Full story in the Palm Beach Post
By Anne Geggis
Automobiles might have gotten swamped en masse in the floodwaters of 2024’s hurricanes Helene and Milton, but recent tort law changes are protecting car insurance policyholders from getting hit with those resulting losses, state officials say.
Customers of the state’s five largest auto insurers, which make up 78% of the market, are going to see their auto premiums drop by an average of 6.5%, some by as much as 11.5%, in 2025, according to the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation. That’s following a 4.3% average increase in 2024 and an eye-popping 31.7% increase in 2023, state insurance regulators said.
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This year’s decrease in rates might take out some of the sting Floridians feel from paying some of the highest car insurance premiums in the country. Only five states — New York, New Jersey, Nevada, Delaware and Connecticut — pay more on average for the minimum auto insurance coverage state laws require, according to Bankrate, an online insurance cost aggregator. That’s despite Florida having the lowest insurance minimum requirements for getting on the road, except for New Hampshire, which doesn’t require that motorists are insured, if they can prove their ability to cover costs if found at fault in an accident.
Florida’s Top 5 auto insurers that collectively show the average rate decreasing are Progressive, Geico, State Farm, Allstate and USAA.
“Florida’s auto insurance market is turning the corner,” said Blaise Ingoglia, a former state senator sworn in July 21 as Florida’s chief financial officer. “When the top insurers in the state are cutting rates … that’s not just a statistic; it’s money back in the pockets of Florida residents.”
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Just like the property insurance market, the number of lawsuits against auto insurers has dropped dramatically since a spate of legislative efforts addressed insurance litigation. For car insurance, though, an industry representative attributes the drop in litigation to the end of assigning insurance benefits to auto glass repair providers.
After state law prohibited assigning benefits to the repair provider, the number of auto-glass lawsuits filed in 2024 showed an 80% drop in 2024, after hitting a record of more than 46,000 lawsuits the year before, filed ahead of the new law, in 2023, according to Mark Friedlander, senior director of media relations for the Insurance Information Institute, an insurance industry-funded organization.
“For many years, unscrupulous actors preyed upon Florida drivers at car washes, gas stations and shopping center parking lots, offering gift cards in exchange for signing over their windshield repair,” Friedlander said in an email. “These highly inflated claims were typically rejected by auto insurers, leading to a large volume of frivolous lawsuits, which Florida drivers paid for in the form of higher premiums.”