Your roof’s age and your Florida insurance
In Florida, roof age is usually what triggers a replacement — not a leak. But your insurer has far less power over that decision than most homeowners believe. Under Florida Statute 627.7011(5), a carrier may not refuse to issue or renew your homeowners policy solely because of roof age if your roof is under 15 years old — and at 15 or older, you have a statutory right to an inspection before anyone can force your hand.
Under 15 years: an insurer may not refuse to issue or renew a homeowners policy solely because of the age of the roof. Age alone is not a permissible reason.
15 years or older: before requiring replacement as a condition of issuing or renewing, the insurer must allow you to obtain an inspection from an authorised inspector, at your expense. If that inspection finds five or more years of useful life remaining, the insurer may not refuse solely because of age.
How age is counted: from the last date on which 100% of the roof’s surface area was built or replaced to the building code in effect at that time. Partial replacements do not reset the clock unless they add up to the entire surface.
These provisions apply to homeowners policies issued or renewed on or after 1 July 2022. Source: F.S. 627.7011, 2026 edition.
What this means when the renewal letter arrives
The gap between what the statute says and what happens in practice is where homeowners lose money. Here is how to work the difference.
Not when you bought the house — when 100% of the surface was last replaced. Your county building department’s permit records will show the last re-roof permit, and that is the date that counts. If a previous owner replaced half the roof after a storm, that did not reset anything.
A carrier cannot decline renewal on age alone below that threshold. If you are being told otherwise, ask them to state the actual reason for non-renewal in writing. Condition, prior claims, or an inspection finding are legitimate grounds. “The roof is twelve years old” is not.
You have a right to it, and the number that matters is five or more years of remaining useful life. Get that finding stated explicitly in the inspector’s report, in those terms — a report that says the roof is “in fair condition” does you no good. You pay for this inspection, which is the trade the statute makes.
Individual carriers set underwriting rules on top of the statutory floor, and those change by internal bulletin rather than by law. Some push at 10 years rather than 15. The statute is your floor, not your ceiling — so get the specific guideline from your agent in writing rather than accepting a number over the phone.
A code-compliant re-roof is the one moment you can add several premium-reducing features at once. Have the inspection done and the form filed afterwards, or you have paid for the upgrades and left the discount on the table. How the credits work.
The roof deductible trap
If a separate roof deductible is applied to your claim, F.S. 627.7011(3)(a) lets the insurer limit payment for the roof to actual cash value until it receives reasonable proof that you have actually paid that deductible. Acceptable proof includes a cancelled check, a money order receipt, a credit card statement, or an executed installment contract.
In plain terms: the depreciated portion is withheld until you can document that you paid your share. Keep the paperwork. And be aware that the specific dollar thresholds and age triggers for the optional roof deductible live in a different statute (F.S. 627.701) that we have not fully verified — so check your own policy declarations page rather than assuming.
It is not from SB 76. The 15-year threshold and the inspection right came out of Florida’s 2022 property insurance reforms, not the 2021 bill that is often credited. SB 76 dealt mainly with contractor deductible-waiver schemes and insurer data reporting. If you are citing authority to an adjuster, cite 627.7011.
The 2026 attempt to extend it failed. HB 815 would have widened these protections to property policies beyond homeowners policies, added provisions for low-slope roofs, and revised the steep-slope inspection criteria. It died in the Insurance and Banking Subcommittee on 13 March 2026. The law as described above remains what governs.
Get your actual roof measured and priced in about thirty seconds, so the decision is a numbers decision rather than a guess.
Related Florida guides
The law is the same across the state. Pricing is not — that is what the city pages are for.