Written by Abraham Galvan on August 13, 2025

While South Florida home insurance rates remain higher than the national average, homeowners are seeing more stabilized numbers.

Florida average insurance rates are about 20% higher than the rest of the nation. However, now homeowners have gotten 14 new insurance carriers since 2023, and that’s helping the rates to stabilize, according to Gus Fonte, president and principal broker at AJF Properties and vice chair of the insurance breakout committee for Florida Realtors.

“The carriers this year are not asking for rate increases, which hasn’t happened in the last three years, and that’s important in creating some downward pressure for Citizens [the state-sponsored carrier of last resort], which is our last resort,” he said. “For a lot of people, they’re at the lowest number since 2022. In terms of fees, they’re down 36% from the previous year, and that means that we’re getting other insurers coming in, which I have been huge proponent with every time we go and meet with our legislators that they need to put pressure on our insurance commissioner to get more insurers in our market.”

If homeowners are renewing policies between now and the end of the year, they might even get a minimal drop in their property insurance, he added. “Obviously, this is subject to not having any occurrences the rest of this hurricane season. If we have a major storm, then all bets are off. We’ve been fortunate, particularly down here in South Florida, for a lot of years that we haven’t gotten anything major.”

The other positive is new state legislation limiting how home insurance lawsuits are filed, referred to as “one-way attorney fees,” where the state was seeing a high volume of lawsuits against insurers, Mr. Fonte explained.

“Now we’re starting to see a benefit of that, the lawsuits have dropped considerably, and that’s one of the reasons that you’ve gotten the insurers coming in,” he added. “In 2024, over 10% of those lawsuits dropped, and it has made it a little bit fairer and more difficult for insurance attorneys to file, and that gives stability to a carrier that’s coming in because they understand where’s their downfall or where they stand for any given situation that might happen.”