Florida multifamily insurance premiums post first drop in six years

The median property-insurance bill at securitized Florida multifamily properties fell 6.2% in 2025, Trepp data show, the first year-over-year decline in the six-year series and a sharp turn from the state's 42.1% surge in 2023. The rest of the nation still recorded a 3.4% increase in the same year, according to the August 2026 multifamily line-item report, with each year measured at year-end. Underwriters should treat the decline as a ceiling, not a floor.

The reversal took two years to build. Florida's median increase ran ahead of the rest of the country in every year from 2020 through 2023, including 13.5% growth in 2021 and 17.3% in 2022 against 7.8% and 9.1% elsewhere, and the gap peaked in 2023 at 26.1 percentage points, when the state's median was two and a half times the rest of the nation's 16.0%. Even the 2024 slowdown, when Florida rose 7.7% against the rest of the country's 11.1%, marked the first year the state's growth fell below the comparison group.

The 2025 gap ran in the opposite direction: 9.6 points between a median Florida property down 6.2% and the rest of the country up 3.4%. The whole-nation median came in positive at 2.7%, a sign that the decline is concentrated in Florida. Trepp strips Florida out to build the comparison group, so the median is an institutional read on the state's apartment stock.

Trepp describes the 2025 decline as a pullback after several years of outsized increases, rather than evidence that insurance expenses have returned to their earlier levels. A negative median means the midpoint property reported a smaller bill, and the 2020-to-2023 climb is far larger than the 2025 give-back — Florida's insurance costs rose 42.1% in 2023 alone, so one year of decline recovers only a fraction of that. The sound read is a reprieve from an unsustainable run.

The relief is nonetheless real for owners who survived the climb. For a Florida multifamily sponsor coming off the 2023 surge, the 2025 line is cash flow back in the model. Lenders underwriting 2026 debt service should take the number, but they should also notice how quickly this input has moved in both directions: the gap between Florida and the rest of the country swung from 26.1 points in one direction to 9.6 points in the other in two years. That range is the underwriting risk.

This publication has tied the 2023 conduit multifamily vintage's delinquency to thin underwriting cushions, and the 2024 vintage starts even thinner. A year of insurance relief can help the loans in those cohorts that are still performing, but a single expense line cannot repair a debt yield that was set at purchase. The insurance reversal matters most where cash flow was already the margin of safety.

The broader math from this publication's recent coverage still holds: expense growth cooling at the national level in 2025 did not produce stronger NOI because revenue slowed by roughly the same amount. Florida's insurance decline is a rarer kind of expense story — a line item moving in a property's favor. But it lands in a market where cap rates have reset upward in every census division, even where cash flow grows. A lower insurance bill improves current cash flow; it does not by itself reset a capitalization rate.

Nothing in the series says the conditions behind the 2020-to-2023 run have disappeared, and one year of decline does not repeal that record. Sponsors who layer 2025's lower bill into a permanent expense forecast are creating next year's problem; lenders who underwrite to a permanent annual decline are doing the same at greater leverage. The better underwrite is to model a Florida property with a repeat of the 2023 spike and ask whether the debt service survives.

The next repricing of risk is what matters now. The six-year series has shown both how fast Florida insurance costs can spike and how quickly they can reverse, and the sponsors and lenders who underwrite as if the 2023 surge could return are the ones whose model survives that repricing.