The hour comes from one of four places, and which one decides how early you find out.
A clock in the statute, a decibel table that steps down, an audibility distance, or a condition written into the permit.
Some cities legislate a time. Clewiston writes it into section 34-90(b)(2): a sound-reproducing device plainly audible at fifty feet is prohibited between 10:00 p.m. and 7:00 a.m., and subsection (b)(7) says the same of electronic amplification. Belle Glade sets its sound-device line at 11:00 p.m. in section 18-31(1) and states no measurement distance. Those are hours a run of show can be built backwards from.
Other cities legislate a level and let the clock move it. Davie holds residential receiving ground to 55 dBA from 7:00 a.m. and 50 dBA from 7:00 p.m., so the night figure arrives while an outdoor audience is still walking in. Deerfield Beach splits every row of its Table 1 at 9:00 p.m. Nothing in either code says the show is over; the budget simply shrinks mid-evening.
A third group publishes no number anywhere. Homestead names its instrument in section 19-25(a) and the instrument is a person with ordinary hearing standing at least fifty feet away. Weston runs fifteen lettered clauses on prohibited noise without a decibel figure among them. Miramar has no level, table, weighting or measurement distance in its noise article at all.
And a fourth group puts the hour in the permit. Miami Beach declines to publish a cutoff for permitted events: under section 12-5(8) the city manager may authorise an event in conflict with the noise ordinance only where the applicant has met every requirement and the event cannot be performed in compliance, and the permit has to specify the precise manner, duration and locations of the exceedance. The cutoff is an output of the design rather than an input to it.
Ten o’clock, eleven o’clock, and a Friday that is already the weekend.
Where the hour sits in the statute, a producer can read it before the permit office opens. These print one.
- Ten o’clock
Clewiston, section 34-90(b)(2) and (b)(7), amplified sound audible past fifty feet. Miami, section 36-4(b), outdoor amplified music barred between 10 p.m. and 8 a.m. Vero Beach, section 38-62(2), covering any machine or device for producing or amplifying sound.
- Eleven o’clock
Belle Glade, section 18-31(1). Coral Gables, section 34-169(2), tested as plainly audible at a hundred feet. Cape Coral, section 12-22(e)(12), which licenses outdoor performances, shows and fairs from 9:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m. Weston, in the clause actually headed Music. Sunrise, section 16-280(b), under which special events close at 11 p.m. except at one park or by commission resolution, with New Year’s Eve carried to 1 a.m.
- Eleven, unless somebody signs
Doral permits an activity that shall not commence or continue beyond 11:00 p.m. in any case, unless approved by the city manager or a designee. Jupiter sets 11:00 p.m. in section 13-107(a), and section 13-108 lets a property approved as an outdoor venue run one further hour to midnight on a second, looser table of levels.
- Two hours, depending on the day
West Palm Beach permits amplified sound from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and to 11 p.m. on Friday and Saturday. Boynton Beach ends a weekday at eleven and a weekend at midnight. Aventura reads 11:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. in section 30-33, and defines the weekend as starting on Friday evening, so a Friday show has the later hour before its first song.
- An hour that belongs to a tent
Hialeah publishes no decibel figure anywhere in its Code, and section 38-152 supplies the only curfew the city prints: no tent gathering may operate later than 10:00 p.m. on weeknights or 11:00 p.m. at a weekend. Where a build involves a tent, the tent calendar is the clock.
A step-down is not a curfew. It is a quieter show with the same running time.
These cities let the event continue and change what it is allowed to measure while it does.
Hollywood is the clearest case. On nonresidential property the ceiling is 80 dBA or 80 dBC from 7:00 a.m., falling to 75 dBA or 75 dBC at ten on a weeknight and at eleven on Friday and Saturday. The show does not end at ten. It gets five decibels quieter, which is an instruction to a front-of-house engineer rather than a cue to play the last song.
Cape Coral publishes both kinds of line in the same chapter, an hour apart: outdoor performances run to 11:00 p.m. under section 12-22(e)(12), while the residential receiving limit in section 12-22(f)(1)(a) drops from 66 dBA to 60 dBA at 10:00 p.m. The last hour of a licensed performance is measured against the night column. Pompano Beach does the same thing at 10:01 p.m., and the headroom above its table falls from ten decibels to five at the same moment.
Palm Beach Gardens classifies by the source rather than the receiver: a concert, a festival and a civic ceremony are all non-residential sources, carrying 65 dBA to 11:00 p.m. and 60 dBA after it whatever sits across the property line. Plantation and Boynton Beach both halve the permitted excess over the table at their night hour, from ten decibels to five, so the ceiling and the headroom under it close together.
Sunrise inverts the usual order inside one district. Its Western Sunrise Entertainment District table publishes 85 dBA or 87 dBC from six in the evening until four in the morning, and 65 dBA or 75 dBC through the working day. Fort Lauderdale runs an entertainment overlay on the same principle, capped at 85 dBA or 95 dBC from noon to midnight Monday to Thursday and to 1 a.m. Friday to Sunday and holidays, against a general city test written as plainly audible at fifty feet by day and twenty-five by night.
Two cities attach the lower column to a day rather than a clock. Port St. Lucie applies the 11:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. figures to any sound projected at any time on a Sunday or a holiday, which rules out more Sunday programming than any curfew in the region. Fort Pierce legislates dBA, dBC and dBZ in every cell of Table 1 and sets all three to the same number, so a subwoofer array is measured without the A-weighting discount it gets almost everywhere else.
No decibel, no distance, no hour. The standard is somebody’s judgment on the night.
These are the hardest to quote and the easiest to get wrong, because there is nothing to put in a drawing.
- Boca Raton
No decibel limit, no measurement distance and no cutoff hour in the sound rule. The design has to be defensible on pattern control and array aim rather than on a figure.
- Homestead
Search the nuisances article for a decibel value and the count is zero. Section 19-25(a) measures with a reasonable person of normal hearing at fifty feet. A permitted outdoor show is separately exempt under section 19-24(c).
- Miramar and Weston
Neither noise article contains a level, a table, a weighting curve, an octave band or a measurement procedure. Weston’s Music clause still carries hours, so the city has a time and no level; Miramar has neither.
- Fort Myers
The city’s Special Event Handbook publishes a power to lower the sound or close the event down, and no cutoff hour at all. Amplified sound is listed as its own permit trigger, so a small stage with a PA needs the permit whether or not a crowd gathers.
- Punta Gorda
No decibel limit, no performance end time and no amplified-sound schedule appears in the material the city puts in front of event organisers. That absence is a finding to raise in writing during permit review.
The permit sets the clock, and the lead time is the real constraint.
In these cities the question is who signs, how early, and whether the answer can be withdrawn later.
Key West is the strictest version. An event expected to exceed the limits for its area needs a Noise Exemption, the body that grants one is the City Commission rather than staff, and the city states that Noise Exemptions cannot be issued for the same location within sixty days of the last approval. A venue that hosted a show two months ago is a different proposition from one that did not.
Stuart grants the exemption and keeps the right to take it back. Section 20-151(e)(8) exempts amplified sound at permitted events from the decibel limits, and the sentence after it reserves the city’s right to say otherwise. A system designed so that the 80-decibel figure in subsection (b) is reachable without re-aiming anything can comply with an instruction given mid-show in the time it takes to pull a master.
Bonita Springs triggers its permit at amplification above 65 decibels and then sends the applicant to the county ordinance for the levels themselves, where the public-space limit falls from 66 dBA to 55 dBA at 10 p.m. Clewiston runs the opposite risk: the festival permit sits in one chapter and the 10 p.m. sound line in another, and nothing on the face of either lifts the second. A commission approval and a later finish are two separate requests there.
Okeechobee is the outlier worth knowing about. Section 30-85 sets one figure of 55 decibels that applies around the clock and states no night-time curfew at all, while section 30-82(5) restricts loading and unloading between 8:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m. The show has no published end time and the load-out does.
None of these needs a site visit. All of them are answerable from published documents.
Answered in this order, they fix the end time and the system design weeks before anyone loads a truck.
- Which instrument does this city use?
A clock, a table, an audibility distance, or a permit condition. The answer decides whether the end time is readable in advance or has to be asked for, and asking takes longer.
- Does a level change before the published hour?
Cape Coral, Pompano Beach, Davie and Deerfield Beach all step down while an event is still running. A design built to the daytime figure fails in its last hour without anything being turned up.
- Is the measurement at the stage or at the receiver?
Most of these codes measure at the property line of the receiving use, which makes the distance to the nearest residential frontage a design input rather than a detail of the site plan.
- Does the permit lift the ordinance, or sit beside it?
Coral Gables hands permitted events to its special events article by name. Clewiston does not. The same approval means different things either side of a county line.
- What time does the ground close?
Doral’s parks shut before its ordinance does, and one Sunrise park exempt from the city’s eleven o’clock close has a county landlord who shuts the gate at 7:30 p.m. The shorter of the two clocks is the one that binds.
The last song is a document, not a negotiation.
Every hour above was published before anybody asked for it, and most of the disagreements on a show night come from a document nobody read in time. Find out which of the four instruments the city uses, read the step-down hour as carefully as the curfew, and build the set times, the changeover and the weather contingency backwards from whichever clock is shortest.
Where the figures come from
- Amplified sound 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. Friday and Saturday — City of West Palm Beach event permit guidelines, wpb.org, re-read against the city’s own page on 25 October 2026. The same page states that the city reserves the right to reduce sound levels as needed.
- “Approval for Noise will not be approved after 10pm and before 8am” — City of Marco Island Community Special Event Permit Application, cityofmarcoisland.com, re-read against the city’s own form on 25 October 2026, including its parenthetical excluding some holidays.
- Every other hour, level and section number above — each city’s own code of ordinances, permit application or event handbook, as read and cited on that city’s page on this site. Each city name above links to the page that carries the full reading, the subsection and the date it was read.
- Why the hours are quoted and not summarised — a code is amended between supplements and an application form is reissued without notice. Confirm the standard with the city for the event date before it is written into a run of show.