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Home Insurers Shift Cost to Homeowners as Climate Change Exacerbates Natural Disasters [1]

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Date: 2025-07-09

Editor’s Note: This post is from our data newsletter, the Rural Index, headed by Sarah Melotte, the Daily Yonder’s data reporter. Subscribe to get a weekly map or graph straight to your inbox.



Last weekend, I stood outside an apartment complex in Mitchell County, North Carolina, and, as the mid-day sun beat down on me, I listened to a middle-aged woman tell me that her family’s home place in the neighboring county was up to her chest in mud. She moved into an apartment nine months ago, when Hurricane Helene devastated Western North Carolina, killing over 100 people and razing homes and businesses across the region.

I’ve been conducting interviews for a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) survey methodology called Community Assessment for Public Health Emergency Response, or CASPER, for short. A local health advocacy nonprofit called SEARCH, where I serve on the board, organized these surveys to collect information about our community’s ongoing recovery in an attempt to bring resources to the region.

Conducting these interviews made me think about the infrastructure that is supposed to help communities recover from natural disasters, from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), to state-level aid, all the way down to local food pantries and churches. These organizations play a key role in the emergency response ecosystem, and without them, cities and small towns alike wouldn’t have the resources they need to get back on their feet after a disaster.

In this edition of the Rural Index, I’m looking at just one aspect of that vast ecosystem of recovery efforts: home insurance. Home insurance is supposed to help homeowners deal with unexpected damage or repairs to their home by allowing them to buy into a system that offers a safety net in case of an emergency. But as climate change increases the frequency and severity of natural disasters, insurance companies are increasingly backing out of high-risk markets either by increasing premiums or cancelling plans altogether.

For home insurance companies, insuring properties is a gamble, and it’s increasingly not worth the risk. Sometimes, companies will decide to drop homeowners by not renewing their plans.

Although changes in home insurance policies can happen for a variety of reasons, an emerging body of research is demonstrating the link between home insurance and climate change. In ZIP codes more prone to natural disasters, people can pay up to 82% more for home insurance compared to their neighbors in lower risk areas.

In North Carolina, private home insurers were backing out of the market in high-risk areas like the Outer Banks even before Hurricane Helene.

The home insurance crisis is hurting both urban and rural communities, according to my analysis of insurance data collected by the Revolving Door Project. In 2023, the latest year of available data, home insurance nonrenewal rates were a little more than 1% in both metropolitan and nonmetropolitan, or rural, counties.

That might not sound like a lot, but those figures shift county by county. Some rural counties had nonrenewal rates of more than 10% in 2023, meaning that more than 10% of home insurance policies in the county were not renewed that year.

The above map shows the percentage change in home insurance nonrenewal rates between 2018 and 2023, demonstrating where the most pronounced changes have occurred in recent years by splitting the data into quintiles, or five groups. In the fifth quintile, represented on the map by the darkest shade of red, are the areas where nonrenewal rates have increased the most since 2018.

I like percentage change maps because they are an easy way to visualize change over time. But showing this data in terms of percentage change can be misleading when we’re working with relatively small percentages.

In rural Marion County, South Carolina, for example, the percentage change in nonrenewal rates between 2018 and 2023 was 382%. That figure might sound unbelievably high, but it’s just a product of working with small numbers. The reality is that Marion County’s nonrenewal rate increased from 0.5% in 2018 to 2.7% in 2023.

The best way to look at this map is to view the fifth quintile, or the darkest shade of red, as the areas where the nonrenewal rates increased the most, in relative terms, not necessarily as the counties that have the highest nonrenewal rates. With that in mind, let’s zoom into a few of the hardest-hit rural counties.

Wildfires in rural northern California make the region a hotspot for home insurance nonrenewal. In Plumas County, California, the home insurance nonrenewal rate went from just under 2% in 2018, to almost 7% in 2023. Home to 20,000 residents in the Sierra Nevada mountains, Plumas County was hit by the North Complex Fire in 2020 that killed 16 people and burned over a quarter of a million acres.

The North Carolina coast is another hotspot in the home insurance crisis because of hurricanes. Nonrenewal rates increased from 2% in 2018 to 13% in 2023 in coastal Dare County, North Carolina. Dare County is the easternmost county in the state with a population of 36,000 residents. Since 1985, 24 hurricanes have made landfall with Dare County. In 2018, Hurricane Michael, a category 4 storm, hit Dare County, causing $7 million in damages.

Homeowners who lose home insurance have to shop around for a new plan, as most mortgages require one. But new policies are likely to lead to higher premiums, particularly for residents in areas at high risk of natural disasters. The loss of home insurance shifts the heavy burden of adapting to a changing climate from private corporations to everyday American homeowners, leaving the most vulnerable among them to fill in the gaps.

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