New NAIC homeowners insurance data show premiums and nonrenewals climbing across every U.S. region since 2018, with insurer-initiated nonrenewal rates up as much as 216%. The seven-year Market Conduct Annual Statement analysis, NAIC’s first of its kind, ties steeper premium growth in some zones to sharply higher nonrenewal activity in others.
Premiums rose as much as 43.3% in real terms since 2018
The National Association of Insurance Commissioners released its first analysis built on seven years of Market Conduct Annual Statement data collected by state insurance departments on Aug. 5, 2026, in a news release announcing the countrywide state-level study. The report, prepared for NAIC’s Center for Insurance Policy and Research and credited to researchers Czajkowski and Harms, found that 715 companies wrote homeowners coverage in 2024, with underwriting results improving across all four NAIC geographic regions — a trend consistent with the broader personal-lines underwriting rebound insurers posted last year.
Those 715 carriers, covering 103,289,334 policies in force, generated $165.2 billion in direct premium written in 2024 — an average of $1,600 per policy. That average masks wide regional gaps: the Southeast Zone carried the highest average premium per policy at $1,818, while the Northeast Zone was lowest at $1,396. The underlying methodology draws on the same MCAS filings NAIC used to establish that 715 homeowners companies wrote at least $50,000 in annual premium across the U.S. in 2024, the threshold for inclusion in the study.
Measured against 2018, the increases are steep everywhere. In nominal dollars, average premium per policy rose 44% in the Northeast Zone to 74% in the Western Zone, according to the underlying MCAS report published alongside the release. Adjusted for inflation, the gains are smaller but still substantial: 18.3% in the Northeast Zone to 43.3% in the Western Zone, or 2.4% to 5.3% in average annual increases. Even so, NAIC’s researchers note the 2024 overall average effective rate relative to home value sat 2.2% below the 2018 baseline, with significant variance by zone.
The pattern is not uniform across zones: the region posting the steepest inflation-adjusted premium increase, the West, is not the same region posting the steepest nonrenewal increase since 2018, which the data show concentrated in the Southeast and Northeast. That gap between where premiums climbed fastest and where coverage was pulled back fastest is one of the more striking findings in NAIC’s zone-by-zone breakdown, and it runs through the rest of the report.
Nonrenewals climbed even faster, up to 216% in the Southeast
Premium growth tells only part of the story. Company-initiated nonrenewal rates increased between 96% and 216%, depending on region, over the same period. Insurers reported 2,019,799 homeowners company-initiated nonrenewals nationwide in 2024, and by year-end the Southeast and Western zones carried the highest nonrenewal rates, at 22.0 and 25.1 per 1,000 policies in force, respectively. Regionally, 31% of 2024 nonrenewals were incurred in the Southeast Zone and 42% in the Western Zone, together accounting for most of the countrywide total.
The regional split shifted meaningfully within just three years. The Southeast’s share of countrywide nonrenewals fell from almost 53% in 2022 to 31% in 2024, while the Western Zone’s share rose from 25% to 42% — a reversal that comes as insurers reposition catastrophe exposure, including the stabilization Fitch has tracked in Florida’s property market heading into the 2026 hurricane season. Even so, the longest-run increases sit elsewhere: since 2018, nonrenewal ratios per 1,000 policies rose 147% in the Northeast Zone and 216% in the Southeast Zone — the two largest regional increases. And the pace has accelerated recently — nonrenewal rates per 1,000 policies nearly tripled from 2022 to 2024 in the Midwest Zone, from 5.5 to 14.2, and in the Western Zone, from 8.0 to 25.1, a jump that has coincided with state-level mitigation pushes such as Colorado’s SB26-155 hail-mitigation grant program.
Claim costs and severity are pushing the numbers higher
NAIC’s data point to rising claims activity as a driver behind both trends. Claim frequency and severity generally increased, particularly between 2021 and 2024. MCAS-reporting homeowners companies incurred $98.161 billion in losses in 2024, and the 7,354,437 claims closed with payment that year carried an inflation-adjusted average severity of $13,349, according to the MCAS claims data.
Severity, too, varies sharply by zone. Average claim severity in 2024 was highest in the Western and Northeast zones, at $14,249 and $13,423 respectively, and the increase since 2018 has been steepest outside the Sun Belt: inflation-adjusted claim severity rose 21.6% in the Midwest Zone, 22.9% in the Northeast Zone, and 9.5% in the Southeast Zone — the mirror image of the nonrenewal pattern, where Northeast and Southeast carriers pulled back the most.
That divide raises a question the report itself does not fully resolve: zones with only moderate severity growth, such as the Southeast at 9.5%, still logged the era’s single largest nonrenewal increase, at 216%, while the Midwest posted the second-largest severity gain but a comparatively smaller nonrenewal increase. The relationship between claims trends and nonrenewal decisions is clearly not one-to-one across regions.
Regulators frame the numbers as a coverage-availability test
“As we work to maintain healthy and competitive insurance markets, state insurance regulators are committed to ensuring consumers have access to reliable homeowners insurance coverage,”
Scott White, NAIC President and Virginia Insurance Commissioner
The report arrives as insurers recalibrate underwriting and capital allocation across the same regions the data highlight. In the Northeast, where nonrenewals rose fastest since 2018, Mapfre’s cash deal to acquire Massachusetts-based Safety Insurance reflects continued consolidation among regional homeowners writers. In the Midwest, where claim severity has climbed steadily since 2018, American Family’s acquisition of Bowhead Specialty points to carriers diversifying beyond standard homeowners lines. NAIC has not yet published the companion ZIP-code-level Homeowners Market Data Call, which regulators say will add finer-grained, address-level detail once it is released, but the countrywide zone data already give regulators, insurers and policyholders a clearer national baseline than existed before this report.
