According to an article in the Insurance Journal, Senator Albritton is predicting more relief on rates coming based on tort reform from SB2 passed in 2022 and the fact that there were no storms in 2025.
A new poll conducted on behalf of the nonpartisan Florida Policy Institute (FPI) found that 63% of Florida voters — including 73% of Democrats, 58% of Republicans, and 60% of independents — believe that property insurance relief should be a higher priority for the state Legislature than property tax relief. Only 32% of voters said that property tax relief was the higher priority of the two options.
While the news is that rates are going to be reduced, Citizens rates have not been released, and we don’t know if Monroe County, which typically sees the largest increases in the state, will see a decrease. FIRM’s president Mel Montagne has requested the Monroe numbers from Citizens and from the office of the Insurance Consumer Advocate.
Citizens has aggressively reduced its policy count from a peak of over 1.4 million in 2023 to roughly 400,000–427,000 by late 2025/early 2026, marking a 14-year low. The depopulation program, driven by legal reforms and private market improvements, transferred over 428,000 policies to private insurers in 2024 alone. The Florida Office of Insurance Regulation (OIR) approved more than a dozen private insurers to assume hundreds of thousands of policies from Citizens through the end of last year.
At the same time Commissioner Yaworsky penalized companies for misconduct regarding claims for Hurricanes Ian and Idalia. In September 2025 he penalized 8 companies for misconduct. Policyholders have little assurance that their new insurer will remain solvent, continue to write policies in Florida if we have a busy storm season or even if claims will be handled correctly.
During Florida Keys Day in Tallahassee last week, FIRM’s Vice President Joe Walsh met with Insurance Commissioner Michael Yaworsky and Citizens Legislative Director Michael Wickersheim to discuss modeling, the Monroe County-specific mitigation form and the Citizens flood insurance requirement.
As FIRM has done for 20 years, we continue to question the validity of the catastrophe models, and with this recent additional rate decrease to the Citizens rates promulgated by the OIR, our concerns are well placed. It seems that the cat models are used selectively up or down depending on the political situation at hand.