Compare home insurance quotes when the prices differ
A cheaper number usually means a different policy.
Deductibles, roofs, claims, credit, filing clocks
Home insurance cost and the six settings behind it
Six settings decide home insurance cost, and the deductible line is the first of them. A deductible written as a percentage is computed from the dwelling limit, not from the damage, so 5 percent of a $400,000 limit is $20,000 whether the storm took three shingles or the whole roof.
Which deductible applies, and what is it a percentage of?
A flat deductible is a number. A percentage deductible is an instruction to compute one, and the base is the dwelling limit filed as Coverage A, never the size of the loss. That is the regulators' own wording in the definitions for the 2026 market data call. It is also not a fixed sum from year to year, which is what a home insurance renewal does to that number.
So the arithmetic runs against intuition. A $12,000 roof claim, against a 5 percent named storm deductible on a $400,000 dwelling limit, pays nothing. Nothing was denied. The policy worked as filed. And the percentage is only half the term. The trigger is the other half.
| Deductible | What sets it off | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| All other perils | Any covered loss not carved out below. | Flat dollars. |
| Windstorm, or wind and hail | Any wind or hail event, unnamed and undeclared. | Flat, or a percentage. |
| Named storm | A tropical cyclone given a name or a number. | A percentage, 1 to 15 in the NAIC’s range. |
| Hurricane | A storm the National Hurricane Center categorizes as one. | A percentage, same scale. |
Inland readers skip the windstorm row and it is the one that is theirs: a hail policy in Colorado or Oklahoma needs no coast. Nineteen states and the District of Columbia had a storm deductible as of June 2025.
How much is homeowners insurance, and why will an average not answer it?
That figure is a quotient, not a price. Regulators collect two totals per state, written premium in dollars and written exposure in house-years, and divide. Nobody was surveyed. No rate filing was read. The report then disclaims its own number: average premium is an imperfect measure of relative price, it says, because hazards, economic conditions and real estate values vary so widely between states. Hold the policy form fixed, change only the amount of insurance, and the 2023 average runs about four and a half times from the smallest coverage band to the largest. So this site ranks states by fifths and reprints none of its dollars.
Home insurance cost as a distribution, not an average
One federal table answers the question without averaging it away. The Census Bureau asks owner-occupied households what they pay a year to insure the property, and table B25141 of the ACS 2024 1-year estimates sorts the answers into twelve bands. Nothing gathers at a single figure. The largest band among mortgaged owners is $1,000 to $1,499, at 22.5 percent; among owners who have paid the loan off it is the bottom band, at 21.7 percent, and the bottom band is not a price.
Housing question 21 takes a dollar amount or a None box, so the bottom band holds households that pay little together with households carrying no policy at all, which is lawful once no lender is owed. It also holds 4,642,283 owners who do have a mortgage and therefore a lender requiring coverage, and the published table does not say why. Set the band aside and $1,000 to $1,499 is the largest in both arms. There is nothing here to average, and a home insurance cost produced without an address is an average in a costume.
| Reported for the year | Owners with a mortgage | Owners with no mortgage |
|---|---|---|
| Less than $100 | 9.0% | 21.7% |
| $100 to $299 | 3.1% | 2.8% |
| $300 to $499 | 3.0% | 3.4% |
| $500 to $799 | 8.0% | 8.5% |
| $800 to $999 | 6.7% | 6.8% |
| $1,000 to $1,499 | 22.5% | 19.3% |
| $1,500 to $1,999 | 13.8% | 11.2% |
| $2,000 to $2,499 | 11.4% | 8.9% |
| $2,500 to $2,999 | 5.7% | 4.3% |
| $3,000 to $3,499 | 5.0% | 3.9% |
| $3,500 to $3,999 | 2.7% | 2.0% |
| $4,000 or more | 9.2% | 7.1% |
What the home insurance cost in this table actually measures
Housing question 21, put to owner-occupied units only. The Bureau defines the answer as the annual premium for fire, hazard and flood insurance on the property, so flood sits inside the number wherever a household buys it. These are reported figures, not filed rates, and which band a house lands in is settled state by state: the fifty-one rows sit in the home insurance by state table.
What does a roof do to homeowners insurance cost?
Roof age gates the policy before it rates it. Below some age insurers compete for the house; above it they decline, or they price the roof out from inside. A filed endorsement dated August 2023 shows that second move: replacement cost terms deleted, actual cash value substituted for wind or hail loss to roof surfacing once the surfacing is fifteen years old. Surfacing there covers underlayment and flashing, and the depreciation is applied to labor as well as materials. Fire still pays replacement cost. Only wind and hail, the perils a roof actually fails from, get depreciated.
Two more erosions sit alongside it. Several states authorize a separate roof deductible; Florida caps its version at the lesser of 2 percent of the dwelling limit or half the cost of a new roof, under the 2026 statutes. Cosmetic exclusions drop hail that dents the surface without ending its function.
Is the house insured for its market value or its rebuild cost?
The policy insures the structure. The purchase price also bought land, a location and a school district, and none of those burn. In an expensive metro the rebuild figure sits below market value; on a large old house in a soft market it sits above, and insuring to what the house would sell for there leaves the owner short. Being short has a mechanism attached. Insurers typically require at least 80 percent of replacement cost, some 100 percent, and under that line the shortfall comes out of the owner's pocket. That is the Texas regulator's description, in its guide as updated in June 2026.
How are homeowners insurance rates determined by credit, and where is that restricted?
A credit-based insurance score is not a credit score and does not measure whether you repay debt. Regulators call it an estimate of how likely someone is to file a claim. It enters in two places that get conflated: underwriting decides if you are written at all, rating decides the tier and the factor.
Published state lists on this are mostly wrong. Maryland has the one unambiguous homeowners prohibition in statute, and it reaches rating tiers and placement with an affiliated company, not underwriting alone, because a narrower ban would have been stepped around. Michigan allows credit to set premiums and bars it only from denial, cancellation and non-renewal. California has no prohibition in its code, only prior approval, and the department's homeowners rate questionnaire does not ask about credit. One old measurement gives the order of magnitude: in a Texas review of rate filings reported to the legislature in December 2004, insurers writing about 42 percent of homeowners premium used credit in rates or tiers.
Do old claims change home insurance rates at the quote?
They do, and the database holding them is not a registry. It is the Comprehensive Loss Underwriting Exchange, or CLUE, run by the consumer reporting agency LexisNexis. It keeps up to seven years of personal property claims and works by subscription, so a loss filed with a company that does not contribute never appears there. A claim that was never paid still counts: the entry is made by the request, not the payment.
These reports are pulled almost entirely to rate new policies, since an existing insurer already holds your history, which makes claims the variable that punishes shopping in particular. The history attaches to the address as well as to the person, and a buyer cannot order the report on a house they are considering. Access runs to the owner, the insurer or the lender, so ask the seller.
Why home insurance cost rises with no claim filed
Two engines run under a renewal and neither needs a claim. The first is the amount of insurance. An inflation guard lifts the dwelling limit every year by itself, and the premium is rated off that limit, so an unchanged house renews on a larger number. Florida legislates about the side effect: the insurer must warn that the rider can push a hurricane deductible above the dollar figure shown on the declarations page.
The second engine sits outside the house. The Texas department names the costs carried by every policyholder at once: inflation in building materials and labor, supply chain disruption, weather events, and the price of reinsurance. None of that is in your file. All of it arrives as a rate filing.
How is home insurance calculated, and why is my home insurance so high?
A rate is the price of a single unit of coverage. The premium is that rate times the units bought, which is why the two words are not interchangeable. The same department lists six things its companies read on a house: the age of the building, the roof, where it stands, the cost to replace it, the claims filed on it, and credit. Each writes its own formula from them, which is why two quotes on one house disagree.
Why does the same company quote a different home insurance cost across a state line?
Because a rate is not a company decision. It is a company decision that survived a state process, and the processes differ. On the regulators' 2026 chart of filing methods, California is prior approval with a 60-day deemer and a 180-day outer limit; New York is prior approval on 30 days, extendable to 45; Texas is file-and-use; Florida lets the insurer pick file-and-use at 90 days or use-and-file at 30; North Carolina runs residential property through a rate bureau on a 210-day clock. Those filings are public records in most states, which makes the department's file the honest answer to why a renewal moved.
Home insurance cost seen from the other pages
Cheap home insurance and what gets removed to get there
Every reduction in price comes out of a specific line.
Home insurance by state: the rules behind your number
Credit use, deductible type and rate approval all vary.
Home insurance renewal and a premium that moved
The increase arrives without a claim more often than with one.
Bundle home and auto insurance as a rating factor
Where the multi-policy factor is applied, and to which policy.
What people ask next about home insurance cost
How much is home insurance per month?
Nothing here is priced by the month. Regulators measure in house-years, twelve months of coverage on one dwelling, and a policy is rated a year at a time. A monthly figure is that annual premium divided by the schedule you were given.
Does moving from a 2 percent deductible to 5 percent cut the premium in proportion?
No. It is one rating variable among many. A second effect is easy to miss: with an inflation guard on the policy, the dwelling limit rises every year, and the dollar value of a percentage deductible rises with it.
The premium went up and nothing was filed. Where does that get answered?
In the rate filing, a public record in most states, held by the state insurance department. An open claim or a billing problem belongs with your own insurer first and that department second, not with this line.
How is home insurance price determined when two insurers see one house?
Each company files its own rating plan and builds its own formula from the same raw facts, so two numbers on one house can both be correct within their own filings.
Can a bad stretch of credit be reconsidered?
In many states an insurer must reconsider credit affected by an extraordinary life circumstance, on written request and with documentation: serious illness, a death in the immediate family, divorce, identity theft, or involuntary job loss of three months or more. Texas writes several of those into its rules, as its department set them out in April 2025.
Sources and data years
- NAIC, Homeowners Insurance Report: Data for 2023 . 2023 data year, published July 2026. Reproduction barred, so none of its figures are reprinted here.
- U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey, table B25141 . 2024 data year, 1-year estimates. Shares are our arithmetic on the published counts.
- U.S. Census Bureau, ACS Subject Definitions 2024 . Housing question 21, and what the reported premium includes.
- U.S. Census Bureau, 2024 American Community Survey questionnaire . 2024 form. Question 21 takes an amount or a None box; question 22d asks whether insurance sits inside the mortgage payment.
- Texas Department of Insurance, how auto and homeowners insurance costs are calculated . Page updated 1 September 2026. Rate against premium, and the six factors.
- Texas Department of Insurance, Home insurance guide, publication CB025 . Guide updated 1 June 2026. The 80 percent floor, and the companies that ask for 100.
- Florida Statutes section 627.701 . Subsection (4)(c): the warning that an inflation guard rider can raise the dollar deductible.
- NAIC, Definitions for the Homeowners Market Data Call . Definitions dated 2026. Percentage deductible base, roof settlement categories.
- Filed homeowners endorsement, loss settlement for windstorm or hail losses to roof surfacing . Edition 08-23, August 2023. The insurer is not named and the form is not reproduced: the mechanism only.
- NAIC, Insurance Topics: Hurricane Deductibles . As of June 2025. Triggers, percentage range, count of states.
- NAIC, Use of Credit Reports and Scoring in Underwriting, chart MC-20 . Summer 2025 edition. The Maryland, Michigan and California entries were reviewed in June 2025.
- Texas Department of Insurance, Use of Credit Information by Insurers in Texas . Report to the 79th Legislature, 30 December 2004, from its review of rate filings. Twenty-two years old, and good for the order of magnitude only.
- Wisconsin Insurance Commissioner, fact sheet PI-207 . Revision May 2026. The exchange, its operator, its contents and access rights.
Page last reviewed 2026-09-23. Each figure above carries the year of its own data.