FL Property Insurance Cancellation Rate 3% In 2022-23; Highest In Poorest Inland Counties

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Florida had the highest rates of home insurance non-renewal in the nation, rising to around 3 percent of policies statewide in each of 2022 and 2023. But within the state, Inside Climate News found a more complex picture that could not be explained simply by the risk of financial losses from hurricanes and other tropical storms: The highest non-renewal rates were not in coastal counties like Miami-Dade, Monroe, Lee and Broward that are in the direct firing line of landfalling storms. Instead, they were concentrated inland, in the four rural counties around Lake Okeechobee: Glades, Hendry, Highlands and Okeechobee.

To make sense of this finding, Inside Climate News turned to data from the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s National Risk Index, used to identify the U.S. communities most severely threatened by natural hazards. We found no relationship between county-level non-renewal rates and the Expected Annual Loss Rate for Buildings, a measure of the percentage losses in building values anticipated each year. Where the counties around Lake Okeechobee stood out was in a measure of risk that also accounted for social vulnerability and resilience in the face of natural disasters.

In other words, non-renewals were highest in the Florida counties where climate-related hazards are compounded by poverty and other factors that make it harder to withstand and recover from extreme weather events. Glades County, with a median household income of less than $39,000 a year compared to the statewide figure of around $72,000, had the highest non-renewal rates and is the state’s poorest county. The counties south of Lake Okeechobee constitute a region known as the Everglades Agricultural Area, which was set aside as the Everglades were drained for farming. The region is among the nation’s most bountiful, raising rice, sod, vegetables such as lettuce and sugarcane, making Florida the country’s top producer of the crop. Vast ranchlands stretch north of the lake, where Okeechobee County is situated.

That county had the second-highest non-renewal rate in the state in 2022 and there too, insurance is a common worry. “It’s kind of like always in the back of your mind, that you’re just waiting for that shoe to drop,” said Okeechobee Mayor Dowling Watford, whose own policy has doubled in cost in recent years to some $6,000 annually. “We didn’t even think about not paying it or trying to find another insurance company. When you have insurance, you don’t want to do anything to jeopardize that.”

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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/06072025/florida-poor-inland-counties-home-insurance-crisis/