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.
There has been a lot of arguing in this country about whether the climate is changing and what is causing it. The insurance industry does not really get to participate in that argument. They have to underwrite risk based on what they actually expect to happen in the next 30 years, and if they get it wrong they go bankrupt. When a dozen companies whose entire job is pricing risk accurately all decide they cannot price Florida anymore, that is information. It does not require anyone to sign up to a particular political framework. It just requires looking at where the smartest money in the room is going.
This is going to land on the regular Florida homeowner whether anyone in Tallahassee or Washington wants it to or not. Mortgages require insurance. If insurance is unaffordable or unavailable, home values fall. If home values fall, property tax bases shrink. If property tax bases shrink, schools and local services get squeezed. None of that is hypothetical. It is starting to show up in coastal county budgets right now. Texas and Louisiana are watching the same dynamic begin in their own coastal markets.
There is no clean policy answer here. Citizens Property Insurance cannot scale to be everyone’s carrier without becoming a fiscal time bomb for the state. The federal flood program is already underwater. Walking away from coastal communities is not a serious option. But pretending that what is happening is normal market noise, when every actuary in the country is screaming that it isn’t, is also not serious. The conversation about how this country protects its coastal places has to start being a real one, and soon.