The Florida Wind Mitigation Inspection, Explained (2026)

Last updated: July 13, 2026

If you own a home in Florida, there's a fair chance you're paying more for windstorm coverage than you have to. A wind mitigation inspection is how you find out. It's a short visit from a licensed inspector who looks at how your house is built to take a hurricane, writes it down on a state form, and hands you the paperwork your insurer needs to lower your bill.

That discount isn't a favor. Fla. Stat. 627.0629 requires insurers to give you a premium credit when your home has verified wind-resistant features (Florida OIR). The credit just doesn't happen on its own. Someone has to inspect the house and prove the features are there — and plenty of owners never claim the credit they're owed.

What a wind mitigation inspection is

Think of it as a report card for how your roof and openings handle wind. The inspector isn't checking for leaks or code violations. They're documenting specific features — the shape of the roof, the nails holding the deck down, the straps tying the roof to the walls — that make a house less likely to come apart in a storm. Each feature that checks out earns a credit against the windstorm part of your premium.

The visit is quick. An inspector usually needs access to the attic to photograph the roof deck and the roof-to-wall connections, plus a walk around the outside. Newer homes tend to score well because they were built to a stricter code. Older homes are the wild card, and they're the ones most likely to be paying for features they can't see and don't get credit for.

One form: the OIR-B1-1802

Every wind mitigation inspection in Florida runs on a single document: the OIR-B1-1802, or Uniform Mitigation Verification Inspection Form (Florida OIR). Same form statewide, whether your house is in Miami or Marion County. That's on purpose. It lets any insurer read any inspection the same way.

One thing to watch this year: the state revised the form. The new version, Rev. 04/26, becomes mandatory on April 1, 2026. If you're booking an inspection around that date, ask whether the inspector is using the current form, because an insurer can bounce an outdated one and make you start over.

The features the inspector scores

Here's what actually earns you money on that form. Some of it you can change; a lot of it is baked into how your house was built.

A few of these lines are just about the roof itself and the paper trail behind it:

• Start with the roof covering. The inspector records what it's made of and its permit date.
• The deck underneath counts too, and here the fastener does the talking: nails hold plywood down better than staples. Plenty of older Florida homes were stapled, which is one reason a re-roof so often bumps the score.
• Roof shape is worth real money, and it's the one line you're either born with or you aren't. A hip roof — the kind that slopes down on all four sides — sheds wind better than a gable with its flat triangular ends, and it scores that way.
• Then there's secondary water resistance, a peel-and-stick underlayment sealed under the covering. If the shingles or tiles blow off, it stops water from pouring straight into the house, and it earns its own credit.

Roof-to-wall attachment

This line grades how the roof structure is tied to the walls, and the scale runs from weakest to strongest — toe-nails, then clips, then single wraps, then double wraps. A double wrap is a metal strap that loops over the truss and nails into the wall, and it earns the biggest credit of the four. It's also the connection a routine re-roof leaves exactly as it was, so a lot of homes never climb this scale without a separate structural upgrade.

Opening protection

Your windows, doors, garage door, and skylights all live on this line, along with how they're guarded. Impact-rated glass or shutters earn the credit.

What it's actually worth

It varies. Anyone quoting you an exact dollar figure sight unseen is guessing. Agents and insurers commonly report savings in the range of $100 to $600 a year, and some homes cut 30 to 40 percent off the windstorm portion of their premium (Greene Insurance). Those are secondary figures from the industry, not a single official state number, so read them as a range and expect your own result to land somewhere inside it.

The credit isn't forever, either. It usually lasts about five years, and then you re-inspect and re-submit the form to keep it (Greene Insurance). Where you live moves the number too, since a windstorm premium in coastal Miami starts from a very different place than one in inland Ocala.

How a new roof earns most of these credits

This is where the inspection and a roof replacement meet. A modern, code-compliant re-roof builds several credit-earning features in automatically. You get a nailed deck instead of a stapled one, and you get secondary water resistance under the new covering. Both show up on the form as credits without you asking for them.

There's one feature a re-roof usually doesn't touch: the roof-to-wall straps. Those connections are structural hardware inside the walls, so a normal tear-off and re-cover leaves them as they were. That's worth knowing before you assume a new roof fixes everything on the form. If you're weighing a replacement anyway — say in Cape Coral or Fort Myers, where Hurricane Ian aged a lot of roofs early — the smart move is to book the wind mitigation inspection right after the job. That way the new deck and SWR get counted while everything is fresh and documented.

Help paying for it: My Safe Florida Home

Cost is the reason a lot of owners skip the upgrades that would score highest. The state has a program for that. My Safe Florida Home received a $280 million appropriation in 2025 to help homeowners pay for wind mitigation inspections and qualifying upgrades through grants (Fuller Insurance). It's worth checking whether the program is accepting applications before you pay out of pocket. Availability and the exact terms change with each round of funding, so confirm the current rules directly with the program.

How to book an inspection

The process is simpler than the payoff makes it sound. Hire a licensed inspector who's qualified under Florida law to complete the OIR-B1-1802 — your insurance agent can confirm whose signature they accept. They'll photograph the roof deck, the roof-to-wall connections, and your openings, then fill out the form. You send the completed form to your insurance agent, who applies the credits at your next renewal.

A few things keep it clean. Use an inspector who does wind mitigation regularly, since the roof-to-wall and SWR calls are where inexperienced inspectors leave money on the table. Keep a copy of the signed form for your own records. And if you're near the April 1, 2026 cutoff, double-check the form version. This guide isn't legal or insurance advice, so run the specifics past your agent. If you're in Port St. Lucie or anywhere else on the coast, your agent can tell you which credits move your particular policy the most.

Wind mitigation inspection FAQ