A house finished in the last few years feels like the one building nobody needs to think about termites in. Fresh slab, fresh framing, and a builder who says the treatment was taken care of. The genuinely useful question sits narrower than that: which parts of the soil beneath the slab were treated before the concrete went down, and which parts were not. Florida keeps a form answering precisely that, and it is one of very few documents in this business a homeowner can request by name and learn something from immediately.
The form that records what never got treated
Under the state minimum pre-treatment standards, soil beneath a slab gets treated once the sub-slab fill is in and before any concrete is poured. What that creates is a horizontal barrier, and the moment the slab goes down it can never be laid the same way again. Where a slab gets poured without that treatment, the Sub-Slab Treatment Release Form is the document that covers it. Its entire job is telling the property owner which areas went untreated.
Which makes it no kind of certificate of work. It is a written record of a gap, filed somewhere. A good thing to hold, and a bad thing to know nothing about.
Only the property owner should ever sign it
That form should carry the property owner's signature and nobody else's. Not the site superintendent, not whoever was framing that week, not the sales agent sitting in the model home. Where a signature does appear on one, somebody was treated as holding the authority to accept an untreated section of ground beneath a house.
That cuts both ways. As the original buyer, what you want to know is whether you put your name to something buried in a stack of closing paperwork you skimmed. As a later buyer, what you want to know is whether the first owner did.
A second form exists, and it is not the same thing
There is also an Official Waiver of Minimum Termite Requirements form. Two separate documents covering two different situations, and neither is evidence that any full treatment took place. So when a builder or a seller says the paperwork is all there, ask what the paperwork actually consists of. A release form, a waiver, a written service agreement and a warranty are four distinct pieces of paper, and only two of the four describe work anybody performed.
Who to ask, and how to ask it
Start with the builder, since the builder is who hired the treating company. Where the builder has moved on or the entity no longer exists, go straight to whoever did the soil treatment, because they hold the records. Keep every question specific, because a general question about termites earns a general reassurance and nothing else.
- Did anybody ever sign a Sub-Slab Treatment Release Form on this address, and who was it?
- Was an Official Waiver of Minimum Termite Requirements signed as well?
- Which company carried out the soil treatment, and may I have a copy of the written agreement?
- Which of the four treatment stages actually got completed, and on which dates?
- Does the file hold a diagram or sketch of the structure, and may I see it?
Why an untreated section matters especially here
Slab on grade ranks among the commonest construction types anywhere in Florida, and in this county it is every bit as ordinary as a crawl space. A slab was never a sealed lid. It cracks, it shrinks back away from the foundation wall, and something cuts through it at every single plumbing penetration. A termite needs a crack of roughly a thirty-second of an inch to make use of.
Now add the local ground. Sand sheds water fast at the surface while holding damp below it, so the soil a foot down against a foundation stays perfectly workable for a colony right through a long dry spell. The bath trap, the plumbing outlets and the construction joints are what get found first, and a strip of untreated soil under any one of them is a head start nobody meant to give.
What the state minimum actually consists of
Reading the actual numbers is the fastest way to separate a real pre-treatment from an afternoon spent spraying dirt. Below are the state minimums for pre-construction soil treatment, and any builder who did the job properly will not object to being asked about them.
| Element | Minimum standard |
|---|---|
| Method at foundations | Trenching, or trenching and rodding |
| Depth | At least 4 feet |
| Rate at foundation elements | 4 gallons per 10 linear feet, per foot of depth |
| Horizontal barrier under a slab | 1 gallon per 10 square feet |
| Where final fill is washed stone | 1.5 gallons per 10 square feet |
| Stages | Four, usually completed in three trips |
If a release form was signed, here is the next move
This is neither a disaster nor something to file and forget. Get the house inspected by somebody licensed through the FDACS Bureau of Entomology and Pest Control, and say plainly at the outset that you believe part of the sub-slab soil went untreated. That single sentence sends the inspection where it needs to go: the bath trap access, the plumbing penetrations, the base of the interior partition walls, and the joint running around the perimeter.
Whatever gets proposed afterward has to arrive in writing, naming the licensee and the property, stating whether the work treats or prevents, listing the conditions for re-treatment and for repairs, and giving the total maximum price alongside the annual renewal fee. The licensed local pros we connect you with work across Tallahassee, Killearn Estates and Bradfordville, and a recent build whose termite certificate nobody can locate is an entirely normal reason to call rather than an awkward one.
Dealing with this in your home?
Bed bugs travel in luggage and boxes, not seasons, so Leon County calls do not slow down each winter the way ant and roach calls do. Semester turnover near Tallahassee Community College and the moving trucks along Tennessee Street give this city its own steady source of new introductions every August and January.
