Beepr

Who actually gets your $100 school-zone ticket?

2026-07-22 · Beepr

Every Florida school-zone camera ticket is exactly $100. Where does it go?

A chunk goes to the private company that owns and operates the camera. In unincorporated Miami-Dade, the county's vendor takes roughly 20% of fine revenue — about $20 of your $100 — under the program that went live in November 2024. The rest splits between local and state buckets, some of it earmarked for school-safety spending.

Why this matters

We'll say the quiet part: a vendor paid per ticket has zero interest in fewer tickets. The company that profits from violations also helps decide where cameras go and keeps the system running. When the county identified 206 potential enforcement zones, that wasn't just a safety survey — it was a market-sizing exercise.

And volume followed: by the first quarter of 2026, school-zone cameras accounted for roughly 68% of all speeding tickets in Miami-Dade County. One category of automated fine, two-thirds of all enforcement.

The steelman, because fairness

Speeding through a school zone at drop-off is genuinely dangerous, camera zones do slow traffic, and no city can post an officer at every school twice a day. Automated enforcement isn't evil — unaccountable, profit-sharing automated enforcement with hours posted in fine print is just a very easy system to abuse.

What you can actually do

Figures from FLHSMV reports and county program records compiled in our public-records research. Corrections welcome: data@getbeepr.com.

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