Claim Denied by Your Florida Insurance Company?

If your Florida property insurance company has denied, underpaid, or delayed your claim, you have options, and you are on a clock. Florida law gives you 1 year from the date of loss to give your insurer initial notice of the claim, and 18 months for a supplemental claim (Fla. Stat. 627.70132). Once the company has notice, it must acknowledge the claim within 7 days, inspect the property within 30 days of receiving your proof of loss, and pay or deny the claim within 60 days (Fla. Stat. 627.70131). Before you can sue, you must serve a pre-suit notice of intent to initiate litigation through the Florida Department of Financial Services (Fla. Stat. 627.70152), and any lawsuit must be filed within 5 years of the date of loss (Fla. Stat. 95.11(2)(e)).

Those rules bind every authorized insurer in Florida equally. What differs from company to company is process: the claim portal, the field adjusting firms, the estimating assumptions, and how the carrier tends to respond to appraisal demands and pre-suit notices. This page is the index to the carrier-specific guides in our property insurance claims practice, one for each of the six residential insurers most often involved in Tampa Bay claims, plus a walkthrough for researching any Florida carrier in the public record. Cory Cannon represents policyholders only, and on contingency matters no recovery means no fees, costs, or expenses owed.

Find Your Insurance Company’s Guide

Each guide covers one carrier: its Florida footprint, its public dispute record in the DFS pre-suit notice and civil remedy databases, how to file a claim with that company, and how we approach a dispute with it. The policy figures below are approximate. They come from OIR market data and company reporting as of the dates shown, and OIR does not audit the underlying filings before publishing them.

More carrier guides are in progress. If your company is not listed, the research steps below work for any Florida insurer, and we handle denied claims and underpaid claims against any carrier authorized in the state.

Does It Matter Which Company Insures You?

The statutes do not change with the logo on your policy. The notice deadlines, the 60-day pay-or-deny requirement, and the pre-suit process are identical whether you are insured by the largest writer in the state or the smallest. What changes is the file you are handed when something goes wrong: which estimating platform produced the carrier’s numbers, which independent adjusting firm inspected your roof, what the company’s estimates tend to leave out, and whether it typically resolves disputes at appraisal or holds out for the pre-suit notice. Those are process facts, and they are knowable. Our guides document them from public records so you know what to expect before your first phone call.

One more reason to check your paperwork: several private carriers grew quickly by assuming policies from Citizens Property Insurance Corporation, so the company named on your current renewal may not be the one you originally chose. An assumed policy carries the same statutory duties: the new insurer steps into the same 7-day, 30-day, and 60-day obligations as any other.

How to Research Any Florida Insurer in Public Records

You do not have to take anyone’s word, ours included, about a carrier’s dispute record. Three public sources cover most of what a policyholder wants to know:

• DFS pre-suit notice database (PIITIL). Every notice of intent to initiate litigation filed under Fla. Stat. 627.70152 passes through the Chief Financial Officer and becomes a public record. The PIITIL database lets you search filed notices by insurer name and date, so you can see how many disputes with your carrier reached the pre-suit stage and when.
• DFS Civil Remedy Notice system. A policyholder pursuing certain remedies under Fla. Stat. 624.155 must first file a civil remedy notice with DFS describing the insurer’s alleged conduct. Those filings are searchable through the DFS civil remedy system.
• OIR residential market data. Florida insurers must report their residential policies in force, and OIR publishes the data by company and county in its Market Intelligence Reports. OIR’s periodic Property Insurance Stability Report adds market-wide context, including which carriers are growing and which are shedding policies.

It is also worth confirming a carrier’s current status before you rely on anything you read about it. DFS maintains a public list of insurers in receivership: companies a court has placed under state control because of insolvency. As of this page’s last review in July 2026, all six carriers listed above are active, authorized Florida insurers; none is in receivership.

A caution on reading the numbers: a carrier with 500,000 policies will generate more pre-suit notices than a carrier with 50,000 simply because it insures ten times as many homes. Raw counts are a starting point, not a verdict. In each guide we pair notice counts with the carrier’s approximate policy count and date every figure, so you can judge scale for yourself.

What the Dispute Process Looks Like

Whichever company insures you, a Florida property claim dispute follows the same statutory track:

1. Confirm your deadlines. Initial notice within 1 year of the date of loss, supplemental claims within 18 months, suit within 5 years. Our insurance claim deadline calculator applies each date to your specific loss.
2. Hold the insurer to its timeline. Acknowledgment within 7 days, inspection within 30 days of your proof of loss, payment or denial within 60 days. Our insurer response timeline checker flags missed dates, and we explain the consequences in our guide to how long an insurance company has to pay in Florida. If the carrier has simply gone quiet past those windows, our delayed claim practice covers the next move.
3. Get the decision in writing and build the counter-file. That means the carrier’s full estimate, bids from licensed local contractors, photographs, and, where tile, siding, or flooring no longer matches, Florida’s matching statute, Fla. Stat. 626.9744, which we cover in our guide to Florida’s insurance matching law. Check whether your policy pays replacement cost or actual cash value (Fla. Stat. 627.7011); the difference is depreciation, and it is a common place for underpayment to hide.
4. Consider appraisal or mediation. Many policies contain an appraisal clause, a contract procedure where each side’s appraiser and a neutral umpire set the amount of loss, and DFS operates a mediation program for residential claims. We compare the two in appraisal versus mediation in Florida, and our insurance appraisal practice handles the appraisal path.
5. Serve the pre-suit notice. Fla. Stat. 627.70152 requires written notice through DFS at least 10 business days before filing suit, with an itemized demand. The insurer must respond within 10 business days. Skipping this step gets a lawsuit dismissed.
6. File suit within 5 years of the date of loss. Our guide to suing a homeowners insurance company in Florida walks through what a breach-of-contract case involves. Where the carrier’s conduct goes beyond a coverage disagreement, Florida recognizes a separate bad faith remedy: it requires a civil remedy notice under Fla. Stat. 624.155, and under Fla. Stat. 624.1551 it can proceed only after an adverse adjudication against the insurer. Our insurance bad faith practice covers when that path opens.

What It Costs

Fee arrangements depend on the matter. Some insurance-company disputes may be accepted on a contingency basis. Under a contingency agreement, no recovery means no attorney’s fee, case costs, or expenses are owed. The written engagement agreement states the terms before any work begins. Our answer to how much a property insurance lawyer costs goes deeper.

In litigation, Fla. Stat. 768.79 proposals for settlement matter as much as the fee percentage. Either side can serve a formal offer that shifts attorney fees and costs if the other side rejects it and the final judgment misses the offer by the statutory margin (generally 25%). Used deliberately, it changes the insurer’s math on dragging a case out. We explain that leverage before we file, not after.

Why Cory Cannon

I am a Florida attorney with a family history in construction for generations. That background sets my working method. I read the carrier’s estimate line by line (unit prices, waste factors, overhead and profit) and I check the carrier’s figures against real bids from licensed local contractors, not against software defaults. When causation is disputed (wind versus wear, sudden pipe failure versus long-term seepage), we retain independent licensed engineers rather than accept the report the insurer commissioned as the last word.

This is a new firm, and I would rather show my method than make claims I cannot document. The carrier guides on this page are that method in public: sourced numbers, dated records, and a statute-by-statute process.

If Your Dispute Is Really With a Builder

Sometimes a roof leaks because it was installed wrong, not because a storm damaged it, and the insurer denies the claim under a defective-workmanship exclusion. If the evidence points to construction error rather than a covered peril, your claim may run against the contractor or builder instead of the insurer, under different statutes and a different pre-suit process. Our construction defects practice handles that path, and we can tell you which side of the line your facts fall on.

If your insurance company denied, underpaid, or stalled your claim, send us the denial letter and the estimate. The initial consultation is free: request it here, or start with your carrier’s guide above.