Get the Insurance QuoteBefore You Make the Offer

Ask an agent in Orlando what kills deals and you will not hear "financing" first. You will hear insurance. Not because coverage is unobtainable — it is obtainable — but because buyers routinely wait until the week before closing to find out what it costs, and by then the inspection period has expired and the leverage is gone.

This is a fixable problem. What follows is what actually drives the number, and when to find it out.

The market has actually improved — which changes your strategy, not your urgency

The Office of Insurance Regulation's Property Insurance Stability Report of 1 July 2026 reports that for residential policies effective in 2024 or later, 44 companies requested a rate decrease and 48 requested no change at all, and that 21 new companies have been approved to write residential property policies since the 2022–2023 reforms. Florida's domestic property insurers posted a pooled combined ratio of 83% in 2025 — the lowest in more than a decade.

The practical effect for a buyer is that there are more carriers to quote, and the spread between the best and worst quote on the same house has widened. The house has not changed. The underwriting appetite has.

OIR publishes average premiums by county. As of 31 March 2026, for traditional homeowners policies including wind coverage:

Read those as orientation, not as a quote. They are county averages across every age, size, roof and construction type. Your house is not an average. A 2021 block home with a hip roof and impact windows and a 1978 frame home with a 24-year-old shingle roof sit in the same column of that table and will not sit anywhere near each other on a quote.

Roof age is the whole ballgame

If you remember one thing: find out the exact date the roof was last fully replaced, and get the permit that proves it. Almost every hard "no" in Florida residential underwriting traces back to that date.

Florida law gives homeowners two real protections here, both in section 627.7011 of the Florida Statutes, applying to policies issued or renewed on or after 1 July 2022:

Two details inside that matter more than they look. First, roof age is measured from the last date on which 100 percent of the roof's surface area was built or replaced. A partial re-roof does not restart the clock — if half the roof is nine years old and half is twenty-six, the roof is twenty-six. Second, "authorized inspector" is a defined list: an insurer-approved licensed home inspector, a certified building code inspector, a licensed general, building or residential contractor, a roofing contractor, a professional engineer, or a registered architect.

Beyond the statutory floor, individual carriers set their own thresholds. Citizens publishes theirs, which makes it the cleanest example to cite:

Private carriers vary, and many are tighter than Citizens on shingle. Treat a roof approaching twenty years as a negotiating item, not a footnote: it is legitimate to ask a seller for a roof credit, a replacement before closing, or a price adjustment, and it is far easier to ask during the inspection period than three days before funding.

The separate roof deductible

Since 2022, Florida law has allowed carriers to apply a separate roof deductible, capped at the lesser of 2% of your Coverage A limit or 50% of the cost to replace the roof, and only where the premium reflects an actuarially sound credit for it. It does not apply to a hurricane loss, to a total loss under the valued policy law, to a roof punctured by a falling tree or similar hazard, or to a loss requiring repair of less than half the roof. Carriers must offer you the chance to opt out in writing. Read the declarations page: a quote that looks cheap may be carrying a roof deductible you did not notice.

The two inspections, and which one saves you money

These get conflated constantly. They are different documents with different purposes.

Florida law requires rate filings to include actuarially reasonable discounts for wind mitigation features — roof strength, roof covering performance, roof-to-wall strength, opening protection, and wall-to-floor-to-foundation strength among them — and since 1 October 2023 every insurer must publish its available hurricane mitigation discounts on its own website. The Uniform Mitigation Verification Inspection Form was updated effective 1 April 2026 following a 2024 wind-loss study.

If the house needs hardening

Two programs are worth knowing about. Florida extended its home-hardening sales tax exemption through 30 June 2029 for impact-resistant windows, doors and garage doors, with refunds capped at $500 per homestead property. And the My Safe Florida Home program offers free wind mitigation inspections and grants of up to $10,000.

Read the grant eligibility carefully before you count on it. Under the current version of section 215.5586, grant applicants must hold a homestead exemption, the home must have an insured value of $700,000 or less and have been built before 1 January 2008, and — the part that surprises people — the applicant must be a low-income or moderate-income person as defined in section 420.0004. Grants are matched $1 from the applicant for every $2 from the state up to $10,000; low-income applicants are eligible for up to $10,000 with no match. The program is subject to annual legislative appropriation and expressly creates no entitlement. Confirm your own eligibility through the program's portal rather than assuming.

What Citizens actually is

That is not editorial framing; it is the statutory design, in section 627.351(6)(n)1. It has two consequences buyers run into constantly.

The 20% test. If an authorized insurer offers you coverage at its approved rate under a standard or basic policy including wind, you are not eligible for a Citizens policy unless the private premium is more than 20 percent greater than comparable Citizens coverage. The same test applies at renewal for policies renewing on or after 1 April 2023, and to take-out offers under the depopulation program for primary residences. So "I'll just go with Citizens" is frequently not a choice you get to make.

Dollar and location limits. A structure with a dwelling replacement cost of $700,000 or more is not eligible (the threshold rises to under $1 million in counties where OIR determines competition is inadequate). In the wind-borne debris region, a structure with insured value of $750,000 or more is ineligible without code-compliant opening protection.

Citizens has shrunk dramatically — OIR reported 293,465 policies in force as of 5 June 2026, described as the lowest level in 25 years, down from roughly 1.2 million at the end of 2022. Its OIR-approved 2026 rates reduce homeowners multiperil rates by an average of 8.8%, with wind-only down an average of 5.5%, effective 1 July 2026 for new policyholders and on renewal for existing ones.

If you are placed with Citizens and later receive a take-out offer from a private carrier, read the comparison worksheet Citizens is required to send you. It must list every insurer requesting takeout with estimated premium, coverage description and a side-by-side comparison. If the offer is within 20% of your Citizens renewal, staying is not an option.

Flood is a separate policy — and it is coming for every Citizens policyholder

Your homeowners policy does not cover flood. In inland Central Florida this gets waved off constantly, and it should not be. Hurricane Ian's freshwater flooding hit Seminole, Orange, Lake, Osceola and Putnam counties hard in 2022; Milton put the St. Johns River into major flood stage in 2024. Being fifty miles from the coast protects you from storm surge. It does not protect you from fifteen inches of rain.

If the home is financed and sits in a FEMA special flood hazard area, your lender will require flood insurance regardless. Separately, Florida law phases in a flood requirement for every Citizens personal-lines residential policy:

Properties inside a FEMA special flood hazard area were already required to carry it — at issuance for new Citizens policies written on or after 1 April 2023, and at renewal for policies renewing on or after 1 July 2023. The requirement does not apply to policies that exclude wind, to condominium unit owner forms, or to tenant contents policies.

We wrote about that deadline in more detail in a separate piece on the 2027 requirement.

A named storm anywhere in Florida can stop your closing

This is the one that blindsides people, and it is worth understanding before you schedule a June-through-November closing.

Two things there. The trigger is a watch or warning anywhere in Florida — not over your house. And it applies regardless of the requested effective date, so you cannot post-date your way around it. Private carriers impose their own suspensions on their own triggers; the mechanics differ but the effect is the same.

No lender funds without bound hazard insurance. So a suspension in force on your closing date generally moves your closing. Citizens has posted these notices repeatedly — June 2022, August 2023, four separate times in 2024, again in July 2026. Plan for it: bind early, and if you are closing in the back half of hurricane season, talk to your lender and your title company about what happens to your rate lock and your per-diem if the date slips.

What to do, in order

• Before you write the offer. Pull the roof permit history from the county or city building department and note the date of the last full replacement. If there is an existing wind mitigation form, ask for it — it may still be inside its five-year window.
• Day one of the inspection period. Send the address, year built, square footage, roof date, construction type and any mitigation documents to an independent agent who can quote multiple carriers. Ask for the quote with and without the mitigation form.
• While you still have leverage. If the roof is the problem, this is when you negotiate — credit, replacement before closing, or price. After the inspection period ends, you are asking for a favor instead of exercising a right.
• Read the declarations page, not the premium. Check the hurricane deductible, whether a separate roof deductible was applied, whether roof coverage is replacement cost or actual cash value, and what the ordinance-and-law limit is.
• Get the flood quote too. Even outside a special flood hazard area. Especially in the new-construction corridors where retention ponds and grading are still settling in.
• Bind early if you are closing in storm season.

None of this is exotic. It is just sequencing. The buyers who have insurance problems are almost never the ones with uninsurable houses — they are the ones who found out too late to do anything about it.