My Safe Florida Home
A state programme offering a free wind mitigation inspection and matching grants. What it is, and what we will not claim about it.
What the programme is
My Safe Florida Home is run by the Florida Department of Financial Services. It offers two things: a free wind mitigation inspection of your home, and grants towards the improvements that inspection recommends.
The grant structure has been a match: state money alongside your own, with a higher share for lower income households. Eligibility has centred on site-built single family homes and townhouses that are your primary residence with a homestead exemption, and proof of active homeowners insurance.
What we are not going to tell you
Whether there is money in it right now. Funding for this programme is appropriated, it runs out, it reopens, and the reported amounts have contradicted each other between official documents. Applications are processed in queue order by category, and a backlog of homeowners with completed inspections waiting on grants has been reported.
Any contractor’s website telling you funds are available is telling you something they cannot know as of the day you are reading it. Check the status yourself at the Department of Financial Services, and treat a confident claim about funding as a reason to doubt the rest of the page.
What is worth doing regardless
The free wind mitigation inspection has value on its own, whatever the grant situation is. It tells you what your home is actually credited for, which is the same information that decides your insurance discount, and it costs you nothing.
If you are considering applying, the sequence matters: the inspection comes first, the recommendations come out of it, and the grant follows. Starting work before that sequence is complete is how people make themselves ineligible for money they would have qualified for.
Where we can help
With the part that does not expire: understanding what the inspection found, quoting the work it recommends so the scope matches, and providing the documentation the application asks for. Contractors have to be enrolled in the programme’s process for their work to be used with a grant, so ask any company you are considering — including us — where they stand on that before you count on it.
Questions about My Safe Florida Home
Is there funding available right now?
We do not know on the day you are reading this, and we will not pretend to. The programme is funded by appropriation, it opens and closes, and official sources have disagreed on the amounts. Check the Department of Financial Services directly.
Who is eligible?
Broadly: a site-built single family home or townhouse in Florida that is your primary residence, with a homestead exemption and active homeowners insurance. Several further conditions have been reported — an insured value cap, a construction date cutoff, and income limits in recent cycles — and because those change between cycles you should confirm them at the source rather than from any contractor’s page, ours included.
Should I wait for a grant before replacing my windows?
That is a real decision and it depends on your circumstances. What we would say is: do not leave your house unprotected through a storm season while waiting in a queue whose length nobody can tell you. Take the free inspection now, and decide with that information in hand.
Can you do the work under a grant?
Ask us. Contractors have to be enrolled in the programme’s process, and the honest answer is the current one rather than a claim on a web page. We would rather tell you plainly than have you discover it at the application.
Start with the inspection
It is free and it tells you where you stand. We are happy to quote against what it finds.
Get a free estimate