Trend — Florida tort reform
The 2026 Florida Carrier Behavior Report: How Settlement Tactics Shifted After Tort Reform
Two laws, six months apart, rewrote the property-claim playbook. Three years on, the carrier behavior they produced is the operating environment every Florida public adjuster works in.
Same Tampa zip code, same Hurricane Milton wind-driven rain, same residential property policy. A file opened in October 2024 closed at $46,800 in eleven months without ever reaching a DOAH proceeding. A file with the same loss pattern, same carrier, but opened under pre-2023 rules would have moved on a different clock entirely — one-way attorney fees backstopping the demand, an AOB to the restoration contractor preserving leverage, no 90-day safe harbor for the carrier to hide behind. Florida's tort reform did not just change what the lawyers do. It changed the file.
Two laws that rewrote the playbook
The reset arrived in two pieces, six months apart, and most operators still talk about them as if they were one event.
SB 2-A passed in the December 2022 special session, and Governor DeSantis signed it on December 16, 2022. It rewrote § 627.7152 to bar assignment of post-loss benefits on any residential or commercial property policy issued on or after January 1, 2023. The same bill killed one-way attorney fees inside the property statutes. Restoration contractors who had built their business model on AOB-plus-fee-shifting saw the model evaporate on a deadline they had no input on.
HB 837 came three months later. DeSantis signed it on March 24, 2023, and the operative provisions went live the same day. The bill repealed § 627.428 statewide — not just for property — so the one-way fee structure that had backstopped first-party claims for decades was gone outside of the narrow bad-faith judgment exception. The same bill installed the 90-day pay-or-fight safe harbor that has reshaped settlement timing more than any other single provision. It also moved Florida from pure to modified comparative negligence with a 50% bar, a change less relevant to first-party property work but worth knowing when an underlying liability theory is in play.
The combined effect was visible inside a year. Auto glass repair lawsuits — the cleanest signal, because that docket was almost entirely AOB plus one-way fees — dropped from 24,720 filings in Q2 2023 to 2,613 in Q2 2024. An 89% collapse in twelve months. The property side moved slower, because hurricanes do not respect statutory dates, but the trend was the same.
| Element of the file | Before (pre-2023) | After (current) |
|---|---|---|
| Demand leverage | Implicit one-way fee threat under § 627.428 | The file's line-item record alone |
| AOB on post-loss benefits | Standard practice for restoration contractors | Barred on policies issued on or after Jan 1, 2023 (§ 627.7152) |
| Bad-faith exposure | Available on most denials | Foreclosed if the carrier pays the demand or limits within 90 days of CRN |
| Common Citizens dispute venue | Circuit court | DOAH for most disputes — 78% settle, half for $500 or less |
| FL homeowner claim denial rate | Lower historical norms per FOIR data | ≈46.7% in 2024, the highest in over a decade |
Where the carrier money went
If the lawsuit lever weakens, carrier behavior changes. That is the part of the reform that did not get printed on the press release.
Florida's overall homeowner claim denial rate reached approximately 46.7% in 2024, the highest in over a decade. That number is not a hurricane-specific figure; it is the share of files where the carrier paid nothing. Some of those denials are legitimate — losses below deductible, flood claims under an HO-3, late notice past the one-year window in § 627.70132. Others are not. The pattern most operators see is closer to the second.
Hurricane Milton, October 2024, produced a dataset clean enough to read. By December 9, 2025, Florida regulators reported 134,177 of 385,146 Milton claims closed without payment — roughly 35% of the storm's docket gone before a dollar moved. Pre-2023 storms ran at a noticeably lower closed-without-payment rate. Carriers used to settle small claims in volume because the alternative was a small lawsuit with one-way fees attached. After the reform, settling a $9,000 file and litigating a $9,000 file cost about the same.
Citizens, the carrier of last resort and now the largest single property insurer in the state by exposed dwellings, moved most of its disputes off the circuit court track entirely. ProPublica's review of Citizens cases at the Division of Administrative Hearings between March 2024 and July 2025 found 78% settled rather than going to a final order. Half of those settlements paid the policyholder $500 or less. That is not adversarial litigation; that is a clearing mechanism. The administrative venue keeps the file out of a jury's sight, caps the legal cost on both sides, and produces the kind of low-dollar disposition that would have been a nuisance settlement under the old fee regime.
The other ground shift is depopulation. Citizens recommended rate cuts for most policyholders in December 2025, an inversion of the prior five years. Behind that headline, more than 546,000 policies were transferred to private carriers through the depopulation program in 2025 alone — Slide, Loggerhead, Florida Peninsula, Olympus, and others picked up the volume. Each of those carriers has its own claim posture, its own desk-adjuster culture, and its own willingness to engage with a public adjuster on the merits. The same loss, on the same parcel, under the same policy form, can take a different shape depending on which carrier carries the risk at the moment of loss.
The 90-day clock and the file that supports it
The 90-day safe harbor is doing more work than any other provision in the reform. The mechanic is simple. If the carrier pays the demanded amount or the policy limits within 90 days of receiving a civil remedy notice plus sufficient supporting evidence, the policyholder cannot later sue for bad faith on that claim. The carrier gets a controlled escape hatch. The adjuster gets a hard deadline by which the demand must be airtight.
The operational shift is the order of work. First the notice of loss inside the policy's prompt-notice window — usually three to fourteen days, never longer than the one-year ceiling at § 627.70132. Then the scope, the photo grid, the moisture map, and the dated weather pull. Then the line-item estimate, anchored in real material and labor pricing for the county, not a desk adjuster's regional average. Then the demand, written as if a senior carrier counsel will read it on Day 80 with a settle-or-defend recommendation due Monday. Pre-2023, the demand could carry softer numbers because the fee shift on a denial covered the gap. Post-2023, every line in the demand has to be defensible on the record the file built.
The 18-month supplemental window at § 627.70132 is the other deadline that has tightened in practice. Reopening a file at month seventeen with new water-extraction findings used to be routine. Now it lands on a desk where the original CRN has long since expired and the supplemental demand has to stand on the strength of the new evidence alone, without the fee leverage that used to make a carrier engage rather than deny.
A working public adjuster running files through this regime keeps three things visible on every active claim: the policy's prompt-notice clause language by carrier form, the date-of-loss anchor for the § 627.70132 windows, and the demand-readiness state of the file. Operators using claimOS see these on the claim header rather than tracked in a side spreadsheet, because the file has to be the system of record under the new rules — there is no fee-shift backstop to paper over a thin file.
What 2026 actually looks like
The 2025 legislative session saw rollback bills introduced — efforts to restore one-way fees, narrow the safe harbor, or carve property back out of the broader tort regime. None passed. The reform regime as written in 2022 and 2023 is what the 2026 file is running under, and the carriers have had two years to adapt their playbook to it.
Rate filings show the carrier side has captured most of the early gain. Florida's average homeowner rate increase fell from approximately 21% in 2023 to a projected 0.2% in 2025, and Citizens is recommending cuts on its own book. Public adjusters who track their business by closed-claim recovery per file rather than by litigation outcomes are doing fine. PAs who built their model on lawyered-up demands are not.
Carrier behavior to expect in 2026 is what 2024 and 2025 already showed: faster denials on borderline coverage questions, smaller initial offers, and aggressive use of DOAH arbitration where Citizens is involved. The counter is the same thing it always was: a notice that closes the prompt-notice window cleanly, a scope that anticipates the carrier's reinspection questions, and a demand that reads like the carrier wrote it. The legal landscape changed; the work did not. The file is still the case. The case is still the file. Compare your current desk-adjuster handoffs against the Symbility-routed carrier workflow most insurers are still running internally, and the gap between your file and theirs is the variable that decides what the post-reform safe-harbor period looks like for your client.
Did SB 2-A actually eliminate AOB on Florida property claims?
Yes, on policies issued or renewed on or after January 1, 2023. § 627.7152 as amended bars assignment of post-loss insurance benefits on any residential or commercial property insurance policy. Older policies that pre-date the rewrite can still carry AOB rights under the prior version of the statute, so check the policy effective date before assuming an assignment is invalid.
What is the 90-day bad-faith safe harbor and when does the clock start?
Under HB 837, a carrier that pays the demanded amount or the policy limits (whichever is less) within 90 days of receiving a civil remedy notice plus sufficient supporting evidence cannot be sued for bad faith on that claim. The clock starts when the CRN and the evidence package are received, not when the loss occurred.
Can a public adjuster's client still recover attorney's fees after HB 837?
Not under the old § 627.428 one-way fee structure, which the reform repealed. Fees remain available in narrow circumstances, most notably on a bad-faith judgment under § 624.155 where the carrier failed to pay within the 90-day window. Plan the file as if a fee shift will not move.
How long does a Florida property policyholder have to file a claim?
§ 627.70132 caps notice of an initial claim at one year from the date of loss and notice of a supplemental or reopened claim at 18 months. The policy's own prompt-notice clause typically requires notice sooner, often within three to fourteen days, so the statute is the outer limit, not the operating standard.
Why are so many Citizens disputes ending up at DOAH?
Citizens, as a state-created entity, is exempt from circuit-court venue on most policy disputes and routes them to the Division of Administrative Hearings. The administrative venue caps legal costs and produces a different settlement curve than circuit-court litigation, which is why most Citizens DOAH cases resolve fast and for small dollar amounts.
Sources cited
- Florida's Most Comprehensive Tort Reform in Decades and What it Means for Insurers and Bad Faith Law— RumbergerKirk
- Florida's Citizens Property Insurance Wins Most of Its Claim Disputes in Mandatory Arbitration— ProPublica
- Historic Florida Insurance Reforms Under SB 2-A— Clyde & Co
- Florida Statute § 627.70132 — Notice of property insurance claim— Florida Legislature
- How recent tort reforms are shaping insurance claims— Milliman
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