Universal Property and Casualty: What Florida's Dispute Notice Data Shows

Who the reader is looking up

Universal Property & Casualty Insurance Company (NAIC 10861) is one of the larger property insurers writing homeowners policies in Florida. Someone researching the company before buying a policy, or after filing a claim, usually finds anecdotes on general review sites, star ratings from strangers, or forum posts about a single experience. Those anecdotes are not statewide data, and they are hard to weigh against one another. What does exist statewide is a public record of a specific statutory filing: the notice of intent to initiate litigation, filed with a state agency before certain property insurance lawsuits can proceed. This article reports what that record shows for Universal, with the caveats that have to travel with it, rather than repeating what review sites or complaint boards say.

The dispute notices on file

As of September 7, 2026, Universal Property & Casualty Insurance Company has 31,489 notices of intent to litigate on file in the statewide record, going back to July 1, 2021 when the requirement took effect. Of those, 3,236 were filed in the trailing 12 months. This count excludes withdrawn notices; a notice can be withdrawn by the party that filed it, and withdrawn notices are never part of a headline count anywhere on this site.

Share of the statewide total, and what size explains

Universal's 31,489 notices represent 11.4% of the 277,081 total notices filed statewide since July 2021, putting it second among all insurers in the record. A raw count and a rank like this are driven heavily by how many policies a carrier writes and how many claims it handles in a given period. A large insurer with many policyholders will generate more notices than a small one even if the two behave identically when a dispute reaches this stage, because more policies mean more claims and more opportunities for a claim to become a dispute. That is why this article reports the share of the statewide total alongside the raw count, rather than the raw count alone: share puts the number in the context of the whole record, though it still does not adjust for how many policies Universal has in force, since that per-policy data is not part of what we publish here. The same caveat applies to every insurer in the record, large or small, and it is worth keeping in mind any time a raw notice count is used to compare one carrier against another.

How the count has moved over time

The statewide record lets us track how Universal's cumulative notice count has moved since July 2021. Over that period the running total climbed in nearly every month, without long flat stretches, and the increase has continued through the most recent months in the data rather than leveling off the way the cumulative line does for some smaller or run-off carriers in the same record. Beyond that direction and general shape, we are not citing a month-by-month figure here; readers who want the monthly detail can find the interactive chart on the scorecard.

What a notice is, and what it is not

A notice of intent to litigate is a pre-suit filing required under section 627.70152, Florida Statutes. The statute requires a claimant to give the Florida Department of Financial Services (DFS) written notice of intent to initiate litigation, filed through the department's Property Insurance Intent to Litigate portal, and that notice "must be given at least 10 business days before filing suit under the policy." If a claimant sues without giving the required notice, the statute directs that "a court must dismiss without prejudice any claimant's suit relating to a claim for which a notice of intent to initiate litigation was not given as required by this section." (Statutory text retrieved September 8, 2026.)

That is the whole legal function of the filing: it is a required step before a lawsuit, not a lawsuit itself and not a ruling on one. Filing a notice is not a finding that Universal, or any insurer, denied, delayed, or underpaid a claim. It is an allegation made by or for a policyholder at the point a dispute has not been resolved to their satisfaction. Many notices are withdrawn, and the public record does not say why a given notice was withdrawn or how a given dispute was ultimately resolved. Nothing in this record supports a ranking of insurers by "best" or "worst" claims handling, and nothing here should be read as a statement about Universal's financial condition; that is a separate question governed by separate public filings.

Other public records worth checking

The dispute notice record is one piece of the public picture, not the whole thing. Readers who want to look further can check the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation's company search tool to confirm a carrier's current licensing status, and DFS's consumer services pages for general guidance on homeowners insurance and how to reach the department directly. Neither of those sources was used to make a specific factual claim about Universal in this article; they are pointed out here as places to look next, alongside the methodology page, which documents exactly how the counts on this site are built, what is excluded, and how damage types and dispute categories are derived from the underlying filings. The scorecard itself also lets a reader filter Universal's notices by county and by damage type, and compare it side by side against up to four other carriers at once.