The wind mitigation inspection

The seven sections of form OIR-B1-1802

Every wind mitigation inspection in Florida ends up on the same document: the Uniform Mitigation Verification Inspection Form, OIR-B1-1802, adopted by rule and published by the Office of Insurance Regulation. It is four pages and seven questions, and the answers are what your carrier prices against.

Two structural facts about the form are worth more than the details. First, the weakest link governs: deck attachment, roof-to-wall and opening protection are all scored on the worst example the inspector finds, so fixing three of four elevations buys nothing. Second, the form is revised. The Office of Insurance Regulation put a new version into effect on April 1, 2026, so option lettering and technical thresholds should be read off the current form rather than an older report.

How the report turns into a discount

The credits are not a courtesy. Fla. Stat. 627.0629 requires residential property rate filings to include actuarially reasonable discounts, credits, or other rate differentials for fixtures and construction techniques demonstrated to reduce windstorm loss, and it names the categories: wind uplift prevention, roof strength, roof covering performance, roof-to-wall strength, wall-to-floor-to-foundation strength, opening protection, and window, door and skylight strength. Line those up against the seven form sections and the mapping is obvious, because the form was built to feed the statute.

Fla. Stat. 627.711 handles disclosure. Insurers must clearly notify the policyholder of the availability and the range of each premium discount at issuance and at every renewal, and must accept a form signed by an authorized inspector: a licensed home inspector with at least three hours of hurricane mitigation training, a certified building code inspector, a licensed general, building or residential contractor, a licensed professional engineer, a licensed professional architect, or anyone else the insurer recognizes as qualified. Since October 1, 2023, 627.0629 also requires carriers to publish their mitigation discount information on the website, reachable from the home page or the main property-policyholder page.

If you want to see the range before you call your agent, the Office of Insurance Regulation publishes the wind premium credit ranges for existing construction on forms OIR-B1-1699 and OIR-B1-1700, linked from its wind mitigation resources page ↗. The report is good for up to five years absent a material change to the structure, so file it, and redo it the day you reroof or add impact glass.

Getting the inspection without paying for it

My Safe Florida Home provides the inspection free, with no obligation to take a grant afterward. The qualifying test is short: a single-family unit on its own parcel, site-built and owner-occupied, with a homestead exemption granted under chapter 196. Condos, co-ops, multi-family, mobile and manufactured homes, retirement homes, second homes and rentals are excluded.

You do not get to pick the inspector. The program assigns one it contracts with, and Fla. Stat. 215.5586 sets the bar for who that can be: a licensed building code inspector, a licensed general, building or residential contractor, a licensed professional engineer or architect, or a licensed home inspector with at least three hours of hurricane mitigation training, all subject to background screening. The report you get back has to identify the recommended improvements, give cost estimate ranges, and state the estimated insurance premium discounts.

Send it to your agent the week it arrives, whether or not you ever build anything. Homes routinely already have features they are not being credited for, and a report that only sits in the portal earns nothing. If the recommendations are worth acting on, the money side is on the grant program page, and the rest of the pre-storm file is in before the storm.

Keep the report with your claim file

Here is the part the discount conversation misses. The most common way a hurricane roof claim dies is the wear-and-tear argument: the carrier agrees the roof is damaged and then says the damage is old, the product of age and deferred maintenance rather than this storm. That argument wins so often because it is usually uncontested. The adjuster arrives after the loss, and the only account of what the roof looked like beforehand is the homeowner insisting it was fine.

A wind mitigation report is the cheapest counterweight available. It is dated, photographed, third-party documentation of the roof covering, the deck attachment, the roof-to-wall connections and the opening protection, produced before the loss by an inspector with no stake in the claim, on the state's own form, which requires at least one photograph to validate each attribute marked in questions 3 through 7.

Be precise about what it does. It does not prove the storm caused your damage, and any page that tells you otherwise is selling something. What it does is remove the carrier's free assumption about pre-loss condition and push the fight back onto causation, where photographs, weather data and repair evidence tend to favor the policyholder. Paired with your own dated photographs it is a genuinely strong record.

So keep the initial report, keep the final report if you did the work, and keep the invoice. Store them with the policy and the photo set, not in the portal. Then read wear and tear vs. wind damage for how the argument actually runs, and the denial documents for what carriers write when they run it. Before you assume a claim is worth filing at all, the hurricane deductible calculator tells you what comes out of your pocket first.

Inspection questions, answered