Home Insurance Costs by State (2026)

The state spread, and what it is actually measuring

State averages compiled by the NAIC and published by the Insurance Information Institute give a defensible starting point, provided you read them as what they are: the mean of the policies actually written in a state, at whatever coverage levels those buyers chose, not a like-for-like quote on an identical house.

Source: NAIC data as published by the Insurance Information Institute; 2021 is the latest year in that series. Exposure labels are editorial characterisations of the dominant catastrophe peril in each state, not part of the NAIC dataset.

The three most expensive states are all catastrophe states, and the three cheapest are not. That is not coincidence: it is the whole mechanism. Homeowners insurance prices the tail, and the tail in the United States is weather. The Insurance Information Institute's breakdown of homeowners losses by cause makes the point directly — wind and hail accounted for 40.7% of claims in 2022, more than any other cause, at an average severity of $13,511.

The second most common cause is not weather in the dramatic sense at all: water damage and freezing accounted for 27.6% of claims at an average severity of $13,954 — marginally more expensive per claim than wind and hail. Fire and lightning made up 21.9% of claims but at an average severity of $83,991, roughly six times the wind-and-hail figure, which is why wildfire exposure moves pricing so violently even where fire claims are comparatively rare. Theft was 0.7% of claims at $5,024. Property damage overall accounted for 97.8% of homeowners claims in 2022.

For a buyer, the practical read is that frequency and severity are different risks and they price differently. A hail-belt house generates many moderate claims; a wildfire-interface house generates few, catastrophic ones. The first shows up as a higher premium and a percentage wind/hail deductible; the second increasingly shows up as an availability problem rather than a price one.

The national view no single state page can show

This site prices homeowners insurance for all 51 states off one dataset — Insurance.com — Average homeowners insurance rates by state (Rate Analysis 2026), standardized at a $300,000 dwelling level and retrieved 2026-08-17. Each state page below reads its own single row from that dataset. Aggregated across all 51 rows, the pattern a one-state view cannot show is this:

The insurer-retreat signal is also only visible in aggregate. Of all 51 states in this dataset, exactly 2 — Florida and California — are flagged for major carriers pulling back from writing new business, and 20 states run a named state-backed insurer of last resort: Florida, Colorado, Louisiana, Texas, North Carolina, Missouri, Arkansas, South Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia, Massachusetts, Ohio, Virginia, New York, Washington, California, Oregon, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Hawaii. A buyer reading one state page sees whether their own state has a backstop; only counting across all of them shows that a residual-market plan is still the exception, not the norm, even among high-premium states.

Source: Insurance.com — Average homeowners insurance rates by state (Rate Analysis 2026), $300,000 dwelling dwelling coverage, retrieved 2026-08-17 — the same dataset the home insurance cost calculator prices from. Risk-tag groupings (tornado/hail, hurricane, wildfire) are this site's own editorial classification of each state's dominant perils, not part of the source dataset itself; a state can and often does carry more than one tag.

Below the state line: what Treasury found at ZIP-code level

In January 2025 the Treasury Department's Federal Insurance Office published Analyses of U.S. Homeowners Insurance Markets, 2018–2022: Climate-Related Risks and Other Factors, built from data on over 330 insurers and more than 246 million policies — an average of 49.3 million policies a year — aggregated to ZIP code. It is the most granular public picture of this market that exists, and it makes three findings a buyer should carry into a house hunt.

Treasury also reported that homeowners premiums rose 8.7% faster than the rate of inflation across 2018 to 2022. Anyone using a published state average from that period as a budgeting figure is therefore working from a number that is real but stale, and stale in a known direction.

What drives your premium, beyond geography

Location is the largest single input, but it is not the only one, and several of the others are things a buyer can inspect or negotiate before making an offer.

Roof age and condition. This is the underwriting variable most worth checking during a viewing. The Insurance Information Institute states that if a roof is over 20 years old when you apply for insurance, most companies will require it to pass an inspection; that some insurers may decline to write new policies on homes with older roofs; and that those who do accept may specify the roof is covered only at actual cash value rather than replacement cost, so depreciation is deducted from any payout. Age, condition, material and shape all feed the risk assessment. The Texas Department of Insurance says the same from the regulator's side: as roofs age, some companies switch to actual cash value; if a roof is in poor condition the company might not cover it at all; and the insurer will inspect the roof when you apply — so a roof that will not pass is a problem you discover after you are committed, unless you look first.

Deductible structure. In catastrophe states the deductible is often not a flat dollar figure at all. The III explains that percentage deductibles are calculated as a percentage of the home's insured value — a 2% deductible on a $100,000 home is $2,000 per claim — and that hurricane deductibles are generally higher than other homeowners deductibles and usually take the form of a percentage of the policy limits. Triggers vary by state and insurer, commonly keyed to the National Weather Service naming a tropical storm, issuing a hurricane watch or warning, or rating hurricane intensity. In some states a policyholder can choose a dollar deductible instead by paying a higher premium, though insurers writing high-risk coastal property may mandate the percentage form. Inland, wind and hail deductibles are common in Midwestern and Tornado Alley states — the III names Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska and Ohio — and are most commonly paid in percentages, typically from 1 percent to 5 percent. On a $400,000 home a 5% wind deductible is $20,000 before the policy pays anything, which is a materially different product from one with a $1,000 flat deductible at a similar premium.

Credit-based insurance scores, where legal. The NAIC describes a credit-based insurance score as one based partly or entirely on information from a consumer's credit history, used to estimate how likely someone is to file an insurance claim — explicitly not how likely they are to repay a loan. It reports that about 85 percent of homeowners insurers use them in states where the practice is allowed, and that the score is typically only one of many inputs, sitting alongside claims history, property characteristics, location, coverage limits and deductibles. State laws place important limits on their use and those limits differ considerably by state, so whether your credit affects your homeowners premium depends on where you are buying; your state insurance department is the authority on the rule that applies to you.

Coverage choices you control. The California Department of Insurance notes that higher deductibles reduce premiums, and that discounts are available for burglar alarms and fire protection devices. These are small levers next to geography, but they are the ones that remain available after the address is fixed.

Replacement cost versus actual cash value — the difference that shows up at claim time

Two policies can carry the same dwelling limit and the same premium and pay out very differently, because they settle losses on different bases. The California Department of Insurance defines replacement cost as the amount that it costs to replace lost or damaged property with new property of like kind and quality in the local market.

Actual cash value is settled in two steps under California law: for a total loss to the structure, it is the policy limit or the fair market value of the structure, whichever is less; for a partial loss, it is the amount it would cost to repair, rebuild or replace less a fair and reasonable deduction for physical depreciation, or the policy limit, whichever is less. The department's own illustration is a tree falling through the roof onto an eight-year-old washing machine: under replacement cost the insurer pays to replace the old machine with a new one; under actual cash value it would likely pay only a percentage of a new machine's cost, because an eight-year-old machine is worth less than its original price.

A third tier exists above replacement cost, and the label is regulated. The California Department of Insurance states that a policy cannot be sold as a “guaranteed replacement cost” policy unless it will pay to completely rebuild the home regardless of the coverage limit. Other variants — commonly marketed as extended replacement cost — pay the policy limit plus a stated percentage above it. Where construction costs have moved sharply, the difference between “limit plus 25%” and “regardless of the limit” is the difference between rebuilding and not.

This interacts directly with the roof question above: a policy written on a replacement-cost basis for the dwelling can still carry an actual-cash-value schedule for the roof specifically. Reading the dwelling coverage basis alone is not enough — the roof endorsement is where the depreciation usually hides.

“Hazard insurance” — the lender's term for the same coverage

A mortgage disclosure, servicing statement or closing document will often say hazard insurance rather than “homeowners insurance,” and it is not a different product. Under the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's mortgage servicing rule (Regulation X, 12 CFR §1024.31), hazard insurance means “insurance on the property securing a mortgage loan that protects the property against loss caused by fire, wind, flood, earthquake, theft, falling objects, freezing, and other similar hazards for which the owner or assignee of such loan requires insurance.” In practice that is the dwelling-coverage part of the same homeowners policy described on this page — the piece that insures the structure itself, as distinct from personal property, liability or loss-of-use coverage bundled into the same policy.

A lender requires it because the home is the collateral for the loan: if the structure burns down or is otherwise destroyed and there are no insurance proceeds to rebuild or pay down the balance, the lender's security for the loan is gone. That is a large part of why the definition above reaches beyond a standard policy's usual perils to “other similar hazards for which the owner or assignee of such loan requires insurance” — flood and earthquake coverage are excluded from a standard homeowners policy (see below), but where a lender requires either one, that coverage is itself hazard insurance under the regulatory definition, not something separate from it.

Most borrowers pay for it through escrow rather than directly. Regulation X (12 CFR §1024.17) defines an escrow account as one a servicer establishes to pay taxes, insurance premiums — the rule's own example is flood insurance — or other charges on the borrower's behalf, funded by the portion of the monthly mortgage payment the servicer sets aside for that purpose. For a borrower who has such an escrow account for hazard insurance, the servicer must pay the premium in a timely manner — on or before the deadline needed to avoid a penalty — and an insufficient escrow balance is not, by itself, an excuse: the servicer must advance its own funds to cover the shortfall and may then seek repayment from the borrower. For that same escrowed borrower, the servicer may treat itself as unable to disburse — and may instead buy force-placed insurance — only if it has a reasonable basis to believe the hazard insurance was cancelled or not renewed for reasons other than nonpayment of premium, or that the property is vacant; a short escrow balance is not one of those reasons. A borrower whose servicer does not hold an escrow account for hazard insurance falls under a different provision, 12 CFR §1024.37, which instead requires the servicer to have a reasonable basis to believe the borrower failed to maintain the coverage required by the loan contract, after sending advance notice, before force-placing insurance.

For budgeting, that means the number that matters is the same one used throughout this page: the homeowners premium, priced by dwelling coverage amount, is what gets escrowed and rolled into the monthly payment. Price it with the home insurance cost calculator and add it to principal, interest and tax in the mortgage calculator to see the full escrowed payment a lender will actually collect.

What a standard homeowners policy does not cover

A homeowners policy is defined as much by its exclusions as its coverages, and for a buyer the exclusions are the ones that change the purchase decision. The California Department of Insurance lists the perils a homeowners policy typically excludes as flood and earthquake; earth movement; termites, insects, rats or mice; water damage from seepage or leaks; mould; wear and tear; war and nuclear hazard; and losses occurring when the property has been vacant for 60 days or more.

The flood exclusion is the one that catches buyers most often, and it is not a quirk of one state's market. The Insurance Information Institute states without qualification that flood damage is excluded under standard homeowners and renters insurance policies. Flood coverage is a separate purchase through the National Flood Insurance Program or a private carrier — see our flood insurance guide for how the mandatory-purchase rule and FEMA's Risk Rating 2.0 pricing work.

Two of the other exclusions deserve more attention than they usually get. The seepage and leaks exclusion is the reason a slow plumbing failure that rots a subfloor over months is treated differently from a pipe that bursts — and given that water damage and freezing account for 27.6% of homeowners claims, the boundary between the two is litigated more than any other. The 60-day vacancy exclusion matters to anyone buying a home they will not occupy immediately, including buyers renovating before moving in and anyone carrying two properties through a slow sale. Both are the kind of clause that is only read after it bites.

Earthquake is the mirror image of flood: excluded by default, available separately, and routinely skipped by buyers outside a handful of states — including, in practice, by many buyers inside them.

When the problem stops being price: the insurer of last resort

Treasury's finding that nonrenewal rates run about 80% higher in the highest-risk ZIP codes than the lowest is an availability statistic, not a price one, and its consequence is visible in the residual markets that exist to catch homeowners the voluntary market has declined. California's is the largest and the best documented. The California FAIR Plan describes itself as an insurer of last resort, established by statute to provide basic property insurance to Californians statewide when no other option is reasonably available.

Source: California FAIR Plan, Key Statistics & Data. Policies in force were also up 8% and exposure up 11% since September 2025.

A 250% increase in exposure at the residual market in under four years is a direct measure of how far the voluntary market has retreated in wildfire-exposed California. There is a tentative counter-signal in the most recent data: the FAIR Plan received 151,061 new business applications over the first nine months of fiscal year 2026, averaging 16,784 a month — down 25% on the prior year, though still 208% above the September 2022 level. Slower growth in a last-resort pool is better than faster growth, but it is not the same as the voluntary market returning.

For a buyer the implication is concrete. Coverage from a residual pool is basic property insurance rather than a full homeowners package — the California FAIR Plan describes offering dwelling, commercial and earthquake policies plus supplemental “difference in conditions” policies for additional coverage when traditional insurers decline. That means two policies, two premiums and two sets of terms rather than one.

The lesson generalises well beyond California: in a high-risk area, get a real quote before you remove your contingencies. What decides a deal in these markets is increasingly whether a carrier will write the property at all, and that has an address-specific answer no published table can give you.

Home insurance costs by state

Select your state for the local risk profile, the perils that dominate pricing there, and a pre-filled mortgage calculator. Treat any state figure as a starting point: Treasury's ZIP-level analysis shows an 82% premium gap between the highest- and lowest-risk fifths of the country, and that gap sits entirely inside state averages.