Homeowners Insurance Non-Renewals Have Surged Nationwide, New NAIC Data Shows
Homeowners Insurance Non-Renewals Have Surged Nationwide, New NAIC Data Shows
Updated September 26, 2026. Every figure below was read on that date from the regulator, federal and residual-market documents listed at the end. No insurer quotes, no comparison-site averages and no star ratings are used anywhere in this article; the premium levels quoted are regulator-published averages, not offers.
How far the non-renewal rate actually moved, and over which years
The NAIC published its first national analysis of homeowners market dynamics on July 31, 2026, announced on August 5. It covers 2018 through 2024 and reports non-renewals the insurer started — not the ones the homeowner started — per 1,000 policies in force. The direction is the same everywhere; the size is not.
| NAIC zone | Company-initiated non-renewals per 1,000, 2024 | Change since 2018 | Average premium, 2024 | Real premium change, 2018–2024 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Northeast | 11.7 (1.17%) | +147% | 1,396 dollars | +18.3% |
| Midwest | 14.2 (1.42%) | +96% | 1,476 dollars | +24.7% |
| Southeast | 22.0 (2.20%) | +216% | 1,818 dollars | +26.5% |
| Western | 25.1 (2.51%) | +96% | 1,600 dollars | +43.3% |
Two details in that table do more work than the headline. The first is that the number of companies writing homeowners insurance barely moved — 715 nationwide in 2024, with zone-level changes between minus 1.9% and plus 1.8%. Capacity did not collapse; it got selective. The second is the NAIC's own "effective rate", premium per 1,000 dollars of home value, which fell between 2018 and 2024 in three zones (Northeast minus 5.5%, Midwest minus 0.8%, Southeast minus 5.8%) and rose only in the Western zone, by 4.9%. Premiums rose faster than inflation while rising slower than the value of what they insure.
Two federal-scale datasets, two different national levels
The Treasury's Federal Insurance Office ran the other big study, published January 16, 2025, covering 2018 to 2022 across more than 330 insurers and about 49.3 million policies a year. It reports a national non-renewal rate of 1.20% in 2022 and a five-year average of 1.04%.
For the one year both studies cover, they do not match. FIO puts 2018 at 1.05%; the NAIC puts it at about 5.5 per 1,000, or 0.55% — roughly half. The NAIC counts only company-initiated non-renewals, which should make its number the smaller one, so the direction of the gap is at least consistent with the definitions. But nothing published reconciles the size of it, and the two use different collections entirely: FIO's own data call versus the NAIC's market conduct annual statement. Treat any single national non-renewal percentage as an estimate with a definition attached, not a measurement.
The GAO adds a third reading. Its February 2026 report, publicly released March 30, found the average U.S. homeowners premium rose just 3% over 2019 to 2024 after inflation, with southern coastal areas up 25% or more, homes at high wind risk paying about 58% more than comparable homes at medium wind risk, and a medium-to-high wildfire step worth about 8%. Set GAO's 3% national real increase against the NAIC's regional real increases of 18.3% to 43.3% and the smallest regional figure is six times the national one. The base years differ by one and GAO is national while the NAIC is zonal, but a one-year shift does not explain a factor of six. Both are current, both are official, and this article does not pick one.
The premium gap underneath the non-renewal gap
FIO also published the pairing that makes this a cost question rather than a news story. Averaged over 2018 to 2022, by ZIP-code climate-risk decile:
- Lowest-risk ZIP codes: non-renewal rate 0.90%, average premium 1,277 dollars, claim frequency 4.1%, paid loss ratio 54.7%.
- Highest-risk ZIP codes: non-renewal rate 1.61% (about 80% higher), average premium 2,321 dollars (about 82% higher), claim frequency 7.0%, paid loss ratio 64.7%.
That is a 1,044-dollar annual difference between the two ends of the same national market, and the higher-priced end is also the end more likely to be dropped. It is the cleanest A-against-B anchor in the public record, and it is what the next table runs forward.
One thousand and forty-four dollars a year, compounded rather than repeated
Flat, the gap is 5,220 dollars over five years and 10,440 over ten. Nobody's premium is flat. So the table below escalates each level at a published real rate: the Northeast's +18.3% over six years works out to about 2.84% a year, and the Western zone's +43.3% to about 6.18% a year. Those are the NAIC's regional figures used as scenarios, not forecasts, and they are real rates, so general inflation sits on top.
| Scenario | Year 1 | 5-year total | 10-year total | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A. Low-risk level, 2.84%/yr | 1,277 dollars | 6,758 dollars | 14,532 dollars | slowest published real escalation |
| B. High-risk level, 2.84%/yr | 2,321 dollars | 12,285 dollars | 26,412 dollars | same escalation, higher base |
| C. High-risk level, 6.18%/yr | 2,321 dollars | 13,132 dollars | 30,855 dollars | fastest published real escalation |
The ten-year spread between A and C is 16,323 dollars. Hold the escalation rate constant and the base alone still costs 11,880 dollars over ten years. Against Census's 2024 figure of 2,035 dollars in median monthly owner costs — mortgage, insurance, taxes, utilities and fees, taking 21.4% of income — the A-to-C difference is about eight months of total housing cost, arriving one premium notice at a time.
One caveat that matters more than it looks. The obvious comparison — admitted carrier against the state-created insurer of last resort — cannot be priced from primary sources, because neither residual-market plan publishes an average premium. That gap is discussed below rather than filled with a derived number.
The clock you are actually on, state by state
A non-renewal is a deadline, and the deadline is statutory. The day counts differ by more than a factor of two.
| State | Advance notice of non-renewal | Other published clocks | Citation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Florida | 120 days | 45 days for the renewal premium; 10 days for non-payment cancellation; 20 days within the first 60 days | Fla. Stat. 627.4133(2) |
| California | 75 days, or a renewal offer 45 days before expiry | if the insurer misses it, the policy continues unchanged for 75 days from delivery of the notice | Cal. Ins. Code 678 |
| New York | at least 45 and not more than 60 days | — | N.Y. Ins. Law 3425 |
| Washington | 60 days | 20 days for any change in rates or contract provisions | RCW 48.18.2901 |
California adds a catastrophe rule worth knowing before it is needed: after a declared state of emergency, insurers may not cancel or refuse to renew residential property insurance in any ZIP code within or next to a fire perimeter for one year, based solely on location; after a total loss in a declared disaster, coverage must be renewed for at least two annual periods and no less than 24 months from the loss. The same code gives at least 100 days to submit proof of loss, 36 months to collect replacement cost, 24 months of additional living expenses extendable to 36, and a 60-day premium grace period.
Then there is the approval clock on the other side of the desk. GAO measured the median regulatory approval time for a premium increase at 331 days in Colorado and 305 days in California. A homeowner reading a 75-day notice and an insurer waiting 305 days for a rate decision are living at very different speeds, and that mismatch is part of why letters go out instead of rate filings.
What the last-resort market looks like where it is already normal
Two states show what the end of this road looks like, and they point opposite ways. The California FAIR Plan's own figures through June 2026: 696,562 policies in force, up 8% since September 2025 and 157% since September 2022; total exposure 768 billion dollars, up 250% over the same four years; written premium 2.04 billion dollars. New business over the nine months from October 2025 averaged 16,784 policies a month. The residential dwelling maximum is 3 million dollars.
Florida's Citizens went the other way. 294,894 policies and 88.5 billion dollars of exposure as of April 30, 2026, against a peak of 1.42 million in October 2023 — a decline of roughly 73%, with more than 546,000 policies moved to private insurers during 2025 alone. Florida's regulator counted 21 new companies approved to write residential property since its reforms, and for policies effective 2024 or later, 44 companies filed for a decrease and 48 filed for no change. Citizens itself recommended a statewide personal-lines decrease of 2.6% effective June 1, 2026, its first since 2015.
So the residual market is not a one-way ratchet. It grew 157% in four years in one state and shrank 73% in under three in another, and the difference was regulatory design rather than weather. County average premiums including wind in Florida still run from 2,105 dollars in Sumter County to 7,863 in Monroe, which is a 3.7-fold spread inside one state.
The discount that is written into statute and mostly unclaimed
Mitigation credits are the one lever on the homeowner's side of this, and several states require them. IBHS, with the University of Alabama, measured Hurricane Sally against more than 40,000 insured properties in coastal Alabama and published the results on May 19, 2025: for FORTIFIED homes, claim frequency down 55% to 74%, severity down 15% to 40%, loss ratios down 51% to 72%, and deductibles paid down more than 60%.
The credit bands published by state programs and regulators, on the wind portion of the premium: Alabama 25–35% for a FORTIFIED roof, 35–45% Silver, 45–55% Gold, plus grants up to 10,000 dollars and a state income-tax deduction of the lesser of 50% of cost or 3,000 dollars. Louisiana's insurance department published a 2024 table of insurer FORTIFIED roof discounts ranging from 1% to 81% — the statute requires an actuarially justified credit and sets no minimum, which is exactly why the range is that wide. Florida's statute mandates actuarially reasonable credits for seven named wind-mitigation features and caps mobile-home tie-down discounts at 10% of annual premium, but names no percentage for anything else.
Tip: Mitigation credits are paid on documentation, not on good intentions, and the cheap end of that documentation is a dated photo set plus sensors that prove the thing never happened. A water leak detector costs a fraction of a deductible. (These are Amazon Associate links — we may earn a small commission on qualifying purchases.)
The fallback that costs the most and protects you least
If a mortgaged homeowner lets coverage lapse, the servicer buys a policy for them. Census puts 59.7% of owned homes under a mortgage in 2024, so this is the default outcome for most of the market, and it is a bad one. The CFPB states plainly that force-placed insurance is usually a lot more expensive than a policy you find yourself, and that it protects only the lender.
The GAO put a number on the economics: over 2004 to 2012, lender-placed insurance ran an average loss ratio of 25.3% against 63% for borrower-purchased coverage. About 10% of such policies ended in a premium refund because the placement was unnecessary. New York now requires these insurers to file rates reflecting loss ratios of at least 62%, and to refile if actual experience falls below 40%.
The timetable is federal and it is generous, which is the good news. Under Regulation X, the servicer must send written notice at least 45 days before charging you for force-placed coverage; you have through the end of a 15-day window from delivery to provide proof of your own coverage; a reminder notice cannot come until 30 days after the first and must arrive at least 15 days before the charge; and once you produce compliant coverage, the servicer must cancel and refund overlapping charges within 15 days. Minimum sequence before the first dollar: 60 days. That is two full months in which a 1,044-dollar-a-year problem does not have to become a lender-placed one.
The exclusion that is not a non-renewal but empties the policy the same way
FEMA states in its own materials that most property policies do not cover flood damage and that flood coverage must generally be bought separately. NFIP limits for a single-family home are 250,000 dollars on the building and 100,000 on contents, with a 30-day waiting period for most new policies. Its published claim figures for 2020 to 2024: average 63,691 dollars, median 20,272. The gap between that average and that median is the whole story of flood risk — most claims are modest and a few are ruinous. Policies in force stood at nearly 4.7 million as of March 31, 2025, against roughly 86.6 million owned households, and FEMA does not publish the take-up ratio.
Where this lands when the letter actually arrives
Read as a decision rather than a trend, the published numbers argue for spending the notice period on three things in a specific order, and the order follows from the day counts rather than from preference.
First, the notice period is the asset. Seventy-five days in California or 120 in Florida is enough time to shop the admitted market properly, and the NAIC's finding that 715 companies still write this line — two thirds of them in fourteen states or fewer — means the regional writers are where the remaining appetite sits. Second, file the mitigation paperwork before shopping, not after. A credit band of 25% to 55% on the wind portion applied to a 2,321-dollar premium is worth more over ten years than almost any shopping win, and in Alabama and Louisiana the credit is a statutory obligation rather than a favour. Third, treat the last-resort plan as a bridge with a documented ceiling, not a destination: 3 million dollars of dwelling limit in California is real coverage, but Florida just demonstrated that a residual book can shrink 73% once private capacity returns, so anyone parked there should be re-shopping annually.
What would change this conclusion is a published residual-market average premium. Without it, the last leg of the comparison is an argument rather than a calculation. The same problem shows up whenever a policy has to be priced against its alternative rather than described on its own, which is why a renters policy has to be read as four separate coverages wearing one price tag, and why a rate quote only means something once it is run against one real purchase price.
Two places the published data will not take you
The CPI cannot stand in for a homeowners premium. The BLS series people reach for — tenants' and household insurance, up 4.1% over the twelve months to August 2026 against all items at 3.4% and shelter at 3.0% — explicitly covers contents coverage only. The BLS factsheet states that physical damage to structures and liability coverage in homeowners policies are excluded, because the rental-equivalence method puts insurance on the structure out of scope. The series carried a relative importance of 0.292% of the CPI in December 2025. Using it as a homeowners-premium trend is a category error, and it is a common one.
Neither residual-market insurer publishes an average premium. The California FAIR Plan publishes policies in force and written premium but not the average; Citizens publishes policies and exposure. Dividing one by the other would be a derivation dressed as a figure, so this article does not do it. Also missing from the public record: the NAIC's countrywide dollar average premium and state extremes sit inside a report PDF that resisted extraction; Washington's regulator has run two non-renewal data calls covering 2021 to 2024 and published no results; and Florida's stability reports do not publish non-renewal counts at all. The NAIC's 2026 market data call, which does collect non-renewals for policy years 2018 to 2025, was due from insurers on July 15, 2026, with a public report targeted for early 2027 — that is the document to watch.
What to do in the first week of a 75-day notice
- Write the expiry date and the statutory notice period on the letter. The number of days you have is set by your state, not by the insurer, and it ranges from 45 to 120 in the four states above.
- Request the reason in writing and check whether a catastrophe moratorium applies. In California, location inside or next to a fire perimeter after a declared emergency blocks non-renewal for a year.
- Assemble mitigation documentation before the first call. Roof age and attachment, opening protection, water shutoff. Credits are filed, actuarially justified and in several states mandatory.
- Shop regional writers, not only national brands. Single-to-fourteen-state companies are 66% to 71% of the companies writing this line.
- Never let it lapse. Regulation X gives you a 60-day minimum runway, and the loss-ratio gap between 25.3% and 63% is what lapsing costs.
- Price flood separately and count the 30-day waiting period backwards from when you need cover.
Where each number came from
- NAIC, homeowner property insurance market dynamics 2018–2024, July 31 2026: content.naic.org; 2026 market data call overview: content.naic.org
- U.S. Treasury Federal Insurance Office, homeowners markets 2018–2022, January 16 2025: home.treasury.gov
- GAO-26-107867, homeowners insurance premiums, February 27 2026: gao.gov; GAO-15-631 on lender-placed insurance: gao.gov
- California FAIR Plan key statistics through June 2026: cfpnet.com; California Department of Insurance on the FAIR Plan and the 2026 annual notice of residential property laws: insurance.ca.gov
- Citizens Property Insurance policies in force and 2026 rate kit: citizensfla.com; Florida Office of Insurance Regulation stability report, July 1 2026: floir.gov; Fla. Stat. 627.4133: flsenate.gov
- New York DFS on cancellations and non-renewals: dfs.ny.gov; RCW 48.18.2901: app.leg.wa.gov
- IBHS Hurricane Sally FORTIFIED study, May 19 2025: ibhs.org; Louisiana Department of Insurance FORTIFIED discount table, 2024: ldi.la.gov
- CFPB on force-placed insurance and 12 C.F.R. 1024.37: consumerfinance.gov
- FEMA NFIP media toolkit, July 2025: agents.floodsmart.gov
- BLS CPI for August 2026, released September 11 2026, and the tenants' and household insurance factsheet: bls.gov
- Census, 2024 American Community Survey release on the cost of homeownership: census.gov
This article summarises published regulatory, federal and residual-market documents. It is not insurance advice for any specific property or policy, and it is not written by a licensed insurance producer or adjuster. Statutory notice periods and credits cited carry their own jurisdictions and effective dates; confirm yours with your state insurance department before relying on a day count.
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