Over the past few years, many housing markets have experienced a home insurance shock. Part of this is due to insurance models reassessing disaster risks, while much of it stems from rising housing and construction costs. Replacement and repair costs have soared, and insurers are trying to keep pace, though some state insurance commissions are slowing the process.
To better understand what has happened to home insurance across the country, ResiClub reached out to economists Benjamin Keys, a professor of real estate economics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and Philip Mulder, a professor of insurance at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This summer, they published a paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), conducting their analysis using raw data from CoreLogic.
They found that the three-year shift in the median annual U.S. home insurance premium from 2020 to 2023 was 33%. That’s a bit above the three-year shift in U.S. home prices from December 2020 to December 2023 (28%).
“We find that premiums have risen sharply since 2020, that this growth has been concentrated in disaster-prone ZIP codes, and that elevated reinsurance costs are a critical driver of the increase,” wrote Keys and Mulder in their NBER paper.
Among the 500 largest U.S. counties, 15 counties saw the biggest three-year increase in median home insurance premiums from 2020 to 2023. Nine of them are in Florida.
