Written by Rumz E
Florida homeowners insurance has been covered as a crisis story for four years. The filings tell a more specific — and more useful — story than the headlines do, and the turn happened quietly.
Start with the state-backed insurer of last resort. Citizens Property Insurance peaked at 1,407,805 policies on September 30, 2023. As of August 14, 2026, it holds 277,902 — an 80% reduction. That number is published monthly by Citizens itself, and almost nobody outside the state cites it. The depopulation program worked, but “worked” needs care: policies moved to private carriers, which is not the same as risk disappearing.
Then the regulator’s own book. The Florida Office of Insurance Regulation’s July 2026 Stability Report says the average charged homeowners premium decreased in 51 of Florida’s 67 counties versus its January report, and that for residential policies effective 2024 or later, 44 companies requested a rate decrease and 48 requested no change at all. After four years of double-digit increases, a majority of counties moving down is the actual news — and it is sitting in a PDF that gets almost no coverage.
None of which means Florida is cheap. Our county survey puts the statewide average at $4,231 a year on a standardized $300,000-dwelling policy. And the state average hides the thing that matters most to a reader: where. OIR’s charged-premium data shows Monroe County (the Keys) at $7,863 including wind and $1,871 excluding it — the same county, the same year, a 4.2× spread depending on one peril. Palm Beach runs $6,323 with wind against $3,175 without.
That wind/no-wind split is the single most useful thing a reporter or an advisor can hand a Florida homeowner, and it is the part that almost never survives into a national story.
1. The regulator publishes better numbers than the aggregators, and later
Every quarter, OIR’s Market Intelligence Report carries average premium actually charged, by county, split by wind coverage. Most published “average premium” figures are quote surveys — a hypothetical policy, priced by a model. Both are legitimate. They are not the same number, and they will not agree. We publish a quote survey ourselves and we now show the regulator’s charged-premium table beside it, clearly labelled, because a reader who compares two of our own numbers and finds a gap deserves the explanation rather than the confusion.
2. A “state average” is usually the least useful figure in the dataset
Florida’s spread between Monroe and the cheapest inland counties is wider than the spread between many states. Anyone writing for a Florida audience should be reaching for the county figure, and anyone writing nationally should say plainly that the state average conceals it.
3. Check whether the trend you are describing already turned
The story we all learned in 2022–2023 — carriers exiting, Citizens ballooning, premiums climbing — is real history. It is also, on the current filings, no longer the present tense. Citizens is down 80% from peak. Most counties saw a decrease this cycle. Writing the 2023 story in 2026 is the easiest mistake to make in this market, and the filings are free to check.
Where the numbers came from
Citizens’ policies-in-force page (updated monthly), the OIR July 2026 Stability Report and its Market Intelligence Report data as of March 31, 2026, and our own county survey. We publish the underlying county tables and will send them to anyone working on a story.
Our datasets, all free and open to cite with credit:
Author Bio:
Rumz is a partner at Dreamy Leads Research, a free U.S. consumer-finance research desk covering insurance, mortgage, debt relief, and solar. He works hands-on with the company’s primary-sourced 2026 cost-and-rate data — compiled from NAIC, CFPB, FHFA, NREL, IRS, and U.S. Census figures — to show how households actually experience prices, state by state and city by city, across 1,150+ published pages spanning 56 US cities. The desk’s original studies are cited roughly 4,200 times a month in Microsoft Copilot’s AI answers, and every claim traces to a named public source. He offers data-grounded commentary on auto and home insurance costs, mortgage affordability, household debt and settlement outcomes, and residential solar economics — answer-first, quotable, and on deadline, always pointing reporters to the underlying numbers and their sources.