Why Is My Florida Home Insurance So High?

The short answer: five things, and only two of them are hurricanes.

Florida is the most expensive state in the country for homeowners insurance. The average premium here runs around $8,300 a year, against a national average closer to $2,900. That’s not a rounding difference, and it isn’t explained by weather alone — plenty of coastal states get hurricanes and don’t pay what we pay.

Here’s what’s actually in the number.

1. Lawsuits — the reason almost nobody tells you about

For years Florida generated a wildly disproportionate share of the entire country’s homeowners insurance litigation. Not a somewhat larger share. A share completely out of scale with the number of claims filed here.

Two mechanisms drove it. One-way attorney fees meant that if a policyholder’s attorney won even a small amount above what the carrier offered, the carrier paid the legal bills — creating an economic incentive to sue over almost anything. And assignment of benefits let a contractor take over your claim and litigate it in your name, which turned a leaking pipe into a lawsuit you never asked for.

Every one of those legal bills got paid out of premiums. Yours.

Florida largely dismantled both in the 2022–2023 reforms. That mattered, and we’ll come back to it.

2. Reinsurance — insurance for your insurance company

No Florida carrier can absorb a major hurricane alone, so they buy reinsurance: coverage that kicks in when losses pile up. Florida carriers buy an enormous amount of it, and they buy it on a global market that prices in wildfires in California, floods in Europe and earthquakes anywhere.

This is the part homeowners find maddening, and it’s legitimate: a bad catastrophe year on the other side of the planet can raise your premium in Sarasota even if Florida had a quiet season. Reinsurance is one of the largest single line items in a Florida property premium, and it’s almost entirely outside any local control.

3. What it costs to rebuild, not what the house is worth

Your policy insures the cost to rebuild your home, which has nothing to do with what it would sell for. Construction labor and materials have risen sharply, so the rebuild figure climbs even in a year when nothing about your house changed and nothing happened to it.

Most carriers apply an inflation adjustment automatically at renewal. That’s usually correct — being underinsured after a total loss is far worse than paying a little more — but it’s a real reason your premium went up without you doing anything.

4. Your roof

Roof age is the single biggest underwriting factor in Florida property insurance, and it’s the most common reason a policy gets non-renewed. Past a certain age, many carriers simply won’t write the house — not at a higher price, not at all.

Roof claims also drove much of the litigation described above, which is why carriers scrutinize them the way they do.

5. Companies that failed

Several Florida property insurers went insolvent in 2021 and 2022. When a carrier fails, its obligations fall to the state guaranty association, and that gets funded by assessments — which land in premiums across the market. The rest of us absorbed those failures.

So what’s actually changed?

Genuinely quite a lot, and it’s worth knowing:

17 new insurance companies have entered the Florida market since the reforms. For years the traffic ran the other direction.
Citizens is shrinking fast. The state-backed insurer of last resort has depopulated dramatically as private carriers have taken policies back.
Citizens filed an average statewide rate decrease of 8.7%, with more than 330,000 policyholders across all 67 counties seeing reductions and over 150,000 seeing cuts of 10% or more.

More competition is the thing that actually lowers prices, and there is more of it now than there has been in a decade.

“Then why did mine still go up?”

Because a stabilizing market and a falling premium are not the same thing, and we’d rather tell you that than sell you a headline.

Statewide averages move slowly and unevenly. Rate decreases are concentrated — heavily in South Florida, and heavily among Citizens policyholders. If you’re with a private carrier on the Gulf coast with a fifteen-year-old roof, none of the good news above necessarily reaches your renewal. Projections for 2026 still show Florida premiums drifting up slightly on average, just far more slowly than the brutal increases of the last few years.

What has changed is that the market is no longer frozen. When more carriers compete, a given house can get meaningfully different prices — and that’s a door that was closed for years.

What you can actually do about it

The forces above are mostly outside your control. Three things aren’t:

Get a wind mitigation inspection. If your form doesn’t reflect what your house actually has, you’re paying for a weaker home than you own.
Understand your roof’s situation before renewal, not after. Options exist while you still have a policy. They shrink once you’ve been non-renewed.
Have someone re-shop it. With 17 new carriers in the market, the company that was competitive for you three years ago very likely isn’t the one that’s competitive today.

We wrote a separate, more practical guide on the discounts and credits available — including the roof-to-wall retrofit that doesn’t require a new roof. It’s linked below.

If you want a straight answer on your own policy

Bring us your current declarations page and we’ll tell you honestly whether what you’re paying is competitive right now. Sometimes it is, and we say so. When it isn’t, we can do something about it, because we represent dozens of companies rather than one.

One caution while you compare: look at price AND at the endorsements section. That’s the heart of a policy and the part almost nobody reads. A lower premium that quietly dropped coverage isn’t a lower premium — it’s less insurance.

Call (941) 312-5771 or stop by. We’re at 62 Sarasota Center Blvd in Sarasota, open Monday through Friday, 8:30 am to 4:30 pm, and we write across Sarasota, Manatee, Charlotte, Pinellas and Hillsborough counties.