Over the 10 years ending in 2024, housing costs increased by 132 percent in Florida, the second-largest spike among states (after Idaho), reports Construction Coverage, a building and real estate research company. Increasingly frequent extreme weather events and rising reconstruction costs have made Florida the most expensive state for homeowners insurance, according to an April 2025 report from the nonprofit Consumer Federation of America.
Premiums there rose more between 2021 and 2024, in absolute dollars, than in any other state, with average annual premiums of $9,462, the study found. More than 20 insurers have stopped writing new homeowners policies in Florida or pulled out of the market entirely.
“It’s difficult to get the homeowners insurance you need. There have been hurricanes and tropical storms. Utilities, food and homeowners association fees are also on the rise,” Marquit says. “And, of course, you’ve got overdevelopment, traffic congestion and overloaded health care services.”
These factors have helped change the flow of new arrivals, says Nicole Ramer, a certified senior move manager and co-owner of Organized Haven, a relocation services company in central Florida.
“I hadn’t really seen a lot of people moving out of Florida until the last couple of years,” she says.
There’s even a term for people like Whitney who moved to Florida to escape Northern winters but ended up resettling somewhere in the middle, like the Carolinas. BEBR Director Christopher McCarty says they’re called “halfbacks.”
Florida fights back
Florida has taken steps to curb soaring insurance costs, enacting legal reforms aimed at coaxing back private insurers and reducing premiums charged by the state-backed provider, Citizens Property Insurance Corp. Seventeen private insurance companies have entered the market in recent years, according to the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation.
Already considered tax-friendly for its lack of an income tax, Florida may roll back property taxes under a constitutional amendment, passed in February by the state House and pending before the Senate, that would phase out real estate levies except those that fund schools.
For now, nearby states that offer warm weather, alluring coasts and a lower cost of living are benefiting from the perception that Florida has become harder to afford. Of the approximately 14,000 65-plus adults who moved to South Carolina last year, for example, more than 1 in 8 were Florida transplants.
New arrivals from neighboring Georgia and North Carolina also contributed to the Palmetto State leading the U.S. in a net gain of retirement-age migrants, with 5,427 more people ages 65-plus moving into South Carolina than moving out.
When Wanda Eastham and her husband were weighing a retirement move from Rhode Island, they considered Florida. But on a scouting trip there, “both of us said, ‘No, absolutely not,’ ” she recalls. “It was crowded. There was something about it that just didn’t appeal to either one of us.”
On the way back, divine intervention struck. While driving through South Carolina, they spotted a church under construction. Eastham, a potter who crafts chalices for churches as a sideline, made a deal to sell some to the local priest. They saw that as a sign to buy a piece of property on Hilton Head and build a house. After her husband died in 2018, she moved to a nearby retirement community called Holiday Indigo Pines.