The Docket

Average homeowners insurance in Miami-Dade runs $14,388 a year on a $300,000 policy, per Insurify. That's 456% above the national average. Hurricane reinsurance costs are landing directly on homeowners, and Citizens Property Insurance is backstopping 1.4 million policies statewide. First Street projects rates could quadruple from here.

California's FAIR Plan, the insurer of last resort, is seeking a 36% average rate hike after absorbing $4 billion in losses from the January 2025 wildfires. The state moratorium on cancellations in fire perimeters expired in January 2026. Major carriers had already been pulling out for years. One in ten LA homes were uninsured before the fires even started.

Louisiana homeowners pay $7,304 a year on average, 111% above the national figure. More than twenty insurers exited the state or went insolvent between 2021 and 2022, concentrating hurricane risk onto fewer carriers willing to write policies at all. The survivors charge accordingly.

Iowa home insurance premiums jumped 54% over the past two years. The culprit is hail. Severe convective storm events rose 133% between 2022 and 2023, and insurers responded by covering roofs at depreciated value instead of replacement cost. The place people moved to escape coastal risk is repricing before they've finished unpacking.

Minnesota insurers raised rates 64% in two years, the steepest climb of any state, vaulting it from the 21st to the 9th most expensive market. Severe convective storm losses topped $52 billion nationally in 2025. SECURA Insurance stopped writing personal lines in neighboring Michigan entirely. The Great Lakes "safe haven" thesis is colliding with the same repricing that hit the coasts first.

U.S. flood-exposed homes carry $121–$237 billion in unpriced climate risk, per a 2023 Nature Climate Change study. In states without mandatory risk disclosure, sellers convert that fiction into liquid wealth at closing. The real estate industry is actively pressuring listing platforms to strip climate data from buyer-facing tools, protecting the spread.

Purchase price locks once. Insurance reprices every year. Freddie Mac now requires full flood premiums in mortgage qualification because buyers were getting approved on subsidized rates that vanished after closing. In Louisiana, 30–40% of mortgage loans fall through over insurance costs alone. The ones that don't fall through are the ones where the buyer hasn't looked yet.

Post-disaster mortgage delinquency spikes 250% for wildfire-exposed loans and 21% for flood-exposed loans, per ICE Climate data across 10 million mortgages. Banks manage this by selling their riskiest loans to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which charge similar guarantee fees regardless of flood exposure. The risk doesn't disappear. It just changes hands, landing on a federal backstop.

Black Americans are 9% more likely to live in coastal flood zones. Latino Americans, 47% more likely. Brookings data from April 2026 finds insurance instability hits these communities hardest, where homeownership rates already trail white Americans by 27–31 points and the house is often the only wealth-building asset a family has. The repricing falls on the people least equipped to survive it.

California's FAIR Plan exposure ballooned over 200% since 2019, reaching $458 billion. Florida Citizens once held 1.42 million policies. When catastrophic losses exceed reserves, assessments spread to every policyholder statewide, including homeowners in low-risk areas who never chose this exposure. The private market sheds risk. The public absorbs it. The geography of who pays stops matching the geography of who flooded.

Cape Coral home prices dropped 13% from their 2022 peak. North Port fell 20%. Florida's net domestic migration collapsed 93% between 2022 and 2025. Tulane's Jesse Keenan calls it non-cyclical: a permanent reset of baseline housing values, not a dip waiting to recover. This is what it looks like when the fiction runs out.