Florida Hurricane Season Strikes Insurance Industry in Turmoil

PALM BEACH GARDENS, Fla., Sept. 5, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- With Florida now entering the peak of hurricane season, insurance companies are denying home damage claims more aggressively, and their policyholders are fighting back by suing at a higher rate.

This is the conclusion of a timely report issued today by Weiss Ratings, the nation's only independent rating agency covering insurance companies. Based on official data from the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, the report documents two damning facts:

1. In 2024, following two hurricanes that made landfall, insurers operating in Florida denied damage payments to almost 47% of homeowners.
2. Nearly 13% of homeowners with denied claims filed lawsuits as their last recourse to get the money needed for home repairs.

"This is one of the most shocking trends I've seen in my 54 years tracking the industry," commented Dr. Martin Weiss, founder of Weiss Ratings. "In 2022, the state of Florida succumbed to the insurance lobby, enacting new laws governing lawsuits. And these new laws, called 'tort reform,' were widely expected to make it much harder for consumers to sue. But rather than passively accepting claims denials, homeowners went to court even more often."

The data indicates that many insurers, perhaps assuming that tort reform would help them get away with abusive practices, denied claims more aggressively, causing more, rather than fewer, lawsuits overall.

Here are the facts:

In 2024, the first full year after the tort reform laws went into effect, insurers operating in Florida denied homeowner claims at a record rate: On average, they made no payments whatsoever to homeowners on 46.7% of the claims they closed, compared to 40.0% in 2022, the last full year before tort reform.

"No one on the outside seems to know what's really going on inside the insurance companies," Weiss added. "But I wouldn't be surprised if many insurers in the state pursued a deliberate strategy to deny claims more aggressively, thinking that tort reform would protect them and expecting it would sharply reduce the number of policyholder lawsuits. It looks like they were wrong. Tort reform failed, and their strategy backfired."

In 2022, before tort reform, for every thousand claims, their policyholders filed 124 lawsuits against them. In 2024, after tort reform, that number actually rose to 129 per thousand.

In contrast, among home insurers operating in all jurisdictions outside Florida, for every thousand claims closed with no payment, their policyholders filed only 11 lawsuits.

This means that, compared to the rest of the nation, Florida policyholders are going to court 12 times more often.

Today, the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation (FLOIR) and the insurance industry continue to forcefully tout tort reform, insisting that the number of policyholder lawsuits is trending down. However, in late August, FLOIR officials admitted they were not tracking the data and had failed to enforce a rule passed back in December of 2022 regarding insurance company reporting of lawsuit activity.

"All the facts reveal a classic example of failure," Weiss concluded. "Insurers abuse their own customers, blame their own customers and then get legislatures to protect them from their own customers' ire. In the end, it only makes things worse for both sides. It's about time they learn the lesson from insurers who do right for their customers, rarely denying legitimate claims and rarely getting sued."

The Weiss report can also serve as a lesson for any other state that might try to follow Florida: Tort reform doesn't work. Driven by the insurance lobby and pursued by well meaning but misguided legislators, the first to get hurt by tort reform are policyholders because insurers don't feel the pain to modify the cynical business practice of delay, deny and defend. But ultimately, the biggest losers are the state and the insurers themselves, when otherwise loyal customers seek other alternatives.

A consumer's best defense is to check each company's history of denials before buying or renewing home insurance, and with this table, Weiss Ratings is the nation's only organization that makes the needed data readily available to the public. In addition, to see how often homeowners file lawsuits in each state or jurisdiction, see this map.

About Weiss Ratings: Weiss rates 53,000 institutions and investments, including safety ratings on insurers, banks and credit unions, as well as investment ratings on stocks, ETFs, mutual funds and cryptocurrencies. Since its founding in 1971, Weiss Ratings has never accepted any form of payment from rated entities for its ratings. All Weiss insurance company ratings are available at https://weissratings.com/en/insurance.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported that the Weiss ratings of U.S. life and health insurers outperformed those of A.M. Best by 3-to-1 in warning of future financial difficulties, while also greatly outperforming those of Moody's and Standard & Poor's. The New York Times reported that Weiss "was the first to warn of the dangers and say so unambiguously." Barron's called Weiss Ratings "the leader in identifying vulnerable companies."

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SOURCE Weiss Ratings