Your Panhandle client has seen three numbers for Hurricane Isaias — $1 to $2 billion, about $3 billion, $2.5 to $4.5 billion — and wants to know which one is theirs. None of them is. They are three different ledgers of the same storm, and the spread between them is not a flood argument. This is the meeting version: what each estimate counts, what each one leaves out, where the deductible actually bites on this footprint, and what AM Best’s “earnings event” does and does not promise about the January renewal.
The storm, in one paragraph
Isaias made landfall near Destin at 8:30 p.m. CDT on Friday, October 9, 2026, as a Category 2 hurricane — 105 mph maximum sustained winds, 971 mb, per the National Hurricane Center. It had been a major hurricane over the Gulf that morning (120 mph, 959 mb), and the Category 3 figures circulating in coverage are that offshore peak, not the landfall. The damage ran west of the landfall point: the National Weather Service’s highest gusts — 118 mph at Jay, 116 at Oriole Beach, 114 at Whiting Field — are all west of Destin, and Verisk puts the worst building damage in Santa Rosa and northeastern Escambia counties. The water split the other way: Panama City Beach, east of landfall, recorded 5.6 feet above mean higher high water, while Pensacola read 2.73 feet and several Mobile Bay gauges went negative — the strongest winds, on the western side, blew water away from the coast. It was also the season’s first hurricane — the latest first hurricane on record, per Moody’s RMS — and the first U.S. landfall since Milton in October 2024.
Three ledgers, not three opinions
Verisk, October 13: $1 billion to $2 billion. Onshore residential, commercial, and industrial property and automobiles — building, contents, and time-element coverages — for wind and privately insured storm surge. Read the exclusion list before quoting the range: loss-adjustment expense is out, spawned tornadoes are out, the National Flood Insurance Program is out, pleasure boats are out, precipitation-induced flooding is out (Verisk expects it to be insignificant), and storm-surge leakage paid on wind-only policies because of government intervention is out.
Karen Clark & Company, October 15: about $3 billion. A point estimate, not a range: privately insured wind and storm surge across residential, commercial, and industrial property, automobiles, and business interruption. NFIP is excluded, and per Artemis’s account of the report, boats and offshore property are excluded too.
Moody’s RMS, October 16: $2.5 billion to $4.5 billion, best estimate $3.5 billion. Wind, storm surge, and precipitation-induced flooding; property damage and business interruption across residential, commercial, industrial, automobile, and watercraft; post-event loss amplification included. Inside that range, Moody’s puts storm surge, inland flooding, and NFIP losses together at about $250 million.
That last figure is the reconciliation. The entire water-and-NFIP bucket Moody’s isolates is roughly $250 million — it cannot explain a gap of $1.5 billion or more between Verisk’s top and Moody’s midpoint. The gap lives in the wind: how much wind loss each model counts, whether loss-adjustment expense and tornadoes ride along, whether watercraft and loss amplification are in. All three include a business-interruption or time-element component, so “KCC is higher because only KCC counts BI” is wrong on Verisk’s own release. Do not average the three into a single “about $3 billion” — an average erases exactly the scope decisions your client needs to see. And none of them is Florida’s count: the Office of Insurance Regulation’s data-call filings were due October 13 and 15, and no public Isaias aggregate had been posted as of October 19. The eventual OIR number will be Florida-only and built on different lines; it will not match any of the three even if all four are competently built.
Where the client’s loss actually lands: the deductible
The early claims pattern on this footprint is a wind pattern landing under percentage deductibles. CBIZ’s Matt Mercier, whose brokerage handles condo associations near Pensacola, told Insurance Journal on October 13: “So much of what we have seen has been below the deductible.” The mechanics behind that sentence, for Florida residential coverage: the hurricane deductible is a percentage of the policy dwelling limit, not of the loss — the statutory menu is $500, 2, 5, and 10 percent, and the dollar amount must appear on the declarations page. It applies once per calendar year across the same insurer or group, not once per storm. Because Isaias is 2026’s first hurricane and Milton was a 2024 storm, there is no residual 2026 hurricane deductible to credit — a client’s below-deductible Isaias loss should still be reported, because the credit toward any later 2026 hurricane depends on the record. Two more rules clients get wrong: when a hurricane deductible applies, no other deductible under the policy may be applied to that loss; and Florida’s separate roof deductible cannot be applied to a hurricane roof loss, or to a tree fall that punctures the roof deck — the hurricane deductible is the one that applies, per section 627.701(10).
Commercial accounts split by type. A condominium association or apartment building on an admitted commercial-residential policy sits inside the statute: carriers must offer both an annual hurricane deductible and a per-hurricane one, up to 10 percent of insured value with a 3 percent option offered. A motel or a grocery store is generally commercial non-residential — its percentage deductible is form language, commonly a percentage of values at the location, sometimes split per unit of property, and a surplus-lines form does not have to follow the admitted menu at all. Read the form, not the statute, before the meeting.
Wind, flood, and the power question
Florida’s hurricane coverage definition (§627.4025) covers windstorm damage during a hurricane, including interior and contents damage from rain only if the wind first makes an opening — and it does not include flooding. FEMA’s line is the mirror: water entering from the ground up — surge, heavy rain, overflow — is NFIP flood; rain through a wind-damaged roof is the wind policy’s. On this storm the split is a map: a ground-floor contents claim at Panama City Beach belongs on the flood form behind that 5.6-foot gauge; a wind claim on a Milton motel whose roof covering is in the parking lot is the property form’s, in a county where the water gauges ran low. KCC’s narrative mentions “a peak storm surge of about 8 feet” — that figure is not the NOS or Weather Service gauge record (5.6 feet at Panama City Beach is the high gauge reading), and the Weather Service’s own surge assessment was still unfinished on October 13. Quote the gauges.
Power is its own conversation. Outages peaked at nearly 900,000 customers by Gallagher Re’s count, with some Panhandle counties losing power for a majority of customers. Florida’s Department of Financial Services states the commercial rule plainly: food spoilage from a storm power outage is not generally covered unless that coverage was purchased; business-interruption coverage is not required by Florida law and generally requires direct physical damage to insured property; a business that closed ahead of a storm that missed it generally has no business-income recovery. So the grocery that kept its roof and lost its cold cases for three days, and the motel that closed with its building intact, are endorsement questions — utility-service interruption and spoilage — not wind claims. Ask for the endorsement before you answer the client, not after.
The January quote: what “earnings event” commits to
AM Best’s October 15 commentary is titled “Hurricane Isaias Insured Losses Likely Limited to an Earnings Event.” Its substance: estimates in the low single-digit billions are not expected to deplete surplus in a way that alters capacity among Florida insurers, avoiding a squeeze on pricing — “or more specifically reinsurance capacity and pricing.” Gallagher Re’s October 14 commentary reaches the same expectation for the January 1, 2027 renewals, citing the loss size, the less-populated track, and record traditional and alternative capital. That is as far as the record goes: two published expectations, from a rating agency and a reinsurance broker, that this storm does not reprice Florida. The renewal has not happened. A broker who tells a client in October that January pricing is settled is selling the commentary as the result.
The Citizens footnote belongs in the same expectation-setting. Citizens held 8,882 wind policies with more than $3.2 billion of value across the ten Panhandle counties in the OIR’s July market data — and it is not the Panhandle market. The OIR tables omit carriers claiming trade-secret status; State Farm Florida, Universal, and Slide are absent from them, even though Universal alone described about 20,000 regional policies in the storm’s first week. Statewide, Citizens had shrunk to 266,231 policies by August 31 — about 2 percent of the residential market — with a 2026 reinsurance tower bought in June sized to a 1-in-360-year hurricane. Insurance Journal reported a Citizens spokesman counting 860 claims by October 15; the figure has not appeared on Citizens’ own site. Treat it as an early, attributed count, not a market total.
The through-line for the client meeting: this was a wind event priced by percentage deductibles, modeled three ways because the modelers count different things, in a market two credible voices expect to absorb it as an earnings event. The twin of this piece, at Restoration Intel, takes the same storm to the job site — treefall, roof pull-off, and the 25 percent rule as a scope document. For the coverage-mechanics shelf this desk keeps, see also FM Now Pays on the Trigger, Not the Loss — the parametric conversation is the one clients raise after a storm whose losses landed under their deductibles.
Sources: NHC Tropical Cyclone Update and Discussions 12–13, October 9, 2026; NWS Mobile Post Tropical Cyclone Report, October 13, 2026; Verisk, October 13, 2026; Karen Clark & Company via Artemis and Insurance Journal, October 15, 2026; Moody’s RMS Event Response, October 16, 2026; AM Best BestWire, October 15, 2026; Gallagher Re via Reinsurance News, October 15, 2026; Florida Statutes §§627.4025, 627.701; Florida DFS consumer and commercial guidance; Florida OIR data-call notice, October 12, 2026; Citizens Property Insurance releases, June 23 and August 31, 2026.