Florida’s Largest Home Insurer Seeks 14% Rate Increase

Florida homeowners are used to paying high insurance rates. The state’s annual average rate of $11,759 is the highest in the nation. Now, that average could climb even higher, if the state’s largest insurer wins regulators’ approval for a dramatic rate hike.

Citizens Property Insurance Corporation, the state’s insurer of last resort, covers more than 1.2 million Florida homes, making it the largest insurer in the state. And its proposed rate hike, approved by Citizens’ Board of Governors and made public June 19, could make the home insurance market more expensive for all of them.

Rate hikes across the board

Citizen’s Board of Governors unanimously supported a proposal that could lead to double-digit rate hikes for policyholders. The proposal will now need approval from the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation. No insurer can increase its rates in Florida without approval from regulators.

The proposal would increase the rates for multi-peril policies by 13.5%. A multi-peril policy is the most commonly purchased policy, according to the company.

But the proposed hike isn’t exclusive to multi-peril policyholders. Owners of condos, mobile homes, and single-family homes, and renters would face an average rate increase of 14%.

If approved, these rate hikes would constitute the largest rate increases in Citizens’ history and only the second instance of a double-digit rate increase by Citizens.

Citizens says the rate increases are less than half of what is actually necessary, but state law bars the insurer from raising rates more than the proposed amount. The state’s Office of Insurance Regulation caps all requested rate hikes at 14% for primary homes and 50% for secondary homes.

“Thirty-eight percent is the real data,” Mark Friedlander, director of corporate communications for the Insurance Information Institute, told Tampa Bay’s Fox 13. “That’s what they would be charging if they were a private market.”

If approved, the rate increases would apply to all new policies and policy renewals effective Jan. 1, 2025.

Why the hike?

Officials from Citizens say the Florida insurance market is improving and that the rate hikes are an attempt to bring Citizens’ premiums more in line with the general market. The hope is that substantial rate increases will inspire policyholders to leave the insurer of last resort and seek coverage from private insurers. This, Citizens says, will free it to assess both current and non-policyholders following a potential major weather event in the future.

The state government has long sought to unload policies from Citizens to protect itself from having too many policies should a major storm strike. The state’s “depopulation” program has shifted more than 200,000 policies from Citizens to the private market, decreasing the carrier’s holdings from its all-time high of 1.4 million policies in the fall of 2023.

But the continuing depopulation effort may hit a lull in the coming months if private insurers shy away from adding too many new policies during hurricane season.

Industry experts expect Citizens will take on thousands of new customers each week during this time.

The insurer of last resort goes mainstream

Citizens was never supposed to be the largest insurer in the state of Florida. An insurer of last resort, Citizens covers homeowners who can’t get home insurance anywhere else.

But rampant insurance fraud and costly natural disasters shrunk Florida’s home insurance market and pushed multiple Florida insurers into insolvency.

Florida has lost 11 insurers to liquidation since 2017 and five since 2022.

And as those insurers disappeared and others voluntarily left the market, more people moved to Citizens.

What’s next? The Office of Insurance Regulation to review

Now that Citizens’ Board of Governors have approved the measure, the proposed rate hike will head to the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation for review. The office can choose to approve the rate hike or send it back to the board.

If the Office of Insurance Regulations sends it back, the board will have to amend the proposal and file anew.