Florida's surplus lines market is growing fast and getting cheaper at the same time. That's not a sign of distress. It's a sign of how much money has come rushing back into the state.
Two years ago, the state's insurance industry looked completely different. Hurricane losses and a flood of property lawsuits had driven insurers out.
The collapse was severe. In 2022, Florida had less than 10% of the country's home insurance claims but nearly 80% of its insurance lawsuits. Nine insurers went insolvent between 2021 and 2023, and reinsurers raised prices and pulled capacity out of the state rather than keep backing the risk.
The state then passed legal reforms that curbed the litigation, and the money returned: new carriers, outside investors and reinsurance capital all chasing the same business.
Newer data shows the shift. Through June 30, Florida's surplus lines carriers, the excess and surplus (E&S) insurers that cover what standard carriers won't, wrote 982,627 policies, up 15% from a year earlier, according to the Florida Surplus Lines Service Office. Premium fell almost 6%, and the average price per policy dropped nearly 18%.
"Just as quickly as they left, the tide came back in, and it created a little bit of oversupply, which naturally is driving down the rates," said Troy Snider, a property broker at wholesale firm Amwins.
Commercial property is the largest and fastest-growing part of Florida's surplus lines market. Through June 30, it accounted for more than $3.3 billion in premium across roughly 193,000 policies, and its policy count has nearly doubled since early 2025, from about 24,800 to 45,500, according to the Florida Surplus Lines Service Office.
The jump in policies reflects a flood of new carriers competing for the business, and that competition is pushing prices down. Bo Rhonehouse, an executive vice president at Amwins, said the firm's commercial accounts are running 20% to 40% cheaper than a year ago, while homeowners hasn't seen a similar drop.
There's another reason so much of this business sits in E&S. Surplus lines carriers can take on the big, complicated risks the admitted market won't, stacking several insurers on one account and shaping coverage to fit a client's needs.
"The E&S marketplace has more flexibility on what we can offer for pricing and terms, so we can create a product that fits exactly what the insured needs... The admitted marketplace, they don't have the capability to do that. It's full limits, it's one single shot," Snider said.
In Florida, the line between the standard market and E&S isn't as clean as it is elsewhere. Rhonehouse said admitted carriers stick mostly to condos and homeowner associations, while hotels, shopping centers, timeshares and large commercial schedules land in surplus lines.
The split often comes down to what a carrier can predict. Snider said admitted insurers can lean on decades of storm data to price catastrophe risk, but the harder-to-underwrite accounts, the ones without that kind of loss history, tend to stay in surplus lines.
The flood of capacity has also changed how those deals get done. Snider said surplus lines carriers can now put up far larger line sizes than they could a few years ago, so an account that once needed six, seven or eight insurers to cover might now take only two or three. In the hard market, carriers demanded minimum premiums before they'd deploy their capacity, and Snider said that has largely gone away.
How long the discounts last depends on the weather. Rhonehouse and Snider expect the price drops to shrink over the next year or two, toward smaller single-digit declines, as long as Florida avoids a major hurricane.
The hurricane season lasts from June through November each year. Florida has had a lucky stretch. No hurricane made landfall in the state in 2025, and none have made land so far in 2026. The costliest storm in state history, Hurricane Ian, came ashore near Fort Myers in 2022 and caused more than $21 billion in insured losses in Florida.
"If there is not a major cat event, you're going to see more in line of the 10% decreases, much smaller decreases," Rhonehouse said, using industry shorthand for a catastrophe. "It's not going to be the same path... with these large 30 to 40% decreases."
The bigger risk is the storm itself. Many of the newest carriers came into Florida thinly capitalized, and a major hurricane could wipe a chunk of them out of the state and swing rates back the other way.
"If a Category 5 hits a large area, five of them may go out of business within a year," he said. A Category 5 is the strongest on the scale, capable of catastrophic wind and storm-surge damage. "They just don't have money to pay claims anymore."
