Here's where insurers are dropping homeowners due to climate risk.

1,000 Words / 4 min. Read

The insurance industry is the climate crisis’s canary in the coal mine.¹ As disasters become more frequent and intense,² insurers have responded by increasing prices,³ dropping policies,⁴ and withdrawing from states and regions entirely. State-funded insurance programs have been created to cover the gap,⁵ but mounting losses threaten their viability as well.⁶ Insurance commissioner Dave Jones puts it bluntly:

Insurers in all states will be overrun by the increased risk and losses resulting from rising global temperatures. Unless we transition away from fossil fuels that continue to drive up global temperatures, we will continue to march - at an increasing pace - toward an uninsurable future.¹

In the previous post, we looked at where home insurance premiums are rising in America. In this post, we’ll be taking a look at insurance nonrenewals, or instances of insurers refusing to renew home insurance policies. This is a critical factor, as insurance is a requirement for a mortgage; when insurers withdraw, vulnerable regions may experience a mass exodus as homeowners sell or default on their loans.^7,8

A photo of a seaside town in Maine. — Source: *Leah Newhouse,* Pexels

In 2024, the Senate Budget Committee released a report titled Next to Fall: The Climate-Driven Insurance Crisis is Here – And Getting Worse.⁹ The report analyzed 249 million insurance policies from 2018 through 2023, and found that over 1.9 million homeowners have been dropped from their policies over that time period.⁹

“The climate crisis is not just about polar bears, and it’s not just about green jobs,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, said during a hearing on the investigation’s findings. “It actually is coming through your mail slot, in the form of insurance cancellations, insurance nonrenewals and dramatic increases in insurance costs.”⁴

In this post, we’ve mapped that data so you can see which parts of America have been most affected.

Preface

As we noted in the previous post, we shouldn’t treat these maps as a direct approximation of climate risk. While natural disasters do play a large part in insurance evaluations, property damage is the primary concern (not our personal safety).¹⁰ Housing prices, construction costs, state regulations, litigation, and fraudulent claims also play a part in determining which regions are profitable to insure.^11,12

If you’re looking to evaluate your personal climate risk or find a safer place to call home, we’ve compiled over 80 maps and datasets for climate-related threats, which you can access here.

Insurance Nonrenewals

This map shows nonrenewal rates from 2018 through 2023:

Florida has the highest rate of nonrenewals in the nation; average rates reached 3% in 2023 and 2024, triple the national average. This comes as no surprise, given that the state is facing multiple overlapping climate risks; sea level rise, hurricanes, flooding, and extreme temperatures, compounded by high property values along the coasts.^13,14In 2022, Hendry, Okeechobee, and Glades counties saw astonishingly high nonrenewal rates of 24% to 33% respectively.

Louisiana, North Carolina, and California are also key areas of concern. While the former are facing many of the same risk factors as Florida (sea level rise, hurricanes, and flooding),^15,16 California’s main threat is wildfires.¹⁷ We saw this most recently with the Palisade Fires, where losses mounted to the point where California’s state-run insurance plan (itself intended to be a last resort) required a $1 billion bailout.¹⁸

Nonrenewals across the Midwest are likely driven by hail damage, which is responsible for 50% to 80% of insurance claims in that region,¹⁹ and over $54 billion in losses.²⁰ While deaths from hail are extremely rare,²¹ it poses a large threat to property and agriculture.²²

This map shows insurance nonrenewals in 2023, compared to 6-year averages:

Oklahoma saw a large increase in nonrenewals that year; hail may be to blame, but investigative journalism found evidence that lack of regulation and price gouging may be contributing factors.²³ Coastal counties in South Carolina saw a large increase as well.

This table shows nonrenewal rates and increases at the state level. (You can click on any column to sort by that value.)

Key Takeaways

It’s clear that climate change is a primary driver of this increase in nonrenewals. As the report states:

The data confirm that the states and counties most exposed to climate-related risks, like wildfires or hurricanes, are among those with the highest non-renewal rates and the highest growth in non-renewal rates.⁹

The insurance crisis is also beginning to bleed into less-expected areas of the country:

Insurance non-renewals are not exclusively a problem for communities typically seen as being on the front lines of climate change. Florida, California, and Louisiana have been seen as the canaries in the coal mine, but the Committee’s data make clear that areas such as southern New England, parts of Montana, coastal and inland North Carolina, coastal regions of New Jersey, New Mexico, South Carolina, and even Oklahoma, among others, are not far behind.⁹

As climate change intensifies, there will be fewer safe havens from natural disasters, and less means of insuring against them. We believe this is rapidly becoming a driver of climate migration within the United States.^24,25

We don’t believe that finding a new home is a one-stop solution for climate risk; in many cases, you’re just trading one form of resilience for another.²⁶ And since your exposure to disasters like floods and fires can vary widely over a small area,^27,28 finding a safer location may only mean moving a few miles away.

But if you live in one of the most risk-prone regions of the country - especially one that’s subject to insurer withdrawals - we would recommend looking for higher ground before it becomes a financial necessity.²⁹

Footnotes & References

The Uninsurable Future: The Climate Threat to Property Insurance, and How to Stop It (Dave Jones, The Yale Law Journal)
‍U.S. Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters (Climate Central)‍
US insurers’ profits double as price rises exceed extreme weather claims (Lee Harris, Financial Times)
Insurers Are Deserting Homeowners as Climate Shocks Worsen (Christopher Flavelle, Mira Rojanasakul, The New York Times)
State insurers of last resort: How FAIR plans work and which states have one (Mel Duvall, Insurance.com)‍
Will California’s FAIR Plan Have Enough Cash for Its Wildfire Claims? (L.S. Howard, Insurance Journal)
Climate Abandonment Areas (First Street)
The Un-insurability Crisis Is Upon Us (Rupert Read, Andrew Hoffman, Resilience.org)
New Data Reveal Climate Change-Driven Insurance Crisis is Spreading (Senate Budget Committee)
11 factors that affect home insurance rates (Pat Howard, Kara McGinley, Britta Moss, Policygenius)
Why California’s Homeowners’ Insurance Market Collapsed (Kristian Fors, The Independent Institute)
Study Stirs Debate on Real Impact of Litigation, Fraud on Property Insurance (William Rabb, Insurance Journal)
Florida Climate Outlook (Daniel Raimi, Amelia Keyes, Cora Kingdon, Resource for the Future)
Florida Home Insurance Crisis Explained (Brandon Cornett, Home Buying Institute)
Climate change in Louisiana (Wikipedia)
Climate change in North Carolina (Wikipedia)
The States Where Properties Are Most at Risk of Wildfires (Katharina Buchholz, Statista)
California’s High-Risk Insurer Gets $1 Billion Bailout After L.A. Fires (Christopher Flavelle, The New York Times)
Insurance costs are soaring around Tornado Alley. Hail is the big problem. (Michael Copley, NPR)
Why home insurance is unaffordable, even in places without wildfires or hurricanes (Rebecca Hersher, NPR)
What are your chances of being killed by hail in the US? (Ashley Williams, AccuWeather)
Hurricanes, Heat and Hardship: Counting 2024’s Crop Losses (Daniel Munch, Farm Bureau)
Hail storms don't explain Oklahoma’s outrageous homeowners’ insurance rates (J.C. Hallman, Oklahoma Watch)
Climate-Induced Migration Patterns and Property Insurance (Chia-Chun Chiang, Greg Niehaus, Society of Actuaries Research Institute)
Rethinking place-based economic security in the age of climate migration (Vanessa Williamson, Ellis Chen, Brookings)
The role of social capital in building community disaster resilience (Ailun Xiong, Yuheng Li, International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction)
The Data Behind Flood Factor (First Street)
The Data Behind Fire Factor (First Street)‍
A Climate ‘Shock’ Is Eroding Some Home Values. New Data Shows How Much. (Claire Brown, Mira Rojanasakul, The New York Times)