Florida OIR Triples the Size of Citizens’ Rate Decrease

With takeouts continuing at a steady pace and more carriers working the Florida property insurance market, state regulators saw fit to more than triple the size of Citizens’ Property Insurance Corp. recent rate decrease request.

The Florida Office of Insurance Regulation last week approved an 8.7% average decrease in rates for personal lines across most of the state. The move, touted by the Florida governor and the state’s chief financial officer, came a month after Citizens, the state-created insurer of last resort, asked for a 2.7% average decrease.

That initial filing surprised some after four years of Citizens and primary market insurers urging OIR to raise Citizens’ rates to the maximum allowed. Going beyond a filing’s numbers is rare but not unheard of for OIR. Citizens’ CEO Tim Cerio, in fact, seemed to invite regulators to make deeper cuts.

“As the market continues to get better, OIR may grant even greater relief,” Cerio said at the Dec. 10 Citizens Board of Governors’ meeting.

Any decrease for Citizens is seen as a major reversal of the trend seen in recent years. In early 2022, Citizens’ indicated rate increase was 91% for homeowner policies. And in mid-2025, the Citizens board voted to request a 15% average personal lines rate increase, the maximum allowed by the statutory glidepath, for the first half of 2026. The idea was that higher, more market-based rates for Citizens would drive consumers to private insurance carriers, strengthening the market.

Now, after the 2022 and 2023 legislative reforms that effectively limited claims litigation costs for insurers, Citizens’ 8.7% rate decrease approval is a politically appealing move, helping to assuage the pain of the big premium spikes most Florida property owners felt from 2016 to 2024. Florida officials hailed the cut, despite some concerns that it could reverse the trend toward primary-market carriers.

“We are seeing nothing but good news across all data points for Florida’s auto and home insurance markets. These positive results are entirely related to our historic tort reforms, driven largely by Governor DeSantis’ leadership,” Insurance Commissioner Mike Yaworsky said in a statement last week.

Some 330,000 Citizens policyholders should see some relief from the new rate level. The insurer, which had grown to be the largest in the state with more than 1.3 million policies in force in 2023, now holds about 395,000 policies, making it the third-largest in the state behind Universal Property & Casualty and State Farm Florida.