Report: Property insurance lawsuits fell three years after legislative reforms

The number of lawsuits filed against insurance companies in Florida has dropped by nearly half since 2020, according to the latest report from the state’s Office of Insurance Regulation.

The report found that since legislative reforms were passed in 2022 and 2023, Florida had less than 5% of national claims and just over 41% of nationwide homeowner lawsuits in 2025. That’s a dramatic reduction from five years earlier when in 2020, 9% of national claims came from Florida, as did 79% of homeowner lawsuits.

According to the Tallahassee business development and government consulting firm Lisa Miller & Associates, which compiled and released the data, the reform has had its desired effect — lower insurance rates.

The 30-day average request for homeowners' rates filed by insurance companies in Florida has dropped 6.9%, “a stark contrast to the double-digit rate increases prior to the legislative reforms,” the firm says.

Miller, a former deputy insurance commissioner in Florida, says in the statement that the reforms eliminated the guaranteed one-way attorney fees that had created “a gross incentive to sue,” a sentiment long shared by many in the insurance industry.

The OIR report finds that claims with lawsuits cost almost five times more than those without but only about 8% of the money coming from the litigation goes the homeowners who filed the claim.

“Most of the rest of the money goes to the lawyers,” says Miller, again echoing a sentiment shared by many in and around the insurance industry prior to the reforms.

While you would be hard-pressed to find someone to argue that Florida’s property insurance is an affordable product, the idea of the reforms was also to help bring new insurers to the state, creating the kind of competition that would give property owners more options.

Prior to the reforms, the state had seen an exodus of carriers, leading to an overburdening of Citizens Property Insurance Corp., the state-run carrier created to be the last resort for homeowners. The state’s litigious reputation was often blamed for companies leaving or avoiding Florida.

To that end, OIR announced in May that 20 insurers had entered the market in the state since the reforms. The number of condo association writers for wind only policies had also grown, OIR says, going from one writer to five in Broward, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties alone.