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The Common Belief: Everyone's Premium Jumped 43%
What if the number in the headline is the one figure that almost certainly doesn't describe your policy? As of August 8, 2026, the widely circulated framing of the 2018-to-2024 homeowners market is a premium increase of up to 43% — a phrase that gets shortened in conversation, at kitchen tables and in agent offices, to "premiums went up 43%." Those are not the same claim.
According to Google News, which surfaced the Forbes report on the 2018-to-2024 premium climb, the increase reached as high as 43% over that six-year window, alongside guidance on how homeowners can trim what they pay. One editorial caveat up front, because it matters for how much weight to put on any single figure: the underlying rate filings and state-level breakdowns behind that ceiling number were not independently retrievable for this piece, so what follows treats 43% as a reported top-end boundary rather than a verified national average. A careful reader should do the same.
That distinction is not pedantry. It changes which savings advice is worth acting on and which is just noise.
Where It Breaks Down: "Up to" Is a Ceiling, Not an Average
Run the arithmetic the coverage stayed quiet about. A 43% total increase spread across the six years from 2018 to 2024 works out to roughly 6.1% compounded annually (1.43 raised to the one-sixth power, minus one). That is the shape of the increase most homeowners actually experienced — not one brutal renewal letter, but six renewals that each looked mildly annoying and individually easy to ignore.
In dollars, take any premium and call it $2,000 purely as round arithmetic. A 43% rise adds $860 a year, or about $72 a month. Framed monthly, that is a streaming-bundle-sized line item that arrived so gradually almost nobody re-shopped in response. Framed as a six-year total, it is real money — and it is exactly why the ceiling figure lands as a shock even though the annual steps didn't.
Chart: Indexed view of the reported up-to-43% homeowners premium increase, 2018 to 2024. The 2018 baseline is set at 100. The 2024 bar reflects the reported ceiling, not a national average — figures as reported via Google News as of August 8, 2026.
Who sits near that ceiling and who doesn't is the more useful question. Insurers have pointed consistently to the same drivers: rising reinsurance costs (the insurance that insurers themselves buy), higher claim frequency and severity, and supply-chain inflation in building materials and labor. Reconstruction costs — what it actually takes to rebuild your specific house, not what it would sell for — have climbed substantially on labor shortages and material prices. Those pressures are not evenly distributed. States with heavy catastrophe exposure, among them Florida, Louisiana, California and Texas, have generally seen the steepest increases. Multiple major carriers have reduced writings or exited California and Florida outright, and state-backed pools and residual markets have grown as private capital retreated. Industry analysts describe this as a hardening market with reduced capacity in catastrophe-prone regions — which is a polite way of saying that in some ZIP codes the constraint stopped being price and became availability.
So the skeptic's pushback is fair: a homeowner in a low-catastrophe inland county who assumes the 43% figure applies to them may over-correct and gut a perfectly good policy chasing a problem they don't have. And a homeowner on the Gulf Coast may look at 43% and feel relieved, when their own trajectory ran well past it.
Photo by Ngoc Nguyen Phuong on Unsplash
The Coverage Gap That Opens When You Chase Savings
Here is the part the standard savings checklist skips. The most commonly recommended lever — raise your deductible (the amount you pay out of pocket before insurance pays anything) — is not a discount. It is a transfer. You are buying back part of your own risk, and the premium reduction is the price the carrier pays you for taking it. That can be a genuinely smart trade. It is not free money, and it should never be described as one.
Three exclusions and clauses are worth pulling up before any renewal decision:
The separate wind and hail deductible. In many coastal and hail-belt states this is a percentage of your dwelling coverage, not a flat dollar amount. On a home insured for $400,000, a 2% wind-hail deductible is $8,000 out of pocket before a storm claim pays — regardless of the comfortable-looking $1,000 figure printed on the main declarations page. Raising the flat deductible does nothing to this one, and homeowners routinely discover the difference only after the roof is gone.
Roof settlement basis. A policy that pays actual cash value on the roof (replacement cost minus depreciation for age) rather than replacement cost can cut your premium meaningfully and cut your payout far more. On an older roof, that gap can exceed several years of the savings that bought it.
The rebuild limit itself. With reconstruction costs rising on labor and materials, a dwelling limit set years ago may no longer fund a full rebuild. Trimming coverage to offset a rate increase, in that context, compounds an underinsurance problem that already exists quietly on a lot of policies.
Our read: the coverage gap created by aggressive premium-cutting has grown faster than the premiums themselves, because the cost of a rebuild moved while the limits sat still.
A Better Frame: Cheaper Moves Before You Touch the Deductible
The sequencing matters. Exhaust the levers that reduce price without reducing protection first, then consider the ones that shift risk back to you.
Insurance professionals consistently recommend annual policy reviews and comparison shopping, because premiums and coverage terms vary significantly between carriers for identical homes. The discipline that makes this work: compare policies at matched limits, matched deductibles and matched roof settlement basis. A quote that is cheaper because it silently switched the roof to actual cash value is not a cheaper policy — it is a different product.
Bundling home and auto, verified security and monitoring systems, and documented roof or structural upgrades commonly carry filed discounts. These reduce premium by reducing assessed risk rather than by reducing what you'd collect. Ask the carrier to list every credit on file and confirm which ones are missing — the answer is often more than one.
If the higher deductible is $5,000 and you do not have $5,000 in liquid savings, you have not lowered your cost — you have converted a monthly expense into a future emergency. The rider that's actually worth it for most households sits on the other side of the ledger: extended replacement cost and water backup coverage, which address the two gaps that most often turn a covered loss into an uncovered shortfall.
Insurtech is quietly changing the arithmetic on both sides of this. AI-driven risk assessment lets carriers price individual properties more granularly instead of painting a whole ZIP code with one brush, which helps well-maintained homes in mixed-risk areas and hurts neglected ones. Automated claims management shortens settlement timelines and reduces the friction that used to make small claims not worth filing. And on the consumer side, AI-assisted comparison tools have made it far less painful to check the market annually — the single highest-yield habit in this entire category, and still the one most homeowners skip.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does the up-to-43% homeowners insurance increase apply to every state?
No. As reported via Google News as of August 8, 2026, 43% represents the upper end of increases from 2018 to 2024, not a uniform national figure. Increases vary significantly by state and region based on local catastrophe exposure, with the steepest generally concentrated in high-disaster states such as Florida, Louisiana, California and Texas.
How much can I actually save by raising my homeowners deductible?
The savings depend on your carrier, state and the size of the increase, so no fixed percentage applies. The more important point is structural: a higher deductible lowers premium by transferring risk to you. Before accepting it, confirm whether your policy also carries a separate percentage-based wind and hail deductible, which is not affected by changing the flat deductible.
Why did my premium rise if I never filed a claim?
Homeowners rates are largely set at the book level, not the individual level. Carriers have cited rising reinsurance costs, increased claim frequency and severity across their portfolios, and inflation in construction labor and materials as primary drivers. A clean claims history helps, but it does not insulate a policy from region-wide rate increases or from rising reconstruction costs on your own home.
The Bottom Line
On balance, the more useful takeaway from the 2018-to-2024 data is not the 43% ceiling but the roughly 6.1% annual compounding underneath it — a pace slow enough that most households absorbed it without ever re-shopping. With carriers still retreating from catastrophe-prone markets and residual state pools absorbing the overflow, the likelier path forward is continued divergence: modest, manageable increases in low-exposure areas and continued availability pressure in high-exposure ones. The homeowners who come out ahead will be the ones who compare policies at matched terms every year and fix underinsured rebuild limits, not the ones who buy the largest deductible they can find.
Disclaimer: This article is editorial commentary based on publicly reported information and is for informational purposes only. It does not constitute insurance advice, and it does not reflect independent testing or evaluation of any insurance product. Coverage terms, exclusions and rates vary by carrier and state — always consult a licensed insurance agent for personalized guidance. Research based on publicly available sources current as of August 8, 2026.