Florida wind mitigation features.
Seven physical features decide how your home fares in hurricane wind, and how your wind premium is credited. See which ones your home likely has.
Where the strength lives.
Connections over coverings
Shingles are replaceable; a roof that leaves the walls is not. Deck nailing and roof-to-wall straps are the features engineers, and credit tables, weight heaviest.
The code did the retrofit for you
A home permitted under the 2002 Florida Building Code carries most of these features by construction. The record above tells you which era your home belongs to.
Older homes: two upgrades first
For pre-2002 homes, re-nailing the deck at re-roof time and adding a sealed secondary water barrier are the retrofits that buy the most protection per effort.
Seven features, plainly explained.
Roof geometry: hip versus gable
A hip roof slopes on all four sides, presenting no flat wall of roof to the wind from any direction. A gable roof ends in vertical triangles that catch wind like a sail. Nothing about your roof is harder to change or easier to verify: the shape is visible from the street and from the aerial photo in the county record, which is why it is one of the features our lookup can infer without an inspection.
Roof deck attachment
The plywood or board deck is what the covering is fastened to, and what hurricanes actually try to remove. The difference between the weakest and strongest recognized nailing patterns is dramatic uplift resistance, achieved with nothing more exotic than larger ring-shank nails at closer spacing. Florida's re-roof rules require re-nailing to current standards, so every permitted re-roof quietly upgrades this feature.
Roof-to-wall connection
Toe-nails, clips, single wraps, double wraps: the ladder of ways a truss can be tied to the wall below it. This is the feature that separates homes that lose shingles from homes that lose roofs. Post-2002 construction generally has engineered connections by code; older frame homes are the reason retrofit strap programs exist.
Secondary water resistance
If the covering does blow off, a sealed deck, taped seams or a peel-and-stick membrane, is what keeps the following rain out of the living room. It is invisible from outside, cheap at re-roof time, and expensive to add any other time, which makes it the feature most worth asking your roofer about before the next replacement.
Opening protection
Impact-rated windows and doors, or rated shutters on every opening, keep the storm outside the envelope. The all-or-nothing rule surprises people: one unprotected opening drops the rating, because one breach pressurizes the whole structure. Product approval paperwork, not appearance, is what the inspector needs.
Code era and roof covering
The remaining two features are records questions. A home permitted under the Florida Building Code, in force since March 2002, inherits the modern baseline for everything above. A roof covering permitted to that code, proven by the county permit our lookup reads, closes the loop. Between the two, the public record answers more of the wind-mitigation form than most homeowners expect, before an inspector ever climbs the ladder.
Public records, not guesswork.
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We match it to the county property record and its permit history.
Roof permits date the roof; the construction year sets the building-code era for wind features.
FEMA flood zones, the Florida wind-speed map, and evacuation zones overlay the parcel location.
No. It is a records-based assessment of the factors Florida insurers weigh: roof age, wind and flood exposure, 4-point likelihood, and wind-mitigation features. It shows where you stand before you talk to a carrier or agent.
County permit and assessor records, FEMA flood maps, the Florida Building Code wind-speed map, and county evacuation zones. Permit-backed roof ages are flagged high confidence; everything else is labeled as an estimate.
No. The lookup is free, needs no signup, and the address you type is not sold or shared.
Credit tables vary by carrier and territory, but roof-to-wall connection quality and opening protection are consistently the largest single line items, with roof deck attachment close behind.
Yes. Re-roofing is the natural moment: Florida code already requires deck re-nailing at re-roof, and a peel-and-stick secondary water barrier is a modest add-on. Straps, clips, and shutters can be retrofitted independently.
A licensed inspector documents them on the state wind-mitigation form with photos. Permits and product approvals back the form up. The form is what carriers act on.