Georgia elected a new insurance commissioner who campaigned on freezing rates, and Florida elected a governor who says a Cat Fund change will lower premiums. Your clients heard both. Here is what you can say that will still be true in six months.
Tuesday's results in Georgia and Florida came with insurance promises attached. Georgia voters replaced incumbent insurance commissioner John King with Keisha Sean Waites, who campaigned on holding insurers accountable, barring ZIP codes and credit scores from rate-setting, and what Insurance Journal described as a pledge to "effectively freeze some auto and homeowners' insurance rates." Florida voters sent Byron Donalds to the governor's office after a campaign in which he said ending the Florida Hurricane Catastrophe Fund's rapid cash buildup factor would "automatically begin to lower premiums."
If you write personal lines in either state, you already know what happens next. A client sees a headline, remembers the renewal that went up last spring, and calls to ask when their rate is coming down. That call is a chance to be the one person in their life who explains how this actually works. It is also a chance to lose credibility if you repeat a campaign promise as if it were a filing.
Here is what the pledges are, what each office can actually do, and how to answer the question without promising anything you cannot deliver.
Georgia: What a Commissioner Can and Cannot Freeze
Waites takes office in January. Georgia's rate law, O.C.G.A. 33-9-21, is a file-and-use system for homeowners and for most private passenger auto. Insurers file rates and can use them, subject to the commissioner disapproving them as excessive, inadequate, or unfairly discriminatory. Only minimum-limits auto runs through prior approval. That matters because a freeze in a file-and-use state is not a switch the commissioner flips. In practice it means the office reviews filings more aggressively and challenges the ones it considers unjustified, which is how Waites herself described the health-side version of the plan.
The ZIP code and credit score ban is a legislative item, and Waites has said so. In a debate she described it as working with her former colleagues in the General Assembly. A bill to move all private passenger auto to prior approval, HB 568, has already been introduced. So the honest timeline for a client is this: a new commissioner in January, a legislative session after that, and any rating-factor change applying to filings made after a law passes. Nothing about the policy renewing in February is affected by Tuesday's vote.
There is a second point worth making carefully. Removing credit and ZIP code from rating does not lower the total premium an insurer needs to collect. It redistributes it. Some of your clients would pay less under that change and some would pay more, and you cannot tell which from the headline. The catastrophe losses pushing up Georgia homeowners rates, which analysts covering the race pointed out are the real driver, do not go away when a rating factor does.
Florida: The 25 Percent That Is Not 25 Percent of the Bill
Donalds won by a narrow margin, 50.02 percent to 49 percent according to Insurance Journal, and his insurance platform has two visible pieces: an insurer scorecard that would publish claim payment speed and approval rates, and ending the rapid cash buildup factor in the Florida Hurricane Catastrophe Fund.
The buildup factor is a 25 percent charge on top of the premium carriers pay the Cat Fund for reinsurance. It was added after the 2004 and 2005 storm seasons and made permanent in 2008. It is a charge on the reinsurance layer, not on your client's homeowners premium. When the factor was briefly eliminated in 2007, the Office of Insurance Regulation calculated the presumed savings at 4.4 percent of the hurricane portion of rates. That is a real number, and it is a long way from the 20 to 25 percent premium reduction Donalds described at a roundtable in Stuart when he combined the Cat Fund change with permitting reform.
The Cat Fund itself has pushed back. A 2025 paper the fund published says eliminating the buildup factor "will increase the FHCF's reliance on debt by reducing the ability of the FHCF to pay losses out of its cash balance." Whether that tradeoff is worth it is a policy question for the legislature, which is the body that would have to change the statute. The governor can propose it. He cannot order it, and he cannot order a carrier to reprice a policy.
The Answer You Can Give Today
When the call comes, you need one sentence that is accurate and one sentence that is useful. The accurate sentence: the people elected on Tuesday have proposed changes that would need the legislature to act, and nothing has changed in the rates carriers have on file right now. The useful sentence: here is what we can look at on your policy today, and I will tell you when any of this becomes real.
Then actually do the review. The things that move a Florida or Georgia premium this renewal cycle are the same things that moved it last cycle. Roof age and condition. Wind mitigation credits that were never documented. Deductible structure. Whether the client is still with the carrier that fit them three years ago. In Florida, the 2022 reforms have already produced rate decreases from some carriers, and a client who has not been remarketed since then may be leaving money on the table regardless of what happens in Tallahassee next year.
Keep a short note in each client's file about what they asked and what you told them. When a bill actually moves, you can go back to the people who called and tell them first. That is the version of this story where the headline works in your favor.
What to Watch
In Georgia, watch for the commissioner's first rate filing disapprovals after January and for movement on HB 568 or a successor bill on rating factors. If a ban on credit and ZIP code passes, pull a sample of your book and estimate who moves up and who moves down before clients ask.
In Florida, watch for a Cat Fund bill and for the fund's own response to it. Any savings would show up first in carrier reinsurance costs and only later, if at all, in filed rates. Watch also for the scorecard proposal, because a public ranking of claim payment speed changes which carriers your clients ask about by name.
Both states just told their insurance markets that affordability is now a political issue with a face attached. That raises the volume on every renewal conversation you have for the next year. The agents who come out ahead are the ones who sound like they understand the mechanism, not the slogan.