The average homeowner is now paying more for insurance than at any point in recent memory, and 47% of policyholders saw their premium rise in the past year — the highest share of insurer-initiated rate increases in more than a decade, according to the Insurance Information Institute’s Triple-I Trends and Insights report.
Nationally, the average homeowners insurance premium is projected to climb to $3,057 in 2026, up from $2,948 in 2025, according to Insurify’s home insurance price projections, which draw on real-time quote data from partner carriers and rate filings tracked through Quadrant Information Services. A separate analysis from Rate’s 2026 Home Insurance Trends Report, based on more than 265,000 policies, found premiums rose 9.16% in 2025 alone, pushing the average bill from $2,020 to $2,205.
The States Feeling It Most Aren’t the Coastal Ones
Ask most people which states are getting hit hardest by rising home insurance costs and they’ll probably guess Florida or California. Florida does still carry the nation’s highest average premium at $8,458, but according to Insurify’s data, the states projected to see the steepest year-over-year increases in 2026 are California (+16%), Nebraska (+13%), New Mexico (+11%), Georgia (+10%) and South Carolina (+9%).
Nebraska’s appearance near the top of that list is the real surprise. The state has no hurricane exposure at all, yet it’s projected to have the fourth-highest average premium in the country at $4,560, trailing only Florida, Oklahoma and Louisiana. Insurify attributes this to rising hail and tornado activity across the Plains — what insurers classify as “severe convective storms” — rather than the hurricane risk that typically drives Gulf Coast rates.
Rate’s separate state-level analysis backs up the idea that inland, storm-prone states are outpacing the usual suspects: it found Maine posted the largest single-state increase in 2025, at 21.37%, while Florida, despite its sky-high baseline premium, actually saw one of the smallest increases among larger states at just 4.4%.
Wildfire and Storm Losses Are Reshaping the Market
The Triple-I report points to California’s FAIR Plan — the state-backed insurer of last resort for homeowners who can’t find coverage on the open market — as a bellwether for how bad the underlying risk picture has become. The FAIR Plan’s total exposure reached $696 billion as of September 2025, a 52% jump from the year before, after January 2025 wildfires alone generated an estimated $4 billion in losses to the plan.
That pressure is showing up in how homeowners feel about their coverage, too. Triple-I’s research found that 43% of policyholders who saw a premium increase say it makes them unlikely to renew with their current carrier, and rate-shopping activity was up an estimated 5% year over year in early 2025 as a result.
What It Means Going Forward
The pace of increases does appear to be slowing from the double-digit jumps of the past few years: Insurify’s projections show growth decelerating from a 12% national jump in 2025 to a projected 4% in 2026. But for homeowners in Nebraska, Oklahoma and Maine, that slowdown is happening from an already elevated base, and the underlying driver — storm losses spreading well beyond the coasts — shows no sign of reversing.
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