Five weeks after Hurricane Isaias, Florida carriers have closed roughly a fifth of claims without paying anything, and the leading reason is damage that never reached the deductible. That is not a coverage failure. It is a conversation that did not happen before the storm, and you can have it before the next one.
Hurricane Isaias came ashore near Destin on October 9 with 105 mph winds and moved across the Panhandle. Five weeks later, the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation's claim data, updated November 6 and reported by Insurance Journal on November 10, show about 68,000 claims and $736 million in losses. Homeowners policies account for 47,048 of those claims and private passenger auto for 7,825. Santa Rosa County alone has produced nearly 32,000 claims, with another 21,119 from Escambia.
The number worth your attention is a different one. About 14,400 claims, roughly 21 percent, have been closed without payment. The most common reason in the state's data is that the amount of damage was below the policy's deductible. More than 5,370 claims were closed for administrative reasons, a category that includes claims the policyholder withdrew. Only 326 were closed because the damage was flood, which the homeowners policy does not cover.
Agents and carriers in the area told Insurance Journal what happened. Most of the residential damage came from falling trees and limbs. Keith Goolsby of The Siler Agency in Pensacola described homeowners with trees down who filed quickly, then realized the tree had not actually hit the house, or that the policy does not pay to remove it, or that the repair would cost less than the deductible. Many of those claims were then withdrawn. A storm that AM Best called an earnings event for carriers still produced thousands of claims that went nowhere, and each one took an adjuster's time and a client's hope.
Why the Deductible Surprises People
Florida law requires carriers to offer hurricane deductibles of 2, 5 or 10 percent of the dwelling limit, with a flat $500 option on lower value homes. Those percentages are of Coverage A, not of the claim. A client with a $400,000 dwelling limit and a 2 percent hurricane deductible is carrying an $8,000 deductible for any hurricane loss, and a 5 percent deductible on the same house is $20,000. The client who chose 2 percent at the kitchen table four years ago to save on premium rarely remembers it as a dollar figure, and the dwelling limit has usually gone up since then, which moves the deductible with it.
That is why a tree on the fence, a few sheets of missing shingles and a screen enclosure panel feel like a claim and turn out not to be one. The damage is real. The policy is doing what it says. The client just never had the deductible translated into dollars against their own house.
Tree removal adds a second layer. Many homeowners forms pay to remove a fallen tree only when it damages a covered structure or blocks a driveway or ramp, and they cap the amount. A tree lying across the yard that hit nothing is often the client's expense, and the call to the agency usually starts with that tree.
Report It Anyway, and Here Is Why
A claim that falls under the hurricane deductible is not wasted, and this is the part most clients do not know. Under section 627.701 of the Florida Statutes, the hurricane deductible applies on a calendar year basis to all covered hurricane losses under policies from the same insurer or insurer group. If a client absorbs a $3,000 Isaias loss against an $8,000 deductible, a second hurricane in the same calendar year carries only the remaining $5,000, or the non hurricane deductible if that is higher. The Florida CFO's consumer page walks through exactly that example.
The statute also lets insurers require policyholders to report hurricane losses that are below the deductible, or to keep receipts and records of them, in order to apply those losses to a later claim. So the advice is not do not file. The advice is document the loss, keep the receipts, and understand that the first storm's out of pocket cost can reduce the second storm's.
The flip side matters too. A claim filed and closed without payment can still appear in the client's claims history. Whether and how a carrier weighs it varies, but the client deserves to know that a quick call to the carrier's claims line is not free of consequence, and that a call to you first is.
The Conversation Before the Next Storm
Isaias was the first Atlantic hurricane of 2026, and it hit a stretch of coast that had already been through Sally in 2020, which produced almost 72,000 claims and $577 million in losses over a similar window. Your clients in Santa Rosa and Escambia have now done this twice in six years. Elsewhere in Florida and along the Gulf, they have not done it yet this year, and the calendar year rule means a loss in December still counts.
The pre storm version of this conversation is short. Pull the dwelling limit and the hurricane deductible percentage, multiply, and tell the client the number. Tell them what the policy does and does not do about trees. Tell them that if damage looks small, the smart first call is to you, not to the claims line, so you can help them decide whether to file, document or wait. Put that in the renewal letter for every coastal account before June.
The post storm version is the same conversation delivered under stress. The day after landfall, send every client in the affected counties one message: here is your hurricane deductible in dollars, here is what to photograph, here is what to keep receipts for, call us before you call the carrier. The agency that sends that note is the one whose clients do not end up in the 21 percent.
What to Watch
The Office of Insurance Regulation updates its Isaias figures regularly, and the share closed without payment has held near a fifth across the October 20 and November 6 updates. Watch whether the count of withdrawn claims keeps climbing as adjusters work the backlog, and watch for any carrier that handles below deductible reporting differently at renewal.
For the rest of the state, the practical step is to find every policy with a 5 or 10 percent hurricane deductible and ask whether the client chose it or inherited it. Some will want to keep the premium savings. Some have no idea what they agreed to. Both deserve the number in dollars before the next storm, not after.