While Florida insurance rates are dropping, Brevard County is seeing an increase. Here’s why new construction matters more than ever

For the first time since 2015, Florida homeowners are being told to expect insurance relief. Citizens Property Insurance approved a statewide average rate decrease for 2026. Seventeen new private carriers have entered the Florida market over the past eighteen months. Legislative reforms aimed at reducing litigation and stabilizing the reinsurance market are finally showing up in the numbers for most of the state.

Most of the state. Not all of it.

Brevard County is one of the counties bucking that trend. While places like Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, and much of the rest of Florida are seeing rates hold steady or decline, Citizens’ own 2026 rate filings show Brevard facing an increase of roughly 6.5 percent. If you own a home here, or you’re building one, that divergence is worth understanding — because it changes the calculation on what kind of home actually makes financial sense to own long term.

Why is Brevard moving the opposite direction?

Insurance rates in Florida are driven by a combination of statewide reform and county-specific risk factors — storm exposure, claims history, rebuilding costs, and the age and construction quality of the existing housing stock in that county. Statewide reforms lower the floor for everyone, but they don’t erase the risk profile of a specific place.

Brevard County carries meaningful coastal exposure across a long stretch of the Space Coast, a housing stock that includes a significant number of older homes built before the state’s post-Hurricane Andrew building code overhaul, and a claims history that insurers weigh heavily when setting county-level rates. None of that is new information, but it matters more now precisely because the rest of the state is moving in a different direction. When your neighbors two counties over are getting rate cuts and you’re not, the local factors are what’s driving the gap.

The variable insurers care about most: when was it built

Across every rate filing and every industry report on Florida’s insurance market right now, one factor shows up again and again as the biggest lever homeowners actually control: the age and code compliance of the structure itself.

Many carriers won’t write new policies on homes with roofs older than fifteen years, and some are tightening that threshold to ten years in higher-risk coastal counties like Brevard. Homes built to current Florida Building Code — with modern wind mitigation features, impact-rated windows and doors, and roof-to-wall connections engineered for today’s wind speed requirements — consistently price out lower than homes built even fifteen or twenty years ago, independent of location.

That single factor is why new construction in Brevard County carries a real, quantifiable insurance advantage over comparable existing homes in the same neighborhood. It’s not a marketing claim — it’s how the actuarial math works.

What a wind mitigation report actually buys you

Every new home we build undergoes a wind mitigation inspection after completion, and the resulting report documents the specific storm-resistant features built into the home: roof shape, roof deck attachment method, roof-to-wall connections, and opening protection for windows and doors. Insurance companies use this report directly to calculate discounts, and the combined effect of scoring well across all of those categories can meaningfully reduce your annual premium compared to a home without those documented features.

This is one of the more underappreciated advantages of building new in a market like Brevard’s right now. You’re not hoping a retrofit or an upgrade might help your rate someday — you’re starting with a structure engineered from day one to score as well as possible on the exact criteria insurers are pricing against.

What this means if you’re deciding between building and buying existing

If you’re comparing the cost of building new against buying an existing home in Brevard County, the insurance line item deserves more weight in that comparison than it probably had a few years ago. A home built in the 1990s or early 2000s might carry an insurance premium several thousand dollars higher per year than a comparable new build, purely as a function of construction-era wind mitigation scores and roof age — and that gap widens as rates in this county continue to diverge from the rest of the state.

Over a decade or more of ownership, that difference compounds into a real number. It’s worth running the comparison with real quotes rather than assuming insurance cost is roughly the same regardless of when a home was built. In today’s Brevard market, it isn’t.

What we’d suggest if you’re building here

Get an insurance quote early in the process, not after you close. Many buyers wait until just before closing to shop insurance, which means the number is a surprise rather than something factored into the decision from the start. We can put you in touch with agents who work specifically in this market and understand how to shop a new construction wind mitigation profile across multiple carriers.

If you’re currently in an older home and weighing whether to build, ask your current carrier directly what your premium would look like on a comparable new-construction wind mitigation score. Most agents can run that comparison for you, and seeing the real numbers side by side tends to clarify the decision more than any general statistic can.

Brevard’s insurance market isn’t following the statewide trend right now, and there’s no indication that changes soon. Building to current code, in a home designed with wind mitigation in mind from the first structural decision, is one of the more direct ways to control a cost that otherwise feels entirely out of your hands.

Want to understand the real insurance picture for your build?

We can walk you through what wind mitigation features go into every home we build and connect you with agents who know this market well. Get in touch and we’ll have that conversation.