Citizens Property Insurance Corporation

In 2023 Citizens Property Insurance Corporation passed 1.2 million policies and became Florida's largest homeowners carrier, two decades after the legislature set it up in 2002 as the insurer of last resort. In between, a string of private carriers left the state or failed, worn down by hurricanes and by roof litigation fed by assignment of benefits and one-way attorney fees. Citizens is a nonprofit government entity. It writes homeowners who cannot find private cover, at rates the statute wants actuarially sound but whose yearly increases are capped, which keeps them below market in practice. Depopulation runs the other way, with private carriers taking out policies in waves when they think they can make money on them. The policy count is therefore a running gauge of how the private Florida market is doing. What an underwriter watches is the deficit. If a season exhausts its surplus and reinsurance, Citizens first surcharges its own policyholders and can then levy emergency assessments on most property and casualty policies in the state, auto included, so people who were never Citizens customers end up paying. Coastal risk gets pooled across the whole state after the fact.