Florida's property insurance market is showing its first real signs of capacity relief in years. Citizens Property Insurance, the state's insurer of last resort, has watched its policy count shrink to 278,662 as of June 20, 2026 — down sharply from a peak of 1.41 million in October 2023 — as depopulation efforts move policies back into the private market, Citizens CEO Tim Cerio told the utility's board, per reporting from the Sun-Sentinel and News Service of Florida. Days earlier, Florida Insurance Commissioner Mike Yaworsky told the state Cabinet the market is the healthiest it has been in roughly a decade, pointing to well-capitalized carriers heading into hurricane season, the same outlet reported.
That local recovery lines up with a national story: independent agents captured 62% of all US property-casualty premium in 2025, edging up from 61.5% the year before, according to the Big "I"'s 2026 Market Share Report, compiled from AM Best data and released June 23. The channel's combined ratio dropped to 88% in 2025 from 92% in 2024, comfortably under the five-year average of 94%. Commercial lines are loosening too — the Council of Insurance Agents & Brokers found 72% of member firms saw more property underwriting capacity in the first quarter of 2026, with commercial property premiums down an average of 5.5%, Insurance Business America reported.
Put together, these are the ingredients of a friendlier placement environment. But "friendlier" isn't uniform, and that's the part agency owners should sit with.
State licensing and carrier-appointment registries paint a much patchier picture underneath the headline numbers. Statewide, Florida carries 50,333 active resident General Lines (2-20 P&C) agents, with 2,963 new agency licenses issued in the trailing 12 months — formation that's held roughly flat versus a year earlier (247 new licenses a month in the latest quarter versus 261 a month prior). Carrier access, though, is where the real spread shows up: the median Florida GL agent holds active appointments with 7 carriers, but the bottom quartile sits at just 3 while the top quartile reaches 17, based on public license and appointment data covering more than 37,000 agents.
That gap tracks geography closely. Miami-area agencies carry a median 15 carrier appointments, Tampa 12, Orlando 14, and Jacksonville 15 — all well above the statewide median, with single-carrier dependency (agencies holding just one appointment, a marker of thin capacity access) running 3-7% in those metros, according to the same public registries. Formation is concentrated in South Florida too: Miami-Dade added 668 new agent licenses in the past year, Broward 526, and Palm Beach 290, but agents-per-agency ratios there (1.2 to 1.4) suggest much of that growth is sub-scale — solo or near-solo operations rather than agencies building out deep, diversified panels. Frontline Insurance Reciprocal Exchange and two Progressive entities were the carriers opening the most new Florida agent appointments over the past 90 days, per the same public data.
Why any of this matters to an owner isn't abstract. Valuation advisory firm Sica|Fletcher, whose dataset covers more than 450 sell-side transactions, put mid-market agencies with $1M-$10M in adjusted EBITDA at 11.4x-14x in H1 2025, according to figures compiled by Ad Astra Equity. Books under $1M EBITDA with single-state or thin carrier panels, by contrast, traded at just 5x-7x, or 1.5x-2.5x revenue. Ad Astra names diversified carrier access, alongside book retention, as one of the explicit levers separating those tiers — not headcount, and not geography alone.
That's the piece worth sitting with as Florida's capacity story plays out unevenly by metro. An agency in Jacksonville with 15+ carrier relationships and low single-carrier dependency is structurally positioned very differently than a similarly sized shop in a fragmented, formation-heavy corridor running on three or four appointments — even if both sit in a state regulators now call the healthiest it's been in a decade. Carrier panel depth, not agency count or even local market softening, is what shows up on the value side of the ledger.
For a fuller look at how carrier access breaks down by Florida metro, see the Pexara Florida market intelligence page.