Roof age and home insurance: the 2026 Florida law that never passed

What an underwriter reads when your report mentions the roof

Inspection reports rarely say a roof has failed. They say the covering is at or near the end of its expected service life, or they recommend evaluation by a licensed roofing contractor. To a buyer that reads as a future expense to be argued about later.

An insurance underwriter reads it differently, and earlier. Roof age is one of the first fields on a homeowner's application, and in a growing number of states it decides whether a policy gets offered at all. Your lender will not fund without bound hazard insurance, and a carrier will not bind on a roof it has already decided not to write.

That is the reordering worth understanding. A roof finding used to be something you negotiated once you were confident the deal would close. It is now something that can decide whether the deal closes. Note also that recommending further evaluation is an unanswered question, not a verdict — but an underwriting cutoff is a number, and it does not care what condition your roofer thinks the roof is in.

The Florida roof law that never became law

Search roof age and insurance today and you will find pages describing House Bill 815 as a new Florida law, effective July 1, 2026, that closed the "age-only loophole" and stopped insurers dropping homeowners over an old roof. It is not law. HB 815 (2026), "Roofing Requirements for Property Insurance," died in the House Insurance & Banking Subcommittee on March 13, 2026. Its Senate companion, SB 808, died the same way. Neither was enacted.

What the bill would have done is worth knowing, because it is a map of the gaps that are still there. It would have extended the existing homeowner-policy protection to all residential property insurance — reaching condo associations, landlords and other residential owners who are not covered today. It would have required carriers to treat low-slope and steep-slope roofs differently. And it would have given owners of steep-slope roofs a right to an inspection before a carrier could demand replacement.

None of that happened. What governs is the older provision, and it is narrower than the failed bill's coverage suggests. That is a distinction worth confirming before you rely on a protection you do not actually have.

What Florida law actually gives you

The operative provision is section 627.7011 of the Florida Statutes, which has applied to policies issued or renewed on or after July 1, 2022 and was not changed this year. It does two things.

• Under 15 years: an insurer may not refuse to issue or refuse to renew a homeowner's policy on a residential structure with a roof less than 15 years old solely because of the age of the roof.
• 15 years and over: the insurer must let you have the roof inspected by an authorized inspector, at your own expense, before it can require replacement as a condition of issuing or renewing.
• If that inspection shows the roof has 5 or more years of useful life remaining, the insurer may not refuse to issue or renew solely because of roof age.
• An authorized inspector is one the insurer approves — a licensed home inspector, a certified building code inspector, a licensed general, building, residential or roofing contractor, a licensed engineer or architect, or another party the insurer recognises as qualified.

Read the limits before you rely on it

Three words in that statute do most of the work: "solely because." A carrier declining on the roof's condition, on claims history, or on its own appetite for your county is doing something the provision does not reach. It also applies to homeowner's policies on residential structures, which is exactly the gap HB 815 was written to close and did not.

The inspection route has practical limits too. You pay for it, and it only counts if the inspector is one your carrier accepts. Booking a roofer without checking that first is a common way to spend the money and still be non-renewed.

Outside Florida there is no statute, only appetite

Most states have nothing equivalent. In the high hail and hurricane exposure markets — Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado and Louisiana alongside Florida — it has become common for carriers to decline new policies on roofs older than 15 or 20 years, and to non-renew existing policies when a roof crosses that line. That is underwriting, not law. It varies by carrier, by county, and it can change between the day you go under contract and the day you close.

The quieter change is the coverage form rather than the refusal. An older roof is increasingly written at actual cash value instead of replacement cost, which means depreciation comes off any future roof claim. A policy you can bind is not the same as a policy that will pay to replace the roof. Read which one you have been quoted before you treat the insurance question as settled.

What to do with a roof finding inside your option period

The single reordering that matters is getting the insurance answer before the repair negotiation, not after it. What you should ask a seller for depends entirely on whether the roof is a future expense or a condition of closing, and only a carrier can tell you which.

• Get the roof's actual installation date from permit records or the seller's disclosure, not the inspector's visual estimate. Underwriting runs on the date.
• Quote more than one carrier, and ask each whether the roof is written at replacement cost or actual cash value.
• Where the report recommends evaluation, book a licensed roofer for a written opinion on remaining service life. In Florida, confirm first that the carrier accepts that inspector — the statute only turns on an inspection by an authorized one.
• If the roof really is at the end of its life, ask for a credit rather than a repair. You pick the contractor, and you keep the recourse on work you will be insuring for the next twenty years.

What the numbers look like

Our catalog prices roof work as national planning corridors before any state cost index: roof repair runs roughly $400–2,500, flashing and penetration sealing $300–1,400, roof structure or decking repair $1,000–6,000, and a full tear-off and replacement $9,000–30,000.

That last corridor is wide and marked low confidence on purpose. Square footage, pitch, layer count and material move it more than anything a visual inspection establishes, and a midpoint of a range that wide describes no real house. It is a planning number for deciding what to ask for, never a quote. Where scope genuinely cannot be read from a report at all — foundations, retaining walls, sewer lines, remediation — we decline to attach a number rather than invent one.