Florida homeowners pay an average of $6,000 per year for property insurance in 2026, according to the Insurance Information Institute. The national average is about $1,800. Five years ago, Florida’s average was around $2,000. In the last 36 months, more than a dozen private carriers have either pulled out of the state entirely, gone into receivership, or stopped writing new policies. State Farm, Allstate, Farmers, and AAA have all dramatically reduced their Florida footprint. Citizens Property Insurance, the state-backed insurer of last resort, has gone from a market of around 400,000 policies in 2019 to roughly 1.4 million in 2025, making it the largest property insurer in the state.
The carriers are not being shy about why they are leaving. In SEC filings and earnings calls, they cite three reasons. First, hurricane losses. The 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025 seasons all produced billion-dollar landfalls. Second, litigation costs. Florida has long had unusual rules around assignment-of-benefits claims that drove up legal exposure, though a 2022 state reform was supposed to address this. Third, what is described in the filings as “increasing climate volatility,” which is industry language for storms getting bigger and harder to model. Reuters, the Wall Street Journal, and the Tampa Bay Times have all run extensive reporting on the actuarial side. The conclusion is consistent across them.
Reinsurance pricing reflects the same signal. Global reinsurance rates for Florida property risk have risen 35 to 45 percent cumulatively since 2022, per Guy Carpenter and Aon Benfield market reports. Munich Re and Swiss Re both flagged Florida specifically in their 2025 natural catastrophe reports as a market where modeled loss distributions have shifted faster than premium can be adjusted under state rate-approval rules. The Florida Office of Insurance Regulation has approved rate increases averaging 21 percent annually for three years and is still seeing carriers exit.
The downstream effects are already in the data. Florida coastal counties have begun reporting drops in property tax assessment growth for the first time in over a decade. CoreLogic’s home price index showed declines in Lee, Sarasota, and Charlotte counties through 2025 while inland Florida counties continued to appreciate. Mortgage applications in the affected zips fell 18 percent year over year in Q1 2026, per Mortgage Bankers Association data. Texas Windstorm Insurance Association and Louisiana Citizens are seeing the same population-growth pattern Florida Citizens saw five years ago.
Citizens Property Insurance now carries assessment authority that could be triggered against all Florida policyholders, including auto and homeowners, in the event of a major hurricane that exhausts its claims-paying capacity. The state-level proposals on the table include a public reinsurance fund, building-code-tied premium discounts, and parametric coverage products. The federal options under discussion in Senate Banking are extending the National Flood Insurance Program’s coverage to wind and tightening the program’s Risk Rating 2.0 implementation. None of these has cleared committee. The next hurricane season begins June 1.