Forty-four percent of homeowners in a survey taken in April said their insurance premium now rivals their mortgage payment. Twenty-three percent had been dropped by a carrier since 2024. Thirty-nine percent had absorbed a rise of more than twenty percent at a single renewal in the past three years.
The first of those numbers is the one that travels, and it is the one that needs the most care, because it is a ratio and both halves have been moving.
The denominator was frozen in 2021
American mortgages are overwhelmingly fixed-rate, and an enormous share of outstanding ones were written or refinanced when rates were near three percent. Those payments are fixed in nominal dollars for thirty years. They do not rise with inflation, with property values, or with anything else.
Everything around them has risen. So a ratio of insurance to mortgage payment climbs partly because insurance went up and partly because the comparison is against a number that has not moved since 2021 and never will.
That is not a reason to dismiss the finding. Insurance has genuinely repriced, and the twenty-percent-at-a-single-renewal figure is about the premium alone with no denominator involved. But it does mean the households where insurance most dramatically "rivals the mortgage" are disproportionately the ones who locked in the cheapest loan — which is to say the ratio is worst for people whose housing costs are otherwise the most protected.
The households in real trouble are elsewhere: renters, whose landlords' insurance passes through as rent with no fixed-rate protection at all, and recent buyers carrying both a high rate and a high premium. Neither group is in this survey.
The sixteen percent is the number that matters
Of those dropped since 2024, seventy-nine percent found another private carrier. That is the market working — a withdrawal, a search, a replacement at some price.
Sixteen percent ended up in state-sponsored coverage. That is the market declining to work, and the state absorbing what it would not write.
Residual markets — FAIR plans and their equivalents — are insurers of last resort. They exist to make a home insurable when nobody commercial will, and they are typically funded by assessments on the carriers still operating in the state, which those carriers recover from their remaining policyholders. So the growth of the residual market is a transfer: the risk private insurers declined is redistributed across everybody who still has a private policy.
Sixteen percent of the dropped, in one survey of five hundred and twenty people, is not a national estimate. It is a signal that the residual market is doing more work than it was designed to do, and that is worth checking against the state-level FAIR plan enrolment data, which is published and which nobody reports.
What this is downstream of
This paper wrote on Friday morning that FEMA had denied Massachusetts' appeal for disaster aid on a February blizzard, and that where the federal backstop becomes less predictable the risk moves to markets that will quote it, reaching households as a premium rather than as a policy change.
This survey is what that sentence looks like from the household end. Nobody voted on it. No legislature passed a bill transferring catastrophe exposure from the federal balance sheet to the homeowner's. It arrived as a renewal notice.
The same movement is visible in the wholesale market, where catastrophe bonds price what insurers will not write, and at the far end of it in the households that have concluded the price is not worth paying and are carrying no insurance at all.
Read the regional numbers with caution
The survey reports 62 percent in Western states saying premiums rival the mortgage against 34 percent in the Midwest, and 38 percent versus 31 percent for non-renewal notices.
Five hundred and twenty respondents split four ways gives regional subsamples of roughly a hundred and thirty. A twenty-eight point gap on samples that size is probably real in direction and unreliable in magnitude, and the seven-point non-renewal gap may not be there at all.
The direction is corroborated by everything else known about wildfire and coastal exposure. The precision is not, and anyone quoting 62 percent as a fact about the West is quoting a number with a wide interval around it.
The measure that would settle it
Not survey perceptions. State insurance departments publish FAIR plan policy counts and total insured value, annually and by state.
Watch those. If residual market enrolment is compounding while premiums rise, private capacity is withdrawing and the state is absorbing catastrophe risk without ever having decided to. That is a fiscal event dressed as an insurance statistic, and it is measurable today by anyone willing to read fifty annual reports.
The findings that 44 percent of respondents say their homeowners premium rivals their mortgage payment, that 23 percent were dropped by a carrier since 2024 with 79 percent of those finding another private carrier and 16 percent moving to state-sponsored coverage, that 39 percent saw a premium rise above 20 percent at a single renewal in the past three years, and the regional figures of 62 percent in Western states against 34 percent in the Midwest and 38 percent versus 31 percent for non-renewal notices, are from a survey of 520 US homeowners conducted on 13 April 2026 and reported in August and September 2026. The sample size and the resulting imprecision of the regional subsamples are our own observation, not the survey's. The FEMA disaster declaration denial referred to here is as reported on 4 September 2026. The analysis is our own.
Topics moneyinsurancehousinghouseholds
