Roof Age Home Insurance Florida: The 15-Year Rule

The rule sits in s. 627.7011(5), Fla. Stat., and it applies to homeowners policies issued or renewed on or after July 1, 2022. It has two parts.

First, an insurer may not refuse to issue or renew a homeowners policy solely because of the roof's age when the roof is less than 15 years old. Second, once a roof is at least 15 years old, the insurer must let you have it inspected by an authorized inspector, at your own expense, before it can require a new roof as a condition of writing or renewing the policy. If that inspection shows 5 years or more of useful life remaining, the insurer may not refuse to write or renew solely because of the roof's age.

The statute also says who counts as an authorized inspector. The person must be approved by the insurer and be a licensed home inspector, a certified building code inspector, a licensed general, building or residential contractor or a roofing contractor, a licensed professional engineer, a licensed architect, or someone else the insurer recognizes as qualified. Ask the company which of those it accepts before you book anyone.

Florida measures roof age from the last date the entire roof surface was built or replaced to the code in effect at the time. If you replaced it in sections, the clock starts on the date the first partial job began, once later work finished the whole surface. The easiest proof is a finaled permit.

The City of Naples requires a building permit to construct, alter or repair a building under section 105.1 of the Florida Building Code, and lists repair of less than 2 squares (200 square feet) of an existing single-family roof as exempt (City of Naples permit rules). A full reroof leaves a record you can print from the City of Naples CityView portal. Homes in unincorporated Collier use the county's CityView portal instead.

Those permits carry local weight. The city's wind-speed maps put the Risk Category II design wind speed at 170 mph across the whole City of Naples (City of Naples design wind speeds), and that figure drives the structural and opening-protection requirements new work has to meet. Storm repairs leave records too: the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation counted 112,957 claims in Collier County after Irma (OIR catastrophe reporting) and 49,048 after Ian (OIR Hurricane Ian data). If your roof was replaced after either storm, the permit from that job is the date companies want.