A deductible is the part you pay before your insurance pays. A single car policy can carry two or three of them. A Florida home policy usually carries at least two. And they are not all measured the same way: some are dollar amounts, some are percentages, and one kind is measured in days.
Plain-English guide · Se habla español · Serving all of Florida from Lake Worth Beach
Reviewed August 2026 · Roberto Ramos Jr., Licensed 2-20 P&C Agent · FL License #P111106 · NPN 9567168
Agency: A & J Insurance Services · FL License #L051810 · NPN 9894692 · Serving all of Florida since 2007
Who this is for. This page is for people shopping for coverage, or trying to understand the coverage they already have. If you are in the middle of a claim, you need to speak with a licensed attorney or your claims adjuster, because this page is not designed to walk you through the claims process.
A deductible is the amount you pay out of your own pocket on a claim before your insurance pays anything. If your deductible is $1,000 and the repair is $4,000, you pay the first $1,000 and the policy considers the rest.
Why it exists at all, since it only ever costs you money: the deductible is the dial that sets your price. You agree to handle the small stuff yourself, and in exchange the policy costs less than it would if the company had to process every scratch and every dripping pipe. You are not buying a worse policy when you take a higher deductible. You are buying a different split of the same risk.
That is the whole idea, and it is where most explanations stop. Everything useful comes after it.
Here is what actually trips people up. The word “deductible” gets used as though it names one number on one policy. It does not. It names a mechanism that shows up on every policy you own, takes different shapes on each one, and resets on different clocks. Somebody who tells you “my deductible is $1,000” is usually telling you about one of several.
This is the part worth carrying with you, because once you see it you will read every policy differently.
$500, $1,000, $2,500. You know exactly what it is before anything happens, and it is the shape sitting on your auto policy and on the everyday part of your home policy.
Not of the damage. Of the amount your property is insured for. This is the shape that can catch you out, because a percentage does not look like money until you do the multiplication. In Florida it is standard on hurricane coverage, and it is allowed on sinkhole coverage too.
On some business coverages, what you "pay" first is not money. It is a stretch of hours or days before the coverage starts paying at all, sometimes called a waiting period.
Why the shape matters more than the number. A $1,000 flat deductible is $1,000 on a small claim and $1,000 on a catastrophic one. A percentage deductible does not shrink when the damage is small, and it grows every time the amount your property is insured for goes up. Two policies can look similar on a quote screen and behave nothing alike when something happens.
⭐ You can do that multiplication on your own numbers, further down this page, in the calculator.
On most policies, the deductible applies to each claim separately. Two unrelated events means two deductibles, even in the same month. That is the default and it is what people expect.
Florida’s hurricane deductible is the exception, and it works in your favor. Section 627.701(5)(a) says it “shall apply on an annual basis to all covered hurricane losses that occur during the calendar year for losses that are covered under one or more policies issued by the same insurer or an insurer in the same insurer group.”
You meet it once per year, not once per hurricane. In a season with two or three landfalls, that difference is enormous.
The statute lets your insurer require you to "report hurricane losses that are below the hurricane deductible or to maintain receipts or other records" in order to apply those losses to a later hurricane claim in the same year.
One correction, because the popular version of this online overshoots. A second storm in the same year is not free. The statute says the insurer may apply “the greater of the remaining amount of the hurricane deductible or the amount of the deductible that applies to perils other than a hurricane.” Better than starting over. Not zero.
Your auto policy does not have “a deductible.” It has one for comprehensive and a separate one for collision, and they are frequently different numbers. Collision pays when your car hits something, or flips. Comprehensive pays for most of the other ways a car gets damaged: theft, fire, a falling branch, an animal.
Each is its own coverage with its own deductible, and each incident is its own claim. Somebody ran into the edge of that while looking at old damage on a truck:
“I had several existing dents in my truck tailgate from towing a trailer, then my wife drove my truck and scraped a tree resulting in damage to three panels that will definitely necessitate a claim… can I get damage from the tailgate fixed at the same time as the damage that just occurred?”
That question feels reasonable and still gets a no, because the deductible attaches to the event rather than to the trip to the body shop. Old damage from a different cause is a different claim.
And this one, which feels genuinely unfair the first time:
“Someone swiped my car at a red light and drove off when it turned green today. And now I have to pay $500 for a hit and run when I’m the victim?? It’s absurd.”
They are not wrong to be annoyed, and in Florida the answer runs through more than one coverage. Your own collision coverage is what repairs the car, minus your deductible, because Florida’s uninsured motorist coverage pays for injuries to people rather than damage to a vehicle.
That is not a company being generous. It is section 627.7288, and it applies to every Florida policy with comprehensive coverage. If you carry comprehensive and you have a cracked windshield, the deductible is not what is stopping you.
Your PIP deductible, which behaves differently again. Florida also lets you put a deductible on Personal Injury Protection, the injury coverage the state requires you to carry. Section 627.739 offers $250, $500, and $1,000, and it says the deductible “must be applied to 100 percent of the expenses and losses.”
That last part is the catch. PIP pays 80 percent of medical bills up to a $10,000 total, and the deductible comes off the full bill first rather than off the insurer’s share. It bites harder than you might expect.
There is also an election inside it that is easy to misread. The statute lets you apply the deductible to yourself alone, or to yourself and dependent relatives living in your household, and you may not apply it to anyone else covered by the policy. Somebody untangling that put it exactly right: “It doesn’t sound like it is asking whether you have resident relatives, but rather whether you want the deductible to apply to them.” The question is not who lives with you. It is who has to clear the deductible before the coverage starts paying. More on the coverage itself in the Florida PIP guide.
A Florida homeowners policy carries at least two deductibles, and they can be wildly different sizes. All other perils is a flat dollar amount. This is the one that applies to a kitchen fire, a burst pipe, a break-in. It is the number people remember. Hurricane is usually a percentage of your dwelling limit, which is the amount your home is insured to rebuild for. This is the one people do not remember.
A Florida homeowner described both of theirs in one sentence, off the declarations page that comes with every policy:
“My insurance deductible was 2500 for windstorm, 12000 for hurricane.”
One person, one policy, two numbers, a difference of $9,500, and both were printed on the same page the whole time.
Your policy may carry more than those two. Florida separately allows a roof deductible (section 627.701(4)(e)) and a sinkhole deductible of 1, 2, 5, or 10 percent of your dwelling limit (section 627.706).
Florida law does not let your insurer leave that percentage as an abstraction. For a home policy carrying a separate hurricane deductible, section 627.701(4) requires the insurer to “compute and prominently display the actual dollar value of the hurricane deductible on the declarations page of the policy at issuance and, for renewal, on the renewal declarations page of the policy or on the premium renewal notice.”
The number is already printed. Go look at it. If you want to see the math behind it, or you want to know what a different percentage would come to before you choose one, work it out here.
Interactive · Percentage deductibles
Set your dwelling limit and the deductibles you carry. The panel works out what each percentage comes to in dollars, next to the flat one you already know.
This is the amount your home is insured to rebuild for, not what it would sell for. It is on your declarations page.
The flat one. It applies to a kitchen fire, a burst pipe, a break-in.
Section 627.701 requires your insurer to offer this set on a personal lines residential policy. Homes of higher value can have a different set of choices.
Section 627.706 sets these four. It runs on the same dwelling limit.
Your hurricane deductible is twenty times your all other perils deductible. Same policy, and both are printed on the same declarations page.
You are not supposed to have to do this yourself. Section 627.701(4) requires your insurer to compute the actual dollar value of your hurricane deductible and print it on your declarations page. This shows you the math behind it. Your declarations page is the authority on your policy.
Move the dwelling limit and watch the hurricane figure move with it. If your policy carries an inflation guard, that limit rises on its own at renewal. The percentage does not change. The number it produces does.
What that panel is showing you is a size difference, not a bill. You do not pay every deductible on the list. You pay the one that matches what happened, and only when you have a claim. The reason to see them together is that the flat one is the number you are most likely to have memorized, and it may not be the biggest one you are carrying.
And it has probably changed since you chose it. If your policy carries an inflation guard, your dwelling limit rises each year to keep pace with construction costs. The percentage did not change. The number it produces did. Section 627.701(4)(c) requires your insurer to warn you about exactly that.
There is considerably more to the hurricane deductible than fits here, including the warnings Florida forces onto the policy in 18-point type and the sentence the state makes you write by hand if you want one above 10 percent. That gets its own guide.
Flood is not part of your homeowners policy, and your hurricane deductible does not apply to it. Flood coverage is written as its own policy, and it typically carries two deductibles rather than one: one for the building and a separate one for your contents. They are normally written as flat dollar amounts rather than percentages.
Why that matters after a storm. Wind damage and flood damage are handled under two different policies with two different deductibles, which is why a single hurricane can produce two claims and two out-of-pocket amounts. If you carry both, knowing which is which before the storm is worth the five minutes.
I am describing the structure here rather than quoting specific dollar ranges, because those are set by the flood program and change. Your own flood declarations page is the authority on yours.
This surprises business owners, and it is the cleanest way to understand the whole topic. Liability coverage is the kind that pays other people when your business is responsible for hurting them or their property.
I read the standard commercial general liability coverage form for this page. It contains no deductible provision at all. That coverage is normally written so the insurer pays from the first dollar and defends you on top of the limit.
So when a business liability policy does have a deductible, it was added deliberately, by endorsement. And because it was added rather than built in, the endorsement’s own wording decides how it behaves, which is why you cannot answer the question generically.
A self-insured retention is not the same thing as a deductible, even though they look alike on a summary. They differ in who handles the claim and in how the money interacts with your limit. If you are looking at a business policy with either one, that is a specific question about your specific document, and it is worth asking out loud rather than assuming.
Property and business income coverages behave differently again, and business income is where the time deductible shows up: a waiting period measured in hours before the coverage begins.
Ask this online and you will get two confident, opposite answers. Both are true, of different documents.
Your auto physical damage coverage pays for the loss "minus the deductible shown in the Declarations." Your limit is untouched. The same logic runs through homeowners coverage.
A deductible endorsement can be written so the deductible sits inside the limit and reduces what is available for the claim. That is a real arrangement, and it is what the other half of the internet is describing.
Here is how to tell which one you are holding, which is the part the flat answers leave out: it depends on whether the deductible is subtracted from the loss or applied against the limit, and that is stated in your policy or its endorsement rather than derivable from the word itself.
On a personal auto or homeowners policy you can stop worrying about this. On a business policy, ask. And if you are not sure what you are reading, send it to me and I will read it with you.
The only way to know which one you are looking at is to compare them side by side. I would rather tell you that than sell you a rule.
If you are carrying a higher deductible because somebody once told you it saves money, this next part is worth two minutes. Here is a person who did the checking:
“I’ve apparently been at $1000 deductibles on both collision and comprehensive, because I was always taught that ‘higher saves money in premiums’ (which is true). However in playing around with the new policy, I’m surprised that some of the variances are quite small.”
They were not wrong about the principle. They were wrong about the size of it on their own policy, and they only found that out by putting the two options next to each other.
And there is a real reason to take the higher one, which deserves to be said plainly rather than treated as a mistake:
“Usually a higher one means my monthly will be lower, and I’m lower-mid class so the extra breathing room month to month makes a big difference for me.”
That is not a bad reason. That is a budget, and it belongs in the decision rather than argued away. The honest question is not “high or low.” It is whether the money you free up each month is worth the number you would have to produce on one bad day, and whether you could produce it at all.
One thing worth knowing before you decide, because it explains a nudge you may have felt. Section 627.701(6) states that it is “the intent of the Legislature to encourage the use of higher hurricane deductibles as a means of increasing the effective capacity of the hurricane insurance market in this state.” The state has its own reason to want you carrying more of the risk. That does not make it wrong for you. It does mean you should decide on your numbers rather than on the nudge.
Your declarations page is the summary sheet at the front of each policy, listing every coverage and every deductible you have. It arrives with every renewal and it is in your insurer’s app or online account. Do this once, for each policy, and write the answers down somewhere you will find them.
| Policy | What to look for |
|---|---|
| Auto | Your comprehensive deductible and your collision deductible, separately. Then your PIP deductible if you elected one |
| Homeowners | All other perils, hurricane (a percentage and a dollar figure), plus roof and sinkhole if you carry them. And your dwelling limit, because the percentages are calculated on it |
| Flood | The building deductible and the contents deductible, separately |
| Business | Whether there is a deductible at all, and if so, which coverage it attaches to |
Somebody described what it feels like to find all this out at the wrong moment:
“They didn’t mention a separate hurricane deductible but I guess I should have read through better.”
I want to take that apart, because they are being too hard on themselves. A hurricane deductible is a percentage buried in a document that arrives once a year. Not knowing it is not a character flaw, and it takes about two minutes to fix. That is the entire purpose of this page.
If you have read this far you probably want to know what your actual numbers are, on all of them. That takes a few minutes and it does not cost anything. Find your declarations pages, take photos, and email them to me. I will tell you every deductible you are carrying across every policy, what any percentage comes to in dollars, and whether the whole set still makes sense next to what you are trying to protect.
If it is all where it should be, I will tell you that and you can get on with your day.
Roberto Ramos Jr. · A & J Insurance Services · 807 Lucerne Ave. East Unit, Lake Worth Beach, FL 33460 · Mon–Fri 9am–6pm · Sat 10am–4pm EST
This guide applies statewide. The statutes on this page work the same anywhere in Florida, and the parts that come from a policy form are the parts your own policy controls, wherever you live. Policy language varies between companies, which is why this page keeps pointing you back to your own declarations page.
Your next question: Personal Injury Protection (PIP) · Property Damage Liability (PDL) · Bodily Injury Liability · All guides
A & J Insurance Services, Inc.
807 Lucerne Ave. East Unit,
Lake Worth Beach, FL 33460
(561) 586-4955
Mon–Fri 9am–6pm · Sat 10am–4pm EST
Roberto Ramos Jr. · Licensed 2-20 Property & Casualty Agent · FL License #P111106 · NPN 9567168
Agency FL License #L051810 · NPN 9894692 · Se habla español
Written by Roberto Ramos Jr., Licensed Florida 2-20 Property & Casualty Insurance Agent (License #P111106), serving Palm Beach County since 2007. A & J Insurance Services, agency license L051810. Verify the license with the state at the Florida DFS licensee search.
Sources. Florida Statute 627.701, read in full: the requirement that the hurricane deductible’s actual dollar value be printed on the declarations page, the calendar-year application, the reporting and carryover rule, the inflation guard notice, the separate roof deductible requirements, and the stated legislative intent to encourage higher hurricane deductibles. Florida Statute 627.7288: the rule that comprehensive deductible provisions do not apply to windshield damage. Florida Statute 627.739: the $250, $500 and $1,000 PIP deductibles, the rule that the deductible applies to 100 percent of expenses, and the election covering the named insured alone or the named insured and dependent relatives in the household. Florida Statute 627.706: the 1, 2, 5 and 10 percent sinkhole deductible amounts. Florida Statute 627.736: the $10,000 personal injury protection limit and the 80 percent medical benefit that a PIP deductible sits in front of.
This page is provided for informational and educational purposes only and reflects Florida insurance standards as of the review date. Roberto Ramos Jr., Florida Licensed 2-20 Property & Casualty Insurance Agent, and A & J Insurance Services provide insurance information and insurance-related services only; we do not provide legal, tax, or financial planning advice. For advice about accident liability, lawsuits, settlements, or any legal matter, consult a licensed attorney. Coverage terms, availability, and requirements may vary by insurer, policy language, and individual circumstances.
Reviewed August 2026 against the Florida Statutes. Next review: after the 2027 legislative session.
