to go past that once the construction work is substantial.
These are not theoretical averages. They are the figures around which successful applications get built. An undercapitalised project is obvious immediately, to a landlord and to a consulate alike.
What the E-2 visa does to your budget
There is no minimum amount written into the law for an E-2 visa. That is the source of most of the confusion. The statute requires a “substantial” investment, and substantiality is judged proportionally to the total cost of the enterprise, not in absolute terms.
In practice: for a café whose total start-up cost is $120,000, you will need to commit something very close to the whole amount. For a restaurant costing a million dollars, a proportion in the region of 60% can be enough. So $150,000 may be judged substantial in one case and insufficient in the other.
Two technical points sink applications that are otherwise well funded:
- The funds must be spent or irrevocably committed before filing — held in escrow, for instance, with visa approval as the only remaining condition. Money simply transferred into a US business account does not count.
- The business must not be “marginal”, meaning it cannot merely provide a living for the investor and their family. Restaurants clear this test naturally: they employ a floor manager, cooks, servers, kitchen porters.
These points belong to the immigration attorney, whom we bring in on every file. Our job is to make sure the project they present stands up economically. We cover the realistic E-2 visa timeline in a separate article.
Premises and lease
A Florida commercial lease is usually signed with a security deposit, first and often last month’s rent, and sometimes a personal guarantee. Add the rent that runs during construction, when you are paying without taking a dollar: on a typical budget, deposit plus pre-opening rent easily comes to $20,000 to $25,000.
Rent varies enormously between markets. A waterfront site in Naples or Sarasota, an Orlando shopping centre and a Venice high street are not comparable. That is exactly what our city comparison is for.
Construction and equipment
This is where the gaps open up. Taking over a space already built to restaurant standards — hood, grease trap, services in place — may cost a few thousand dollars to freshen up. Converting a shop into a restaurant is another world: ventilation, plumbing, electrics, accessibility compliance, and permit delays that add to the bill through the rent they keep running.
On kitchen equipment alone, a reference budget for a full-service restaurant sits around $90,000, excluding installation and infrastructure work. Second-hand equipment — plentiful in Florida, where closures are frequent — can halve that line, at a reliability risk you need to be able to judge.
Then add the point of sale: roughly $8,000 for hardware and setup of a complete system.
Licences: the exact numbers
The good news is that this is the most predictable line — and the cheapest, as long as you stay away from spirits.
The restaurant licence (DBPR)
The operating licence issued by the Department of Business and Professional Regulation depends on your seat count, and stays modest:
- No seating: $242 per year
- 1 to 49 seats: $262
- 50 to 149 seats: $273
- 150 to 249 seats: $294
- 250 seats and above: $315 to $357 depending on capacity
Add $50 in application fees for a new licence or a change of ownership. DBPR plan review is free.
Alcohol: the line that can change everything
An on-premises beer and wine licence (2COP) costs between $84 and $196 a year depending on county population. Negligible.
Spirits are a different story. Florida caps the number of licences by quota — one per 7,500 residents per county — and issues almost no new ones. On the secondary market they trade between $100,000 and well over $500,000: $300,000 to $500,000 is common in Miami-Dade, and over $500,000 in Orange County. On top sit one-off charges, including around $10,750 under the Hughes Act and up to $5,000 in transfer fees.
There is an exception many people planning a restaurant never hear about, and it can save several hundred thousand dollars. A restaurant may serve spirits without a quota licence if it meets specific thresholds: at least 2,000 square feet of service area, capacity to serve 120 people at one time, at least 120 seats, and at least 51% of gross revenue from food and non-alcoholic beverages. The annual fee then reverts to an ordinary licence, $624 to $1,820 depending on county.
Put differently: the size of the space you choose can decide, on its own, whether your liquor licence costs $1,800 or $400,000. It is one of the trade-offs we raise as early as possible in a project.
Professional fees
Immigration attorney, accountant, business plan, company formation, insurance: on a typical budget, licences, permits and professional fees together come to around $12,000. This is a line where economising rarely pays — a refused E-2 application costs far more than the fees you would have paid.
The line everyone underestimates
Working capital. Opening inventory and pre-opening payroll already account for about $28,000 on a typical budget. But the real issue is elsewhere: a restaurant usually takes several months to find its rhythm, and you need to pay rent, wages and suppliers through that period without depending on takings.
We always recommend holding enough to cover six months of operation with no revenue. The projects we watch fail almost never lack ideas or craft. They run out of cash in month four.
Buying versus building
On budget alone, taking over an existing business has three advantages: the heavy construction is done, the licences exist and transfer, and above all you have a trading history — a considerable argument for the E-2 file and for the landlord. In exchange, you pay for goodwill, and you sometimes inherit a reputation.
Building costs more and takes longer, but you only pay for what you decide. We go through that trade-off in buying an existing restaurant versus building from scratch.
What to take away
A bakery-pâtisserie or café takeover is built around $100,000 to $150,000. An independent full-service restaurant needs $250,000 to $500,000. Regulatory licences cost a few hundred dollars, except spirits, which can equal the budget of an entire restaurant if you do not know about the 120-seat exception.
And in every case, plan for six months of cash. That is the number separating the projects that get through the winter from the ones that close in spring. For the whole sequence of steps, see our complete guide to opening a restaurant in Florida.
To build your project budget line by line and make it last until opening day, see how we help you open or take over a restaurant in Florida, and our E-2 visa and investment support.
Have a figure in mind and want to know what it actually buys in Florida? That is exactly the conversation of the first call, which is free and carries no obligation. Let us talk about your project.