Average annual home insurance premium

Methodology

This index deliberately shows TWO measures side by side because they are routinely conflated: • FILED / APPROVED RATE CHANGE (blue) — the rate change insurers are permitted to charge, from regulatory filings. Forward-looking. Source: Insurify. Complete 2021–2025 run, single provider. • REALISED WRITTEN PREMIUM (red) — what households actually paid, computed on the NAIC basis as premiums divided by exposure in HOUSE YEARS (one house year = 365 days of coverage on one dwelling), HO-3 policy form. Backward-looking and realised. THE GAP IS THE FINDING. In 2021 approved rates rose 2.8% while realised premium rose 7.6%. Regulators did not approve that difference — it came from rebuilding-cost inflation raising insured values, so the same policy on the same house cost more without any rate increase. Reporting that quotes only the filed rate systematically understates what homeowners experience. CAVEAT: only 2021 was retrieved on the NAIC realised basis, so the red series is a single bar by design. The other years are OMITTED rather than back-filled. A related IRC figure of 6.97% for 2021 uses the same house-year basis but a WIDER policy scope (dwelling fire plus homeowners owner-occupied), so it is not interchangeable with the 7.6% HO-3 figure. Never mix a filed-rate value and a realised-premium value inside one series. Every point’s value_basis states which basis it is on. Context: cumulative 2020–2025 increases reached 46.8%, roughly twice general inflation, about $21bn in aggregate additional household cost. This is the household-level consequence of the catastrophe-losses index. Re-verified 2026-08-10.