Having insurance doesn't mean a storm costs you nothing. The question is how much of the damage you could cover yourself.

The premium doesn't answer that. After Hurricane Helene, Florida's insurance regulator started publishing the reasons storm claims closed without a check. The two most common reasons insurers gave weren't about bad faith. One was arithmetic and the other was fine print.

What the Helene table shows

Helene made landfall in Florida's Big Bend in late September 2024. As of June 10, 2025, insurers had reported to the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation just under 58,000 Helene claims on homeowners policies. About 31,700 of those had closed without payment. The reasons insurers gave included:

  • 10,683 closed because the damage was below the policy deductible.
  • 8,024 closed because the damage came from flooding, which the policy didn't cover.
  • 6,118 closed after coverage was denied for some reason other than flood.

Those counts cover the homeowners line only. Across every line of business the regulator tracks, 15,251 Helene claims closed because the damage fell below the deductible. The regulator labels all of it unaudited and subject to change. It has also said its data doesn't support the narrative that insurers were turning away valid claims wholesale. In its account, the deductible and the flood exclusion were the leading reasons for closing without payment.

The table has limits. It doesn't show how much those homeowners eventually paid themselves, or whether a separate flood policy paid them. A claim that closed under a $2,000 deductible looks exactly like one that closed under a $40,000 deductible. Some closures say nothing about coverage at all. In 3,117 cases the policyholder withdrew the claim, and in 2,325 the insurer's system didn't record a reason.

Even so, the plain reading is that more than 10,000 Florida homeowners claims after Helene ended with the damage inside the share of the loss the policy left to the homeowner.

A deductible that's a percentage

Most people picture a deductible as a fixed sum, like $1,000 or $2,500. Florida hurricane deductibles often aren't. State law requires insurers to offer hurricane deductibles of $500, 2%, 5% or 10% of the dwelling limit, with different options at the very low and very high ends, according to Florida's Department of Financial Services.

The percentage changes the scale. Take a house insured for $600,000, as a hypothetical. Its hurricane deductible would be $12,000 at 2%, $30,000 at 5% and $60,000 at 10%. Florida applies the hurricane deductible once per calendar year with the same insurer group. A household hit by two hurricanes in one season, as Florida was with Helene and Milton in 2024, doesn't pay the full percentage twice.

Earthquake coverage from the California Earthquake Authority works the same way. Its homeowners policies offer dwelling deductibles of 5%, 10%, 15%, 20% or 25% of the dwelling coverage limit. The two lowest options aren't available on homes insured above $1 million. On a hypothetical $900,000 dwelling limit, a 15% deductible is $135,000.

The deductible that grows on its own

This is the part I find least appreciated: a percentage deductible can rise without anyone deciding to raise it. Many replacement-cost policies carry an inflation guard endorsement, which raises the dwelling limit over time to keep up with construction costs. Florida's Department of Financial Services spells out what that means. The endorsement affects only percentage-based hurricane deductibles, and insurers must say on the declarations page that it may make the hurricane deductible higher than the amount shown by the time a loss occurs.

That's a sensible feature. A dwelling limit that falls behind rebuilding costs is its own problem, because it leaves the house underinsured. But it also means a 5% deductible is a dollar figure that moves up with construction costs while the percentage on the page stays the same.

Damage the policy was never going to pay

The second-largest category in the Helene table is a different kind of gap. A standard homeowners policy generally excludes flood, and flood coverage is a separate policy, from the National Flood Insurance Program or a private carrier. In a hurricane, water from surge, rain and rivers is often what does the most damage. A homeowner can carry a perfectly sound wind policy and still find that the worst of the storm falls outside it.

In The Cost of an Honest Premium I wrote about what is happening to federal flood insurance prices as FEMA moves each home toward its full-risk rate, and about the households priced hardest being the first to drop coverage. The 8,024 flood closures are the other side of that ledger. They show what happens when water reaches a house and the homeowners policy doesn't cover it.

A trade, not a trap

None of this is a case against high deductibles. A deductible is a trade. The homeowner keeps the smaller, more likely losses, and the insurer charges a lower premium in return. For many households it's a deliberate choice that both sides price.

What I notice is how differently the two halves of that trade are seen. The premium shows up every year as a bill, so it gets compared, shopped and complained about. The deductible sits on the declarations page as a percentage until the day it turns into a dollar amount, and the flood exclusion sits in the policy language until there is water in the house.

Two costs, one of them visible

In my view, the cost of owning a home in a disaster-exposed place has two parts, and most of the attention goes to one of them. The coverage about rising premiums is warranted. Those increases are real. But the premium is what you pay someone else to carry part of the risk. The deductible, plus whatever the policy excludes, is the part you carry yourself. In Florida's Helene data, more than 10,000 homeowners claims ended there.

The premium buys a transfer of risk. The deductible is the part of the risk that was never transferred, and it stays with the house.

Sources

Figures current as of October 2026.