For years the assignment of benefits agreement was the standard instrument of insurance-funded roofing in Florida: the homeowner signed over their post-loss rights, the contractor dealt with the carrier directly, and the contractor got paid without the homeowner in the middle. That instrument no longer exists for Florida property insurance. Not narrowed, not conditioned — prohibited. Contractors still working from a 2019 or 2021 understanding of the law are using a playbook that the legislature retired, and the paperwork in a lot of trucks has not caught up.
1. What the Law Actually Did
Florida's reform arrived in stages. HB 7065 in 2019 imposed conditions on AOB agreements and changed the attorney-fee dynamics around them. SB 76 in 2021 tightened things further, including notice requirements and limits on contractor solicitation. Both of those were restrictions — the instrument survived, with conditions.
SB 2-A, passed in the December 2022 special session and signed on 16 December 2022, was different in kind. It prohibits the assignment, in whole or in part, of any post-loss insurance benefit under any residential property insurance policy, and under any commercial property insurance policy issued on or after 1 January 2023. It also eliminated the one-way attorney-fee provisions that made AOB litigation economically attractive in the first place.
The distinction matters for how you talk to customers. Saying AOB is restricted in Florida is out of date. For the policies most roofers encounter, it is not available.
2. Which Policies It Reaches, and Which It Does Not
The prohibition applies to residential property insurance policies, and to commercial residential and commercial property policies issued on or after 1 January 2023. Because policies issued before the effective dates were not retroactively rewritten, a small tail of older paper existed for a period after the law passed. In 2026, with standard annual policy terms, that tail has effectively run out for ordinary residential work.
It is also worth being precise about what an assignment is. The prohibition is on assigning post-loss benefits — the right to receive the insurer's payment. It is not a prohibition on being paid from insurance proceeds, and it is not a prohibition on helping a customer document a claim.
If you are unsure which category a specific arrangement falls into, that is a question for a Florida attorney rather than for a broker or a blog. The penalty for guessing wrong is that your route to payment is unenforceable.
3. How Roofers Are Getting Paid Now
The dominant model is straightforward and older than AOB: contract directly with the property owner, and let the owner collect from their carrier. Your contract is with the homeowner, your invoice goes to the homeowner, and the insurance settlement is the homeowner's means of paying it. That is an ordinary commercial relationship and it is unaffected by the assignment prohibition.
A direction to pay is the common companion. It is an instruction from the insured to the carrier to include the contractor on payment, which is not the same as transferring the insured's rights. Whether a particular form is a direction to pay or a de facto assignment is a legal question about that specific wording, so use documents drafted for the current statute rather than a template that predates it.
The practical consequence is that the homeowner is back in the middle of the transaction. Payment timing depends on their carrier and their mortgage company, and mortgagee endorsement on a settlement cheque is a routine delay nobody warns first-time storm contractors about. Price your terms for that reality.
4. What Changes About Your Own Risk
When you held an assignment, you carried the fight with the carrier. Without one, you carry credit risk on the homeowner instead. Those are different exposures and they call for different controls: deposit structure, progress payments, and clear written scope so the customer is not arguing about the invoice while waiting on their insurer.
Your contract documents deserve a review for the same reason. Any agreement drafted before December 2022 that contemplates an assignment of benefits should be replaced rather than amended in the margin, and any marketing that offers to handle the claim for the customer should be read against the current solicitation rules.
None of this touches your liability insurance. What it touches is how you get paid and what you promise in writing — which is why it belongs in a conversation with a Florida construction attorney and your own broker, in that order.
5. Why the Legislature Did It
Understanding the reasoning helps you predict where the rules go next. AOB began as a convenience: a homeowner with a flooded kitchen at midnight signs over their claim rights so the restoration company can start immediately without waiting for an adjuster. That is a genuinely useful arrangement and nobody set out to ban it.
What made it unsustainable in Florida was the interaction between assignment and the one-way attorney-fee rule. A contractor holding an assignment could sue the carrier, and if they recovered even slightly more than the carrier had offered, the carrier paid their legal fees. That combination made litigation the rational first step rather than the last one, and the volume of it fed into the rates every Florida property owner paid.
Roofing sat at the centre of the debate, fairly or not, because roof claims are frequent, weather-driven and highly visible. Contractors who behaved well were affected by the reform along with those who did not — which is the usual outcome when an instrument gets retired rather than policed.
6. Solicitation Rules Are the Other Half
Payment mechanics are only one part of what changed for storm contractors. Florida has also legislated on how roofing work may be solicited, including restrictions on prohibited advertising in relation to insurance claims and requirements about what a contractor may say about deductibles.
Offering to waive, absorb or rebate a customer's deductible is not a marketing tactic in Florida; it is treated as a serious compliance matter, and it is one of the fastest ways for a contractor to attract regulatory attention. The same is true of representations that a roof replacement will be free to the homeowner.
If your door-knocking scripts, flyers or paid ads were written before these changes, they need reading against the current rules rather than grandfathering. The exposure here is licensing and enforcement rather than insurance, which means your general liability policy is not the thing standing between you and the consequence.
7. Why This Matters Outside Florida Too
Florida is the extreme case, not a unique one. Several states have taken up AOB reform, contractor-solicitation rules and post-loss assignment limits in response to the same claims dynamics, and the direction of travel has been consistent. A roofer working across state lines cannot assume one state's answer applies next door.
The operating habit worth building is to check the current statute in each state you work, in the year you are working there, rather than relying on what was true when you learned the trade. Storm work in particular pulls contractors across borders quickly, and the rules on solicitation, contract cancellation windows and deductible handling all vary.
If you work multiple states, keep a one-page note per state with the current position and the date you checked it. It takes an hour a year and it is the difference between a compliance question and a compliance problem.
The same discipline applies to the documents themselves. Contract templates circulate between contractors, get copied from a friend in another state, and quietly carry that state's assumptions into yours. A Florida contract that references an assignment of benefits is not merely out of date — it points your payment route at an instrument the statute no longer recognises.
This article is general information for roofing contractors, not legal or coverage advice. Policy wording, statutes and rating rules vary by carrier and by state — read your own forms and talk through your programme with a broker who writes roofing. Get a quote.