Florida counts every homeowners premium in the state. County by county, 92 percent of the market is sealed

Florida insurers file a line for every residential policy they have in force, every month, broken out by zip code. They have done it monthly since January 2025 and quarterly for years before that. The filing is not voluntary and it is not a survey. Section 624.424(10) of the Florida Statutes requires it, names twelve items the report must contain, and directs the Office of Insurance Regulation to publish the aggregate.

So the state knows what Floridians pay for homeowners insurance. It knows to the dollar, and it updates the number twelve times a year.

Almost nothing on the first page of Google for this question uses it.

What is the average cost of homeowners insurance in Florida?

The average owner-occupied homeowners policy in force in Florida on 31 May 2026 cost $3,675.31 a year. That is total direct premium written for policies in force, $15,293,120,566.83, divided by policies in force, 4,161,048, across the 95 companies reporting that policy type in the state's Market Intelligence Report.

That figure is not a quote and not an estimate. It is the arithmetic mean of what every owner-occupied homeowners policy in the state was actually charging on the last day of May, computed from the insurers' own filings. The Office publishes the workbook. Anyone can download it and repeat the sum.

Here is the same calculation at seven reporting dates.

Why do the published figures range from $2,002 to $18,000?

Because they measure different things and are printed side by side as though they did not. A carrier's own book average, a quote for a sample house at a fixed dwelling limit, and the premium on policies actually in force are three separate statistics. Google's AI Overview for this query currently stacks all three.

Take the three most prominent. Kin, which holds the top organic result, states that home insurance in Florida costs Kin policyholders an average of $2,002 a year for $350,000 in dwelling coverage, as of July 2026. Insurance.com reports $7,136 a year with a 2 percent hurricane deductible. NerdWallet reports a national average of $2,490. U.S. News gives a range of $2,017 to $3,975 for a policy with $400,000 of dwelling coverage.

None of those is wrong for what it measures. Kin says plainly that its number describes Kin customers at one coverage level, which is honest and useful if you want to know what Kin charges. The trouble starts when a reader asking what Florida pays is handed a figure built by pricing one imaginary house, and the answer moves by a factor of three depending on which imaginary house the publisher chose.

The filed number has the opposite property. It contains every roof age, every construction type, every coverage limit and every deductible actually sold, weighted by how many people bought them. It is worse than a quote for predicting your renewal and better than any of them for describing the state.

For the record, Kin's own reported book comes to $2,959.72 for this policy type statewide. State Farm Florida, the largest writer, comes to $2,833.84. Universal Property and Casualty comes to $4,422.49. The spread between large carriers is wide, which is one reason a single sample house explains so little.

What does Florida count as premium?

The reported figure is the premium on the policy plus any policy, service or similar fee, which section 627.403 deems part of the premium, including the $25 managing general agent fee. It excludes premium taxes, fire marshal discounts, the emergency management surcharge under section 252.372, and emergency assessments by the guaranty association, the hurricane catastrophe fund and Citizens.

The Office spells this out in the Market Intelligence Report FAQs. Regular assessments are premium and are reported. Emergency assessments are not.

That matters for comparing the filed average against a bill on a kitchen table. A Florida homeowner's total annual outlay includes items the state deliberately keeps out of this series, and it may include flood cover, which is a separate policy entirely and runs to a median of $1,328 a year in Collier County. The $3,675.31 is the insurance, not the total cost of insuring.

Has the price stopped rising?

The statewide average rose 31.3 percent between the second quarter of 2022 and May 2026, from $2,798.24 to $3,675.31. Most of that arrived early. The rise from 2022 to 2023 was 17.3 percent, then 8.4 percent, then 4.9 percent, then 0.2 percent. The last two readings fell.

The peak in this series is $3,740.65, at the end of 2025. The March 2026 reading came in at $3,711.72 and May at $3,675.31, so the average is $65 below its high, a fall of 1.7 percent.

Three cautions before anyone declares the crisis over. The series covers four years, which is short. Aggregate premium in force still grew 34.5 percent over the period while the number of policies grew only 2.4 percent, so the level remains far above where it started. And a fall in the average is not the same as a fall in anyone's bill, because the average moves when the mix of policies moves, which is exactly what has been happening.

What did Citizens do to the average?

Citizens Property Insurance Corporation held 771,975 owner-occupied homeowners policies in the second quarter of 2023, 18.88 percent of the state. In May 2026 it held 38,080, or 0.92 percent. That is a fall of 95.1 percent in three years, and it moves the statewide average on its own, because Citizens prices differently from the market.

The path runs 12.60 percent in mid 2022, up to 18.88 percent in mid 2023, then 15.65, 7.78, 1.98, 1.05 and 0.92. Depopulation on that scale is the single largest compositional change in the data.

It also runs the wrong way for the usual story. Citizens is the insurer of last resort and its average owner-occupied premium in May 2026 was $3,216.42, which is $459 below the market average. Moving hundreds of thousands of policies out of Citizens and into private carriers therefore pushes the statewide mean up, not down. The mean fell anyway.

Can you find out what your own county pays?

No, and neither can anyone else. The Office runs a public report generator that produces the same filings broken out by county. Queried for all 67 counties, all insurers, the same month and the same policy type, it returns 333,852 policies and $1,243,839,630 of premium, from 35 companies.

The statewide file for that month has 4,161,048 policies and $15.29bn, from 95 companies.

So the county-level view covers 8.02 percent of the policies and 8.13 percent of the premium. Some 3,827,196 policies carrying about $14.05bn are in the statewide total and absent from the county total. The missing companies are not small ones. Ranked by policies in force, the twelve largest writers of owner-occupied homeowners cover in Florida are State Farm Florida, Slide, American Integrity, First Protective, Universal Property and Casualty, Tower Hill Insurance Exchange, Florida Peninsula, Edison, Southern Oak, Manatee Insurance Exchange, Kin and United Services Automobile Association. Not one of them appears in the county report.

The mechanism is visible in a controlled test. Query the county-level report for Citizens alone and it returns 38,080 policies and $122,481,343, matching the Citizens line in the statewide workbook exactly. Query it for State Farm Florida, which reports 396,767 policies statewide, and it returns no data rows at all. Query it for Kin, which reports 106,404, and it returns no data rows. The report system states the reason on its front page: trade secret data is not included.

Why is the county figure a secret when the state figure is not?

Because the Legislature said so, in one sentence. Section 624.424(10)(b) directs the Office to aggregate the filings on a statewide basis and publish them, and then provides that the information, when aggregated on a statewide basis as to an individual insurer or insurer group, is not a trade secret as defined in section 688.002(4) or section 812.081 and is not subject to the public records exemption for trade secrets.

Read that carefully. The protection is stripped at one level of aggregation and left standing everywhere else. A company's statewide policy count and statewide premium are public by force of statute. The identical company's figures for Collier County, or for a zip code in Cape Coral, remain covered by the ordinary trade secret exemption, and 60 of the 95 companies use it.

The procedure sits at section 624.4213. A filer marks each page as a trade secret, separates it from everything else, and files an affidavit certifying under oath to four statements, among them that the information has value because others do not know it and that it is not publicly available elsewhere. Failure to file the notice waives the claim. If a public records request lands, the filer has 30 days to go to circuit court or the document is released.

There is a certain tension in an insurer swearing that its county policy counts are not publicly available elsewhere while its statewide policy count is published on a government website every month by operation of the same statute. The oath is about the county figures, so the two statements can both be true. It is still a narrow ledge.

What do Collier and Lee show?

In the visible 8 percent, Collier County holds 4,829 owner-occupied homeowners policies carrying $32,184,842, an average of $6,664.91. Lee County holds 9,366 policies carrying $34,110,019, an average of $3,641.90. Collier's figure is 83 percent above Lee's and 81 percent above the statewide average.

Do not read those as county averages. They are averages of whichever carriers happen not to have claimed a trade secret, and the composition of that group differs by county in ways nobody outside the Office can measure. Collier's visible slice is 1.45 percent of the visible statewide total and Lee's is 2.81 percent. Both counties have more than ten times as many homeowners policies as appear here.

The direction is probably right. Collier is coastal, its housing stock is expensive, and the median owner-occupied home value in the county is $636,600, so a higher average premium is what anyone would expect. The magnitude is not something this data can settle, and the gap between $6,664.91 and $3,641.90 is large enough that the composition effect could account for a great deal of it.

That is the honest answer to the question every Collier and Lee homeowner asks, and it is more useful than a confident number would be. The confident numbers on this subject are built from quotes.

How this was measured

The statewide figures are sums over one policy type in the Office's published workbooks, taken at seven dates. Columns were located by header text rather than by position, because the 2022 workbook carries 19 columns and the 2026 workbook carries 34, and reading the premium column by index across both would return the wrong field.

The county figures come from the Office's report generator, exported as CSV. Two checks were run on it. Collier and Lee queried separately return 4,829 and 9,366 policies; queried together they return 14,195, the exact sum, so the totals are additive rather than deduplicated. And summing statewide policies for the 35 companies that do appear at county level gives 333,851 against the generator's 333,852, a difference of one policy out of a third of a million, which is what a live query compared against a workbook snapshot dated 15 July should look like.

Two limits belong on the face of this. The Office states that the data is not audited before publication, so these are the insurers' own numbers as filed. And the generator serves live data that changes when companies resubmit, so a reader repeating the county queries later may get slightly different totals; the statewide workbooks are fixed files and will not move.

Frequently asked questions

What is the average homeowners insurance cost in Florida in 2026? $3,675.31 a year for an owner-occupied homeowners policy, computed from the premium in force on all 4,161,048 such policies in the state on 31 May 2026, as filed by 95 insurers with the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation.

Why is that lower than the figures I see quoted? Most published figures are quotes for a sample house at a fixed dwelling limit, or a single carrier's own book. The filed figure covers the policies people actually hold, at every coverage level and deductible sold, weighted by how many hold them.

Are Florida homeowners insurance rates still going up? Not in this series. The statewide average peaked at $3,740.65 at the end of 2025 and has fallen in the two readings since, to $3,675.31 in May 2026. It remains 31.3 percent above its second quarter 2022 level.

How much does homeowners insurance cost in Collier or Lee County? The public county data cannot answer that. It covers 8.02 percent of the market. Within that slice Collier averages $6,664.91 and Lee $3,641.90, but neither figure describes the county, because the largest carriers are absent from it.

Why is county-level insurance data not public in Florida? Section 624.424(10)(b) removes trade secret protection from these filings only when they are aggregated statewide. At county and zip code level the ordinary trade secret exemption applies, and 60 of the 95 companies reporting this policy type have claimed it.

Where can I get the underlying data? The statewide workbooks are published on the Office's Residential Market Share Reports page. The county-level generator is here. The two tables compiled for this piece are linked above.