What are the best Fort Myers home insurance rates and companies?
It’s important to find out before you buy a new home. With so many different homeowners insurance providers, it can be difficult to find the most affordable rates.
Let us help you figure this out with our list of top 4 Florida home insurers in your area! Here is what we found:
How Much Is Homeowners Insurance in Fort Myers Florida?
The short answer is that Fort Myers homeowners insurance costs about $1,878 per year on average. On average, Floridians spend $2,426 annually on home insurance without a hurricane deductible and an additional $1,792 with a 2% hurricane deductible. The reason why the state average is higher than the average for Fort Myers, FL is that cities like Naples and Miami tend to have larger, more expensive houses on the coast.
Keep reading for the long answer.
How much should homeowners insurance cost per month?
Speaking in very, very broad terms, you can expect to pay about $44 to $67 per month per $100,000 of dwelling coverage for home insurance in Florida.
Your home insurance premium—which is often paid yearly—varies based on the amount of coverage that you have and certain aspects about your home’s age and construction.
These numbers are assuming that your house is newly constructed within the last 10 years or so and you don’t have anything that a home inspector will see as risky. Generally speaking, the riskier your situation is, the higher your insurance premium will be.
Since home insurance premiums tend to be paid on a yearly basis, let’s take our monthly payments and multiply them each by 12 for the 12 months in the year. This gives us $528 and $804 per year per $100,000 of dwelling coverage.
Let’s use a dwelling coverage of $250,000 as an example.
250,000 divided by 100,000 is 2.5 so:
- Lower range: $528 x 2.5 = $1,320
- Higher range: $804 x 2.5 = $2,010
For $250,000 of dwelling coverage, you should expect to pay around $1,320 to $2,010 per year for your home insurance. Of course, actual rates are going to vary, but that should give you a general idea of what to expect.
We have some real-life examples below of actual rates that we’ve quoted for home insurance in Fort Myers, so keep reading to see if any of these examples are similar to your house.
What Home Insurance Companies Have the Best Rates for Fort Myers?
As a licensed independent home insurance agent for the state of Florida, we can shop your home insurance with over a dozen different home insurance companies and we’ll get you the same rate as you would by going directly to the carrier, but with the added benefit of knowing which carrier has the best rate. In our experience, we’ll most likely recommend one of the following insurance carriers as they tend to have the lowest premiums for Fort Myers:
- Tower Hill
- Edison
- Florida Peninsula
- American Integrity
With that said, your home insurance premium is determined by many factors, so without getting a quote from a licensed insurance agent we can’t give you an exact answer in this article, but we can give you a ballpark figure of what to expect.
The most important home insurance factors include:
- Location, age, and size of the house
- Shape of the roof and attachment to the frame
- Foundation type (most houses in Fort Myers are concrete slab)
The following table shows our estimated home insurance premiums by our best home insurance carriers for houses in Fort Myers with a heated area of about 1870 square feet:
| Year Built | Lower End | Average | Higher End |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | $804 | $1249 | $1709 |
| 2006 | $1196 | $1902 | $2611 |
| 1995 | $1593 | $2284 | $2977 |
| 1985 | $1733 | $2419 | $3106 |
How We Arrived At These Home Insurance Rates.
Your heated area is the amount of space in your house that is air conditioned (usually excluding the garage, lanai, etc.) and is generally the main variable used to estimate the amount for Dwelling Coverage on your homeowners insurance policy. For Fort Myers, the cost to rebuild a house is about $175-$185 per square foot of heated area. The most common heated area for a house in Fort Myers is about 1800 square feet.
In this example, that would mean that we would expect the most common Dwelling Coverage amount in Fort Myers to be about $315,000 to $333,000. Keep in mind that you can insure the house for more or less than this amount, but if you mortgage your home, your mortgage lender will probably require a certain amount of Dwelling Coverage to satisfy the loan.
For the sake of making calculations easier, let’s just use $185 per square foot of heated area as the basis for future calculations. This way, you’ll probably overshoot your estimate by a little bit rather than underestimate it.
For houses in Fort Myers, our agents use the Lee County Property Appraiser’s website (leepa.org) to find the heated area of your Fort Myers home.
Also, the house-building years that we chose were the peak home-building years for Fort Myers, so there’s a good chance that your house was built during or close to one of these peak years. Fort Myers also has a lot of older houses that were built between 1910 and 1970, but we didn’t include those in this table because they vary wildly with how they’ve changed and been remodeled over time.
Insuring a house in Fort Myers that was built in 1925 is a whole different can of worms; trust us.
Fort Myers 2,000 sqft Homes with $370,000 Dwelling Coverage
For comparison, the following table is our estimated home insurance premiums by our best home insurance carriers for houses in Fort Myers with a heated area of about 2000 square feet and a Dwelling Coverage amount of $370,000:
| Year Built | Lower End | Average | Higher End |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | $854 | $1345 | $1795 |
| 2006 | $1292 | $2019 | $2747 |
| 1995 | $1754 | $2444 | $3135 |
| 1985 | $1848 | $2584 | $3319 |
Fort Myers 2,500 sqft Homes with $462,500 Dwelling Coverage
And for further comparison, the table below shows our best home insurance premiums in Fort Myers for houses about 2,500 square feet and a Dwelling Coverage amount of $462,500:
| Year Built | Lower End | Average | Higher End |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | $1036 | $1595 | $2153 |
| 2006 | $1543 | $2377 | $3212 |
| 1995 | $2145 | $2929 | $3714 |
| 1985 | $2261 | $3083 | $3906 |
Fort Myers 3,000 sqft Homes with $555,000 Dwelling Coverage
And finally, the table below shows our best home insurance premiums in Fort Myers for houses of about 3,000 square feet and a Dwelling Coverage amount of $555,000:
| Year Built | Lower End | Average | Higher End |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | $1236 | $1929 | $2622 |
| 2006 | $1796 | $2857 | $3917 |
| 1995 | $2551 | $3541 | $4530 |
| 1985 | $2720 | $3944 | $5167 |
One of the things that you may notice from these tables is that as the size and age of your house increase, you should expect your home insurance premium to increase. As your house ages and your home insurance premium increases, it’s always a good idea to have an independent insurance agent get competing quotes for you about once every year or two—and especially after a major weather event like a hurricane—because some insurance carriers favor certain types of houses over others.
Other Factors That Affect Your Home Insurance Premium
While these aren’t the main factors that affect your home insurance premiums, we’ll ask you about these lesser factors to determine your home insurance premiums which include things like:
- If you have storm panels or some kind of window protection
- Whether you have other structures like sheds or fences
- The quality of your interior (floor type, appliances, countertops, etc.)
- Whether your dog is classified as a “vicious breed”
All of this information will help you get an idea about how much your Fort Myers home insurance premium will be, but the only way to know for sure is to get an actual quote from a licensed Florida home insurance agent.
So, make sure to get a home insurance quote from our agency and compare your quote to multiple other agents. You can even contact us for a second opinion if you’ve received a quote from a different agent.
