Florida insurance claims due to Hurricane Milton jump by $200M

Image via AP.

Hurricane season may be officially over, but the number of insurance claims attributed to damage caused by Hurricanes Helene and Milton this year in Florida climbed by about $200 million since the last calculation in mid-November.

The Florida Office of Insurance Regulation (OIR) estimates the total cost of insurance claims by Floridians due to Helene, which hit the Big Bend area on Sept. 26, and Milton, which slammed Florida’s Gulf Coast on Oct. 9 before plowing through the peninsula and exiting into the Atlantic Ocean, now amounts to $5.233 billion. That’s up from the Nov. 18 figure of $5.033 billion.

The latest figures posted by the OIR just before Thanksgiving show only an increase in the Milton estimates. The Hurricane Helene figures were unchanged from the Nov. 18 posting on the agency’s Catastrophic Claims Data and Reporting website. So, the increase in the latest report was for Milton figures only, which now rack up to $3.334 billion, up from the Nov. 18 figure of $3.043 billion in claims. Helene’s estimated value in claims remains at $1.99 billion.

The number of residential property claims attributed to Milton has increased to 302,581 claims filed in Florida. That’s up from 285,311 reported Milton insurance claims on Nov. 18.

Of those total claims blamed on Milton, 241,909 are the state’s residential property damage insurance claims. Another 11,730 are commercial property insurance claims attributed to the mid-October storm.

The OIR uses the Insurance Regulation Filing System to compile estimates and dollar costs for lost property estimates.

Both storms took a toll on immediate employment figures. After Hurricane Helene, for the week ending Oct. 5, there was a huge spike in weekly first-time unemployment claims in the state, when that weekly figure jumped to more than 8,000, according to the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL). But that number returned to more normal figures for the following week ending Oct. 12. Then Milton hit, and new weekly unemployment numbers jumped to more than 10,000 for the week ending Oct. 19.

The storms did not impact the general monthly unemployment figures, as the October unemployment rate remained at 3.1% for the seventh month in a row, according to FloridaCommerce.