The CEO of Citizens Property Insurance Corporation has hailed the ongoing recovery of Florida’s property insurance market, explaining that the insurers policy count now stands some 45% lower than its most recent peak and exposure down 43% in just one year, while market conditions suggest this trend will continue.
CEO Timm Cerio told the Citizens Board that the insurer “continues to benefit from improving market conditions brought on by legislative reforms.”
New private insurers are entering the market to provide more choice and some are taking-out Citizens policies, while existing insurers are growing and rates stabilising, he highlighted.
“It is simply irrefutable that reforms championed by the Governor and passed by the Legislature have had a tremendous impact on improving this market,” Cerio explained. “The data bears this out.”
Since the legislative reforms of 2022 there have been 12 new companies that entered the Florida property insurance market.
In addition and just since 2024, six out of 10 national insurance companies operating in Florida expanded their book of business in the state, while four filed for rate decreases.
In addition, Cerio highlighted that 27 private insurance carriers have filed for rate decreases in Florida since 2024, while at least 41 companies requested no rate increase.
This resulted in the Florida insurance market having the lowest rate increase in the United States, with an average increase of just 1%.
With doing business in Florida’s property insurance market becoming more attractive again, the rate of take-outs through the Citizens depopulation program has accelerated.
This has now resulted in Citizens’ exposure falling from $520.1 billion to $295.1 billion over the past year, which is a significant 43% decrease.
In total, some 677,920 policies have been transferred back to the private market from Citizens in Florida since January 2024.
In 2024 alone, a stunning $214.5 billion of exposure was shed by Florida Citizens as those policies went back to private carriers.
In 2025 so far, the exposure that has been shed amounts to $62.9 billion so far, a slightly slower pace, but that is to be anticipated as the portfolio becomes smaller and quality risks often get selected first, we suspect, with just 155,469 policies depopulated up to June 20th.
Florida Citizens gives a best-estimate for having around 700,585 policies in force by the end of 2025, although projections range from as low as 635,348.
Suggesting the shrinking of the Florida Citizens exposure base will continue, albeit at a slower pace.
Of course, there are other data points coming out of Florida that suggest it may still be too early to completely call the state’s property insurance market reformed.
For example, Trusted Resource Underwriters Exchange (TRUE) recently asked for a 31% rate increase for its multi-peril homeowner’s policies at a hearing.
There is also the question of what happens when the next major hurricane landfall occurs and are new entrants and start-ups ready for the challenges that will pose?
Here, the risk transfer, reinsurance and increasingly the insurance-linked securities (ILS) market will demonstrate its importance to the state of Florida.
The importance of reinsurance risk capital, from traditional and capital market sources, cannot be understated in Florida. It is impossible (definitely not advisable) to operate a healthy, profitable and long-term sustainable property insurance business in a region of such high catastrophe exposure without meaningful protection from reinsurance and capital markets these days.
Florida Citizens itself just demonstrated this, with its reinsurance renewals for 2025 resulting in a risk tower that is at least 87% made up of catastrophe bonds, ILS manager capacity and fully-collateralized coverage.
Private market insurance carriers lean just as heavily on the capital markets, some on catastrophe bonds as well and this is anticipated to continue as they grow.
While the shrinking of Citizens could be seen as a negative, with its reducing need for reinsurance, the private market increases its need for protection with every policy it takes.
A more healthy Florida market will ultimately create better opportunities for reinsurers and ILS funds or investors, with a healthier quality of risk being ceded out of the state.
It’s now critical that the reinsurance market remains disciplined, on key treaty features such as attachments and terms.
Because, a less-disciplined reinsurance market could spill over into challenges for primary carriers again and the last thing a growing and more healthy Florida property insurance market needs is a retreating reinsurance market after the next big storm.
