For as long as most Florida drivers have been on the road, a speeding ticket has been a civil matter. You get a citation, you pay a fine or elect a course, you take the points, and no part of it touches your criminal record. On July 1, 2025 that stopped being true at the top of the range. Section 316.1922 of the Florida Statutes created a new offense called dangerous excessive speeding, and a first conviction carries up to thirty days in jail.
Most coverage calls it Florida’s super speeder law, a nickname borrowed from Georgia that appears nowhere in the statute. It has been on the books for over a year now, and it is worth setting out carefully, because some of what has been published about it describes a version of the bill that never became law.
What the Statute Actually Says
There are two ways to commit the offense. The first is exceeding the speed limit by 50 mph or more. The second is driving at 100 mph or more in a manner that threatens the safety of other persons or property, or that interferes with the operation of any vehicle.
Those two routes carry different burdens, and the difference is the whole case. The 50-over route is a pure number, so everything depends on the measurement. The 100 mph route requires the number and something beyond it, because the State also has to prove the manner of driving threatened someone or interfered with another vehicle. A radar reading alone does not establish that.
On penalties, a first conviction carries imprisonment for up to thirty days, or a fine of $500, or both. A second or subsequent conviction carries up to ninety days, or a $1,000 fine, or both. Where the second violation falls within five years of a prior conviction under the same section, the driving privilege is revoked for at least 180 days and no more than one year.
Before taking any of this apart, the law deserves its best version. A car at 100 mph covers about 150 feet every second, roughly half a football field between one glance at the road and the next. Until July 2025 Florida had no criminal charge aimed squarely at extreme speed unless the driving also met the reckless driving standard, which requires a willful or wanton disregard for safety and is a good deal harder to prove. The gap the Legislature closed was a real one.
Where the Wrong Version Came From
If you have read that the offense has three thresholds, or that it reaches 35 mph over the limit on a road other than a limited access highway, or that a first conviction carries ninety days, none of that is in the statute. Those figures come from an earlier draft.
The bill was House Bill 351, filed on February 3, 2025. It was then rewritten three separate times, through committee substitutes in late March, early April, and the middle of April, before the enrolled version was produced on April 24 and signed on May 22. Summaries written from the early drafts and never revisited are still circulating, and they overstate both the reach of the statute and the penalty.
There is a lesson here that is worth more than the specific numbers. For any statute younger than a few years, the current-text page alone will not tell you how much the bill moved on its way through. The history line at the foot of the section names the chapter law, and the enrolled session law is the document that shows what was actually enacted. On a recent statute, that is the one to read.
Why the Name Causes Confusion
Florida borrowed the phrase from Georgia, where it means something quite different. Under section 40-6-189 of the Georgia code, a super speeder is a driver convicted of going 85 mph or more on any road, or 75 mph or more on a two-lane road, and the consequence is a $200 fee collected by the Department of Driver Services on top of whatever the underlying conviction carried. The money funds the state trauma care system. It creates no separate crime and it carries no jail.
Florida’s version sets far higher thresholds and attaches a criminal penalty instead of a fee. A driver doing 85 mph on a 65 mph road is a super speeder in Georgia and is 20 over in Florida, which is an ordinary civil infraction here. The nickname travels between the two states and the law behind it does not, which is a good part of why the Florida rules get reported wrong.
Thirty Over Means a Court Date, Even Without a Crime
Below the criminal threshold, the same act tightened the civil side. Section 318.19 lists the infractions that require a mandatory hearing, and a person cited for one of them loses the convenience options in section 318.14 and has to appear at the scheduled hearing.
Exceeding the limit by 30 mph or more is on that list, and the 2025 act added a further entry covering infractions under section 316.1926(2). If a citation falls into either group, there is no paying it by mail and no quiet election of a course. Showing up is part of the charge.
The Same Driving Sits on Both Sides of the Line
Here is the part that decides how these cases resolve. Section 316.1926(2) has been on the books since 2008, and it still says that exceeding the limit by 50 mph or more is a moving violation punishable under Chapter 318, which is the civil track. Section 316.1922 says the same conduct is a crime with jail attached. Both are current law at the same time.
That overlap puts enormous weight on the charging decision, and a charging decision is something that can be revisited. In a great many of these cases the realistic objective is moving the matter off the criminal track and onto the civil one, where there is no jail and no conviction to carry.
The Case Is Usually About the Measurement
Underneath the label, a 50-over charge is a number produced by an instrument, and Florida regulates those instruments closely. Section 316.1905 requires that the device be of a type approved by the department and that it have been tested for accuracy not less than once every six months. The approval and testing standards sit in the administrative rules, at Chapter 15B-2 of the Florida Administrative Code, which carries separate rules for Doppler radar and for laser units, minimum design criteria for each, and a rule listing the approved devices themselves.
The same statute creates a presumption and a right. A signed and witnessed certificate showing the device was tested within the required period establishes that by presumption, though the statute says the presumption falls where the contrary is shown by competent evidence. And a provision many people never use gives the accused the ability, on oral or written motion, to require that the officer who actually operated the device appear in court and testify.
One honest caution belongs alongside that. Florida’s evidence code allows a lay witness to give an opinion about the speed of a vehicle, so an officer who watched the car can offer an estimate even where the instrument reading is excluded. Attacking the device is often decisive, and it does not automatically end the speed evidence.
The Question the New Crime Quietly Raises
Turning conduct from an infraction into a crime changes what can happen at the roadside. A civil speeding stop ends in a citation, and in Knowles v. Iowa, 525 U.S. 113 (1998), the Supreme Court held that writing a citation does not by itself authorize a full search of the car. Once the same driving can be charged as a crime, an arrest becomes possible, and an arrest is the doorway to a search incident to it.
There is a real argument that the doorway is narrower than it appears. Under Arizona v. Gant, 556 U.S. 332 (2009), a vehicle may be searched incident to a recent occupant’s arrest only where the arrestee is unsecured and within reaching distance of the passenger compartment, or where it is reasonable to believe the vehicle contains evidence of the offense of arrest. Knowles addressed that second justification directly in a speeding case, reasoning that once the citation issued, all the evidence necessary to prosecute the offense had been obtained and no further evidence of excessive speed was going to be found on the driver or inside the car.
Speed lives in the instrument reading and in what the officer observed, rather than in the passenger compartment, which is why that reasoning travels. No Florida court has settled how it applies to this statute, so it is an argument to raise and brief rather than a rule to lean on. It is worth raising, because in these cases what turns up after the stop is frequently the reason the case matters at all.
What This Means If You Are Charged
Three things are worth knowing early. The charge is criminal, so it will not resolve by mail and it does not disappear by paying something. The number came from a device that has an approval status, a testing history, and an operator, and every one of those is documentable. And the same conduct is defined as a civil infraction elsewhere in the same chapter, which is the ground the negotiation stands on.
The detail on the elements, the penalties, the administrative rules governing speed measuring devices, and how these charges are defended is set out on the firm’s dangerous excessive speeding page. The broader picture of how a criminal charge differs from a ticket is in the criminal traffic section, and the work on challenging the stop itself is in the search and seizure section.
This post is general information about Florida law, not legal advice, and it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Dangerous excessive speeding is governed by section 316.1922, Florida Statutes, created by chapter 2025-77, Laws of Florida, with related provisions in sections 316.1905, 316.1926, 318.14, and 318.19, and in Chapter 15B-2 of the Florida Administrative Code. Statutes change, so penalties and elements should be confirmed against the current text. Every case turns on its own facts, and past results do not guarantee a similar outcome.
