Florida home insurance costs rose 1.5% so far in 2025. Will they ever get lower?

Average home insurance premiums in Florida increased by 1.5% over the first eight months of 2025 — an improvement over previous years but not the reduction that cost-burdened policyholders have been waiting for since reforms were enacted in 2022 and 2023.

Will prices ever come down? Insurance insiders are divided over the prospect.

Experts interviewed for this report concur that the potential for meaningful cost decreases depends on what happens to costs of reinsurance — insurance that insurers buy — as well as competition among a growing list of carriers, rebuilding cost inflation, and whether Mother Nature will prevent major storms from hitting the state in coming years.

According to a South Florida Sun Sentinel analysis of data released monthly by the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation, the average cost to insure a single-family home increased from $3,691 in January to $3,747 in August.

Among 84 companies that reported data across all eight months, average premiums declined for policyholders of only 17 of them:

They were American Security (-25.2%), Clear Blue (-15%), Trusted Resource Underwriters Exchange (-10.7%), Trident Reciprocal Exchange (-8.5%), Centauri Specialty (-5.4%), Safe Harbor (-5.3%), U.S. Coastal Property & Casualty (-4.8%), ASI Preferred (-3.7%), Monarch National (-2.5%), Florida Family (-2.1%), Security First (-2.0%), Federal (-1.8%), First Protective (-1.6%), Edison (-0.9%), Olympus (-0.9%), Ovation (-0.5%), and Kin (-0.1%).

Average premiums increased by more than 10% for customers of 15 companies, and from 2% to 9.8% for policyholders of 40 companies.

Those averages were derived from the office’s now-monthly Residential Market Share Reports that report data that more than 90 state-regulated property and casualty insurers are required by law to file. Data from surplus lines carriers, not regulated by the office, is not included.

Average costs were calculated by dividing premium totals by the number of policyholders reported by each company. The statewide averages are determined by dividing the total of all premiums by the total number of policyholders.

And of course, average costs vary widely depending on where homes are located.

According to state data last updated in May, premiums in interior counties in the northern parts of the state, such as Sumter ($2,062) and Marion ($2,210) tend to be lower than the average while coastal and southern counties, including Broward ($6,077), Miami-Dade ($5,836), Palm Beach ($6,327), and Monroe ($7,488) exceed the statewide average due to perceived vulnerability to hurricanes, litigation risks, and higher property costs.

Insurance costs in Central Florida counties such as Orange ($3,422), Seminole ($3,371) and Hillsborough ($3,369) tend to be closer to the state average.

The 1.5% cost increase through August is evidence that premiums have stabilized in Florida compared to previous years dating to 2022, when the state Legislature enacted a series of reforms intended to reduce costs of so-called frivolous claims and lawsuits that insurers said threatened the survival of the state’s private insurance market.

Those threats stemmed in large part from steep reinsurance costs in 2022 and questions about whether all Florida-based insurers would be able to afford the increases. Reinsurers said they raised their costs because litigation and late claims had ultimately doubled costs initially projected by some insurers from 2017’s Hurricane Irma.

At the end of June 2022, Florida’s average premium was $2,798 — up from $1,951 when Irma hit in 2017.

The average premium increased by 33.9% over the three years after 2022, with yearly increases tapering down from 17.3% to 4.1% over the 12 months following June 2024.

The Sun Sentinel’s analysis of the January-to-July data also showed:

— Premiums to insure private condo units increased by an average 1.3% between January and August, from $1,756 to $1,779.

— Costs of dwelling/fire coverage, a cheaper and less comprehensive form of insurance that’s growing faster than full homeowner coverage, increased by an average 2.3%, from $2,659 to $2,722.

— Average costs charged for single-family homeowner coverage by the 50 companies that insure more than 10,000 of those policies also increased by 1.5%, from $3,611 to $3,664.

— Premiums charged by companies that have participated in the depopulation of state-owned Citizens Property Insurance Corp. since 2023 increased by an average .03%, rising by just $1 from $3,795 to $3,796.

Lowest rate of increase in the nation

State officials and insurance leaders, meanwhile, continue to tout filings for decreased or unchanged rates in news releases declaring victory over the cost crisis.

On Monday, Gov. Ron DeSantis told the American Property and Casualty Insurance Association in Orlando that state insurance regulators received 59 rate filings for reductions and 87 for zero rate increases. Eighteen new companies have registered with the state to compete in the market, Florida’s insurance commissioner has said.

Mark Friedlander, senior director of media relations for the industry-funded Insurance Information Institute, characterized the low increases as a win for consumers.

“The rate-filing trend remains very positive as most Florida residential insurers this year have either filed for a rate decrease or flat rates,” Friedlander said. “For the second consecutive year, we expect Florida will rank first in the U.S. with the lowest average rate increase as well as the lowest average premium increase.”

But those low average rate increases follow years of abnormally high rate hikes in a state that Realtor.com determined in September to be among four with the nation’s highest homeowner insurance costs.

And lower rates do not necessarily reduce costs for policyholders if they are assessed against inflated property values.

Friedlander says that the continued insurance cost hikes in Florida, while lowest in years, stem from inflation-driven increases in construction costs that cause insurers to increase home replacement costs. Higher replacement costs can offset rate decreases and cause premiums to rise, he said.

Anthony Lopez, CEO of the Miami-based plaintiff firm Your Insurance Attorney, said it’s premature to call a 1.5% increase “premium relief.”

“If 67 out of 84 companies still raised prices during this stretch, it suggests that the reforms are stabilizing the market for insurers — not necessarily for homeowners,” Lopez said. “The slowdown in rate hikes is a good sign, but the average policyholder is still paying more, and most haven’t seen a dime in actual savings. Relief won’t be real until we see more companies competing for business and lowering premiums across the board.”

Another Miami-based attorney, Ligman Martin P.A. managing partner Joe Ligman, said he has “numerous homeowner clients with significant premium increases for the past three years. South Florida is the worst.”

Reinsurance drives the bus

Don Matz, CEO of Orange Insurance Exchange, says costs could decline if reinsurance costs continue to decrease, and if Florida can avoid a “continuous string of catastrophes.”

Reinsurance rates, which some insurance officials estimate consume up to half of every premium dollar, “peaked several years ago and have been slowly decreasing since, as reinsurers have posted positive underwriting results,” Matz wrote. “How much further they decline will be the biggest driver as to how much property rates in Florida will decline.”

He added, “Because rate filings are based upon weighted past losses trended forward, as each new ‘good’ year of experience replaces an old ‘bad’ year of experience, rates should decrease.”

Birny Birnbaum, executive director of the nonprofit Center for Economic Justice, which studies insurance affordability issues, says he doubts costs will decline unless reinsurance costs continue to drop or the state imposes restrictions on companies that shift premium dollars to affiliated third parties while continuing to report “little or no profit” from their underwriting side.

“Premiums won’t be going lower because risk continues to increase and there’s no effort to force insurers to deliver the coverage more efficiently or prevent excess profits,” he says.

Reductions too early to predict, some say

But Stacey Giulianti, chief legal officer at Florida Peninsula, says it’s still too early to predict what will happen to premiums over the months and years to come. He noted that recent rate decrease requests, including about a 9.9% reduction for his company’s Elite and Preferred policies, have yet to show up in state data because they’ll be reflected in renewals and new policies written over the next year.

Kerrie Ruland, senior vice president at Monarch National Insurance, concurred with Giulianti’s view that it’s too soon to tell if insurance costs have decreased as much as possible.

In addition, Ruland said, “Losses are down, in number and severity. Severe convective storm events” — which include damaging tornadoes, hail and straight-line wind events that struck northern Florida communities in recent years — “are where carriers saw fraud and litigation expenses soar. This year has seen a substantially lower number of severe convective storm events than in prior years, but one year does not a trend make.

“If the trend continues over multiple years, then yes, consumers should expect additional decreases. But they won’t necessarily see it next year.”

Ron Hurtibise covers business and consumer issues for the South Florida Sun Sentinel. He can be reached by phone at 954-356-4071 or by email at [email protected].

©2025 South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Visit sun-sentinel.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.