Cost Estimate of Florida AI Bill of Rights SB 482
I estimate that the annual cost of SB 482 in increased Florida government outlays in the first year of activity 2027 would be $4.1 million, followed by increased annual costs of $3.3 million per year thereafter…. Much more significant are the estimated $6.6 billion in extra costs in 2027 on Florida businesses, and $3.1 billion in extra private business costs every year thereafter.
Florida’s SB 482, more commonly known as the Florida AI Bill of Rights, has unanimously passed the Senate Commerce and Tourism Committee and the Senate Appropriations Committee and has been placed on the Special Order calendar for vote by the full Senate.1 The companion bill in the Florida House (HB 1395) exists, but has not progressed as consistently as the Senate Bill.2 The most recent cost estimate from the Florida Appropriations Committee staff is that SB 482 would increase government outlays by $987,062.3
In this article, I estimate both the government cost and private economic cost on Florida businesses of the current version of SB 482. I only estimate the components of the bill that have direct and explicit costs on the government and the economy. A summary of the main components of SB 482 is given in Table 1.
I estimate that the annual cost of SB 482 in increased Florida government outlays in the first year of activity 2027 would be $4.1 million, followed by increased annual costs of $3.3 million per year thereafter. This is four times the size of the current Appropriations Committee cost estimate of $987,062.
Much more significant are the estimated $6.6 billion in extra costs in 2027 on Florida businesses, and $3.1 billion in extra private business costs every year thereafter. Table 2 shows a summary of the components of this cost estimate, and Section “Cost Estimate Detail” describes the estimate in finer detail.
Cost Estimate Detail
Table 2 gives the detail of the cost estimate of the Florida AI Bill of Rights (SB 482). The following two subsections give finer detail on how these estimates were calculated for the two sections of bill components in Table 2.
Florida regulation of AI companies interaction with minors
Louisiana’s cost estimate of the protections for minors from social media in SB 162 estimated the new regulations and enforcement would require 4 attorneys, 1 forensic investigator, and 1 administrator, costing $774,346 in FY 2024. They note that this staffing estimate was informed by “conversations with the Utah Attorney General and Office of Consumer Protection’s request of an additional 20 full time employees to handle an anticipated workload of complaints and enforcement actions from enactment of the Utah Social Media Regulation Act.”4
Table 3 shows that Florida has 4.2 times the under-18 population as Louisiana. Assuming some economies of scale in implementing the regulation I use a conservative factor of 3.5 to represent the equivalent cost the Florida might have with the regulation of AI with minors portion of SB 482. This adds up to a cost of $2.7 million in the first year. I further assume that the Florida law would cost a little more than the Louisiana law given SB 482’s extra enforcement components.
SB 482 includes not only age verification and parental consent, but also AI reminders and pop-ups, required screening of harmful materials to minors, and significant penalties for noncompliance. If we assume a conservative estimate for these extra complexity costs of 15%, the factor of the Florida law from the Louisiana law goes from 3.5 to 4.0, bringing the total cost of implementing the components of SB 482 dealing with regulations of AI to minors to $3,116,743 in the first year 2027. We estimate that the startup costs to government to set up the systems for monitoring and enforcement will be 25% of the total cost, or $779,186.
The private costs of the proposed restrictions, mandates, and regulations in SB 482 are much bigger than the government costs. Florida has at least 200 AI and social media companies operating in the state.5 The analysis of the UK Online Safety Act estimated that the costs of the age verification would be between $0.5-$10.0 million for a business with 10 million users.6 I assume the average AI or social media company in Florida has 200,000 users (conservative estimate).7 This means that the average cost for age verification is $100,000 per company, or $20 million for all Florida AI and social media companies. I assume the initial cost is twice the cost of the ongoing costs.
To estimate the cost of the parent monitoring platforms in SB 482 on private businesses, we use a similar cost estimate from the UK Online Safety Bill estimates. The specific component estimated in those estimates is labeled “moderation tech.”8 They estimate a one-time build in the first year for a small company to cost between $0.5-$5.0 million. For this component, I make an even more conservative estimate of $1 million for the average small company, which equals $200 million for all the Florida companies. In this case, I estimate the ongoing cost to be one-fourth of the initial cost.
I estimate the cost of the systems to regularly alert minors that they are chatting with an AI that is not human at very small. This is based solely on the fact that this is a fairly inexpensive feature to engineer and maintain. If it cost $50,000 per company on average, that would be $10 million in the first year for all the Florida businesses followed by one-fourth the cost in the following years.
Content moderation seems to be the most expensive compliance component for businesses under SB 482. Clark (2025) reported that “Meta spends as much as $5 billion annually on safety and security measures.” Clutch.co is a company that outsources content moderation, and they charge $50-$99 per hour for human content moderation.9 Those prices are almost certainly coming down as much of the content moderation can be done by AI (ignore the irony of that given the cost estimate for SB 482). I estimate the cost to be below the low point of that range at $25 per hour. If we assume 500 moderation events per day at an average of 5 minutes of labor per event, that is 2,500 minutes per/day or 41.7 hours per day or 15,208 hours per year. At $25 per hour, that is $380,208 per company or $76.0 million for all Florida AI and social media companies. That number seems to be in the ballpark given Meta’s $5 billion price tag.
Florida personal data, image, and likeness restrictions
Wagener (2025) estimated the cost of the No Fakes Act to be $1.14 million annual compliance cost for a digital startup, plus a $500,000 fixed cost to verify the existing catalogue of digital assets. If we assume a much smaller cost per Florida company of $200,000 annual compliance and $100,000 fixed cost, the cost to Florida’s AI and social media companies would be $60 million in the first year, and $40 million every year thereafter.
For SB 482’s restrictions of tech companies from selling or sharing users’ personal data unless de-identified and protected, Castro, et al (2022), Rinehart (2022), and TDWI (2022) provide a good framework for estimating the cost to businesses. These studies focus on the costs of the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). Castro, et al (2022) estimate the in-state costs in California to be $23 billion per year. With Florida’s GDP being 40% of California’s, a conservative estimate of the costs of personal data restrictions in Florida of one-fourth the cost of California is $5.75 billion per year in the first year and $2.875 billion every year thereafter.
Because the most recent cost estimate from the Professional Staff of the Florida Committee on Appropriations estimated minimal costs to the government from these activities, I estimate a minimal $100,000 per year of increased costs from restricting AI use of name, image, and likeness without consent and from restricting tech companies from selling or sharing users’ personal data unless de-identified and protected, respectively.
References
Anderson, Monica, Michelle Faverio, and Jeffrey Gottfried, “Teens, Social Media and Technology 2023,” Report, Pew Research Center (Dec. 11, 2023).
Castro, Daniel, Luke Dascoli, and Gillian Diebold, “The Looming Cost of a Patchwork of State Privacy Laws,” Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (Jan. 24, 2022).
Census, “Annual and Cumulative Estimates of Resident Population Change for the United States, Regions, States, District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico and Region and State Rankings, April 1, 2020 to July 1, 2025,” NST-EST2025-COMP, US Census Bureau (2025a).
Census, “Annual Estimates of the Resident Population for Selected Age Groups by Sex: April 1, 2020 to July 1, 2024,” SC-EST2024-AGESEX, US Census Bureau (2025b). Florida data and Louisiana data.
Clark, Adam, “Facebook Moderation Move Is a Mistake. Why Zuckerberg Shouldn’t Copy Musk With Meta and 5 Other Things to Know Today.” Barrons (Jan. 8, 2025).
Druilhet, Daniel, “Louisiana SB 162,” Fiscal Note, Legislative Fiscal Office, State of Louisiana (Jun. 1, 2023).
DSIT, “Impact Assessment (IA): The Online Safety Act,” Impact Assessment, Department for Science, Innovation, and Technology, United Kingdom (Oct. 23, 2024a).
DSIT, “Potential impact of the Online Safety Bill,” Research and Analysis, Department for Science, Innovation, and Technology, United Kingdom (Oct. 24, 2024b).
Martin, Justin D. and Stephen W. Song, “What 1500 Florida kids told us about digital media policies,” Tampa Bay Times (May 7, 2025).
Professional Staff of the Florida Committee on Appropriations, “SB 482: Bill Analysis and Fiscal Impact Statement,” Committee on Appropriations, Florida Senate (Feb. 17, 2026).
Readycontacts.com, “AI Companies in Florida,” Readycontacts.com (Jan. 28, 2026).
Rinehart, William, “What is the cost of privacy legislation? A Collection of Estimates,” The Center for Growth and Opportunity (Nov. 17, 2022).
TDWI, “State of CCPA Report Reveals Strain, Rising Costs as More Consumers Exercise Privacy Rights,” Research and Resources, Transforming Data with Intelligence (Mar. 9, 2022).
Utah Senate, SB 194, Sen. Michael K. McKell and Rep. Jordan D. Teuscher, State of Utah (Mar. 13, 2024).
Wagener, Trevor, “The Real Costs of the NO FAKES Act,” Computer & Communications Industry Association (Sep. 10, 2025).
Wess, Sydney, “Content Moderation Services Pricing Guide 2026,” Clutch.co (accessed Feb. 18, 2026).
See Professional Staff of the Florida Committee on Appropriations (2026) https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2026/482/Analyses/2026s00482.pre.ap.PDF. Earlier official cost estimates of the bill assigned no government cost. The two previous cost estimates can be found here and here.
See Druilhet (2023) for Louisiana fiscal note. And See Utah SB 194 (2024) for the Utah social media regulations for minors.
See Readycontacts.com (2026).
See DSIT (2024a, 2024b).
See Anderson, et al (2023) and Martin and Song (2025) for a national survey and a Florida survey, respectively, for estimates of the percent of young people using social media by age group.
See DSIT (2024a, 2024b).
See Wess (2026).