Recently, the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation (FOIR), met to discuss raising the rates charged by Citizens' Property for homeowners insurance.

Citizens, which is both the insurer of last resort and the largest insurer in the state already raised rates 14% for over a million policyholders, the rate increase started in June. The FOIR should make a decision regarding the latest rate increase later this month.

According to the CEO of Citizens, Tim Cerio, the requested increase is designed to move Citizens closer to being non-competitive with insurers in the private market.

"We certainly don't take our request for a rate increase lightly," he said in a recent NBC WESH2 article. He claimed it would bring the company closer to being a solely last-resort insurer.

"Nobody wants to face a rate increase, but we believe it's critical for continued market recovery, continued depopulation, and again to reduce the risk of assessments on non-citizen's policyholders," he said in the WESH2 story.

Citizens is requesting a 13.5% increase for most homeowners but for condo owners the increase would be 14.2%.

Citizen's policyholder, Mike Mckee, was interviewed in the NBC WESH2 story after being dropped by Citizens. He was one of 220,000 policyholders across the state that Citizens dropped in the last year.

"They have continually increased the rates," Mckee said in the article. "In January of this year, I got notified that in one year, so January of 2025, that they would dump me for a company that I had never heard of and the rates after the dump going to this new company would go up 40%... this is going to be unsustainable."

Recently, Citizens has put policies in place that require policyholders to move to a private insurer if they are offered a premium that is less than 20% more than their Citizens premium they need to switch.

Florida homeowners pay some of the highest rates in the country due to fraud and the cost of lawsuits in the state.

If the rate increase is approved, it will take effect in January.