Homeowners insurance has closed the gap with the mortgage payment for a large share of American households, according to a new survey: 44% of homeowners say their premium is now large enough to rival what they pay their mortgage lender each month. A separate slice of the same survey found that 23% of homeowners nationwide have had a policy canceled or not renewed since 2024, forcing them to scramble for new coverage in a market that keeps getting less forgiving. For a retiree who assumed a paid-off or nearly paid-off house meant a lighter monthly housing bill, the insurance line item alone can now undo that math.
44% Say the Insurance Bill Now Matches the Mortgage
The findings come from a SoFi survey of 520 homeowners conducted April 13, 2026, distributed through Stacker to news outlets nationwide. The syndicated report on the survey found that share climbs to 62% among homeowners in Western states, where wildfire risk has pushed insurers to raise rates sharply or leave the market outright, and falls to 34% in the Midwest, where severe-weather exposure and rebuilding costs both run comparatively lower.
The increases behind those numbers were not gradual for everyone. Nearly 2 in 5 homeowners surveyed, 39%, said their premium jumped by more than 20% at a single renewal within the past three years, a one-time spike rather than a slow accumulation of smaller annual increases. That lines up with broader government inflation data cited in the same report: the Consumer Price Index showed household insurance costs rising 6.9% over a recent 12-month period, a pace tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics that runs well above overall inflation.
Not every homeowner is caught in the squeeze. Nationally, 49% of respondents reported the opposite experience: stable premiums and no cancellation notices over the past three years. The split illustrates how uneven the pressure is, concentrated heavily in disaster-prone regions and on properties carriers now consider higher risk, rather than spread evenly across every homeowner in the country.
Free retirement updates: Enrollment and claim windows come and go, and missing one can cost you real money. The free Retirement Shield newsletter keeps you ahead of the deadlines that matter. Sign up free.
A Quarter of Homeowners Have Been Dropped Since 2024
Beyond rising cost, simply keeping a policy has gotten harder. The same survey found that 23% of homeowners nationwide had their coverage canceled or non-renewed since 2024, and the survey’s report specifically named California, Oregon, Colorado, Arizona and North Carolina as states where carriers have pulled back most visibly. Of the homeowners who lost coverage, 79% managed to find a new private carrier, while 16% ended up on a state-backed insurance plan, the kind of last-resort coverage many states set up specifically for properties private insurers will no longer touch.
That fallback is usually a state’s FAIR Plan — Fair Access to Insurance Requirements — an insurer of last resort funded by participating private carriers rather than the state treasury. FAIR Plans typically cap dwelling coverage well below a home’s full replacement cost, often exclude liability protection and sometimes water damage from the base policy, and generally charge more per dollar of coverage than a standard homeowners policy would for comparable risk. A homeowner who lands on one after a cancellation is not simply switching carriers; a larger or newer home in particular can outgrow the plan’s dwelling cap entirely, leaving an owner to hunt down a separate excess policy on top of the FAIR Plan just to insure the property at its true replacement value.
The regional breakdown is sharper than the national number suggests. In Western states, 38% of respondents were hit with a nonrenewal or cancellation tied to “catastrophic risk” or property-specific concerns over the past two years, while 31% of Northeastern homeowners reported the same, with about a quarter of that Northeastern group landing on a state-backed plan. A cancellation does more than force a homeowner to shop for a new policy under time pressure; anyone who still carries a mortgage balance and lets coverage lapse even briefly risks having the lender impose a “force-placed” policy: the lender picks the carrier without the homeowner’s input, insures only its own financial stake in the structure rather than the home’s full value or its contents, and bills the premium directly into the mortgage escrow account, typically at a cost well above what the homeowner could have found by shopping the market directly.
How Homeowners Say They Would Respond to Another Jump
Asked what they would do if their premium doubled next year, 48% of respondents said they would raise their deductible or downgrade to a lower tier of coverage to hold the payment down, and 33% said they would instead cut other household spending to keep their current policy intact. A smaller group, 12%, said they would drop insurance entirely, and 7% said they would sell the home and move somewhere with lower disaster risk rather than keep absorbing the cost.
Going without coverage is not a new phenomenon, and it skews toward households that can least absorb a loss without it. A separate Insurance Information Institute study found that roughly 12% of homeowners nationally had no homeowners insurance at all, with nearly half of those households earning less than $40,000 a year. A mortgage lender legally requires coverage for as long as a loan balance remains, which forces most owners with a mortgage to keep paying no matter how steep the increase; a retiree who owns a home outright faces no such lender mandate and could technically go without a policy, but doing so means shouldering the full cost of a fire, storm or other covered loss entirely out of savings.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by The Money Overview editorial team before publication.
More Financial Reading
