Where Homeowners Insurance Is Getting Hard to Buy

A quoted premium is the last thing in the homeowners insurance market to move, which makes it the worst available place to start when you want to know where the coverage is getting hard to buy. A quote tells you what one company charges today for a policy it is still willing to write. It says nothing about whether that company intends to be writing in the same rating territory in three years. And by the time the price moves, the decision behind it has been sitting in a state agency's file for months, on a form with a number.

The signals arrive in a fixed order. Paperwork first, residual-market counts second, and the thing everybody actually checks — can I get a quote — dead last. Working in that order turns a shopping errand into a question about the address.

The paperwork moves before the price does

Most states put a legal tripwire in front of a retreating insurer, and the tripwire generates a document.

Texas is the cleanest to read, because the chapter is short and titled exactly what it does. Insurance Code Chapter 827, "Withdrawal and Restriction Plans", read 22 August 2026 against text the statutes site states is current through the 89th Legislature's 2nd Called Session, 2025, requires an insurer to file a plan for orderly withdrawal before it cuts annual premium in a line by 75 percent or more, or — the one that matters for a house — cuts total annual premium volume in personal automobile or residential property "in this state, or in any applicable rating territory" by 50 percent or more.

Then Section 827.008, which is the earliest signal in the whole sequence. Before an insurer may restrict writing new business in a rating territory in personal auto or residential property "in response to a catastrophic natural event that occurred during the preceding six months," it must file a proposed restriction plan with the commissioner for review and approval. Not a press release. A filing, before the phones stop being answered.

Two more clauses set the tempo. A withdrawal plan is deemed approved if no hearing is held before the 61st day after filing, and an insurer that withdraws from all lines may not resume for five years without approval. Slow, expensive, documented — which is why it lands in the record long before it lands in a quote.

Most states run some version of this under a different name, so the transferable step is finding yours rather than assuming Texas rules travel to Montana.

Where to read filings. Rate, rule and form filings move through the NAIC's SERFF system, and the public window into it is SERFF Filing Access — not one site but one per jurisdiction, each at serff-sfa.naic.org/serff/sfa/home/ plus a two-letter code, with a state picker on the NAIC's own SERFF page. On 22 August 2026 I requested all 52 of those pages: the fifty states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. Fifty came back with a working search, which is 49 states plus the District. The two that did not were Florida and Puerto Rico, both landing on the same notice — "Site Not Found. The site is not available for your state." Florida runs its own filing search through the Office of Insurance Regulation instead.

What a worrying reading looks like. Not the headline rate number. Look for a territory-factor revision that carves your ZIP out of a broader zone, a separate wildfire or named-storm deductible priced as a percentage of Coverage A, or revised underwriting guidelines filed with no rate change attached. Those are appetite changes wearing a pricing costume.

Two limits come with the search itself. The Texas Department of Insurance says on its SERFF search page, last updated 2 July 2026, that filings a company marked confidential will not appear in results, and that individual documents inside a visible filing can be withheld even when the rest of it is public. The same page sets the window: the system carries filings received after 13 April 2014, so there is no deeper history in there to find. Absence of a filing is not evidence of anything. Presence is.

What a moratorium bulletin actually publishes

California Insurance Code section 675.1(b)(1), read on leginfo 22 August 2026 and last amended by Stats. 2018, Ch. 618 (SB 894) effective 1 January 2019, says an insurer "shall not cancel or refuse to renew a policy of residential property insurance for a property located in any ZIP Code within or adjacent to the fire perimeter, for one year after the declaration of a state of emergency," where the only reason is that a wildfire occurred in the area. The mechanics follow: the Department of Forestry and Fire Protection determines the perimeter, hands the data to the commissioner, and "the commissioner shall then issue a bulletin to inform insurers which ZIP Codes are subject to this subdivision."

That bulletin is the artefact you want — a dated, official list of ZIP codes where the legislature expected non-renewals to start. Subdivision (c) then strips the protection back out for gross negligence, for unrelated losses that make the risk ineligible, and for changes that render the property uninsurable.

A one-year pause with exits, published as a ZIP code list. If a candidate address keeps turning up on those lists year after year, the recurrence is the finding. The protection is not.

The residual market is the thermometer, and it reads both ways

When admitted carriers stop writing a risk, the household does not vanish. It lands in the state's plan of last resort, and those plans publish their counts monthly. Nothing else about availability updates that often.

The eligibility rule gives the number its meaning. The Colorado FAIR Plan, read 22 August 2026, requires three declinations before you may apply. Every policy in that count is a household told no three times. The plan came from HB23-1288, effective 7 August 2023, with coverage capped at $750,000 for property and $5,000,000 commercial.

Those caps are the reason a FAIR Plan premium and a standard-market premium cannot share a column in a comparison sheet. The two do not buy the same thing, and the plan's own site says so structurally: alongside its agent pages it keeps a shelf of DIC policy resources — difference-in-conditions cover, the wrap for the perils the plan leaves out. A residual-market premium belongs in a spreadsheet only with a second line under it naming what is missing.

The indicator also runs in reverse, which is the part most coverage leaves out. Florida's Citizens Property Insurance Corporation publishes monthly policies in force back to May 2020, each month linked to the detail report it came from. The count peaked at 1,407,805 on 30 September 2023. Thirty-three months starting from the month after that peak read like this.

Both columns are the "Citizens Total" line of the corporation's own detail report for that month-end — $586,022,743,991 in October 2023 against $78,907,617,476 in July 2026. Read the header on each report before comparing two of them: the recent ones are run excluding takeouts.

Florida OIR's market overview, data as of July 2026, gives the context: 7.64 million residential policies in force statewide, an admitted-market average premium of $3,757 including wind, 1,883,487 policies approved for Citizens takeout during 2025, and a rolling average of requested rate changes reading −6.9% over the prior 30 days against −1.4% a year earlier. That is the private market moving back in — which you never see if you only look for bad news.

Two cautions: a new plan has no trend — Colorado's calls itself still in Phase 1, 2025 to 2026 — and a flat statewide figure hides a county that doubled.

Then the counts: who is still writing, and where

Florida publishes the most granular version of this anywhere. Under section 624.424, Florida Statutes, residential property insurers must report policy data, and since January 2025 those reports are monthly, at county and ZIP code level, generated on demand by period, policy type, company and county.

Read the caveats on that page first. OIR states plainly that the data is not audited before publication, and that companies filing as trade secret are excluded outright. That exclusion list is not a footnote: it ran to 86 companies when I read it on 22 August 2026, starting with State Farm Florida from the first quarter of 2014, adding American Coastal and Family Security from 2017, three Tower Hill entities from 2019, and USAA, Travelers and Universal Property and Casualty later. A ZIP code that looks thinly served may simply be served by companies that never appear in the file.

For a national baseline there is Examining Homeowner Property Insurance Market Dynamics, a final research report from the NAIC's Center for Insurance Policy and Research, dated 31 July 2026 and built on seven years of Market Conduct Annual Statement data. Three of its numbers are worth carrying. In 2024, 715 companies wrote at least $50,000 of homeowners premium somewhere in the country, and that floor is part of what the headline number counts. Adjusted to 2025 dollars, average direct premium written per policy has risen since 2018 by 18.3% in the Northeast Zone at the low end and 43.3% in the Western Zone at the high. And company-initiated non-renewals, measured as a ratio per 1,000 policies in force, rose in every NAIC zone across those years: from 96% at the smallest to 216% in the Southeast Zone, with the Northeast at 147%.

The report's own conclusion is the part to keep. There is, it says, "no single national homeowners insurance market and, therefore, no single national solution to easing pressure." A national figure is a yardstick to hold your ZIP code against. It is not an answer about it.

Quote availability is the last signal, and the noisiest

By the time you cannot get a quote, everything above already happened. Two records still come out of this stage.

The first is the declination. Three of them is a formal threshold in Colorado, and similar counts gate residual-market eligibility elsewhere. Ask an independent agent not "what will it cost" but "which admitted carriers will decline this address, and on what grounds" — the answer names the peril the market is actually pricing.

The second is whether the placement would be admitted or surplus lines. Under Texas Insurance Code section 981.004(a), read 22 August 2026, an eligible surplus lines insurer may write only if the full amount of required insurance "cannot be obtained, after a diligent effort, from an insurer authorized to write and actually writing that kind and class of insurance in this state."

That diligent-effort test has exceptions, and two of them reach ordinary houses rather than commercial risks. Subsection (e) drops the requirement for flood coverage written by a surplus lines insurer rated A- or better by A.M. Best. Subsection (f) says the availability of windstorm and hail cover from the Texas Windstorm Insurance Association does not, on its own, stop a surplus lines insurer from writing it. So a documented diligent effort is a thing to ask about, not a thing to assume.

What does travel with every non-admitted placement is the warning label. Section 981.101(b) requires each surplus lines document to carry, in 11-point type, the statement that the department "does not audit the finances or review the solvency of the surplus lines insurer providing this coverage, and the insurer is not a member of the property and casualty insurance guaranty association created under Chapter 462, Insurance Code." Where that paragraph appears, the state guaranty fund is not standing behind the policy.

Why this belongs in a comparison between towns

You can change your carrier, your deductible, your roof covering, your brush clearance. You cannot change the rating territory the parcel sits in, the fire perimeter it keeps landing next to, or the reinsurance cost the region carries.

That asymmetry is what makes it a comparison between towns rather than a browser full of quote forms. Insurance is one of the seven annual figures in the move comparison this site is built around, and one of only two — property tax being the other — that can reverse the ranking of two candidate towns on its own.

It compounds with exposure you already mapped: a parcel inside a Special Flood Hazard Area carries a lender's mandatory purchase requirement on top of whatever the wind or wildfire market is doing, so the flood zone lookup and this one answer two halves of the same question. A buyer three years from now runs both, or their lender does.

This site will not tell you which company to buy from or which policy form to take. It has no licence to and no view worth having. The question is narrower: is this market still functioning at this address, and which way is it moving? Treat the answer like any other agency dataset — only as good as its denominator and its exclusions, the habit reading crime statistics honestly forces on you.

The order to work in

Each step below shortens the list of things left to ask a person, and the last step is the person.

Start with your state's public filing search. Pick your jurisdiction on SERFF Filing Access, filter to homeowners over the last twenty-four months, and read the largest local writers first. What you are hunting is a territory-factor revision that carves your ZIP out of a wider zone, or a new percentage deductible — not the headline rate change. In Florida this step happens on the OIR filing search instead.

Then the withdrawal and restriction record: your state's equivalent of Texas Chapter 827, and whichever department page posts those plans and company actions. Then the bulletins page, searched for the candidate ZIP code rather than browsed — in California that means the section 675.1 moratorium series, and the finding is whether a ZIP recurs across years, not whether it appears once.

Then the residual market, pulled twice. Take the plan's policies-in-force page for two dates twelve months apart, and for your county if it reports that far down; direction carries more information than level. Where the state also publishes policy counts by ZIP code, that is the sharpest instrument available, and Florida's monthly Market Intelligence Report is currently the only good example of one. Everywhere else the NAIC zone figures are the fallback, and are worth labelling as a fallback in your own notes.

The agent goes last, and gets the two questions from the section above rather than a request for prices: the named declinations, and whether a placement here lands in the admitted or the surplus lines market. Add one more while you have them. Ask what the wind or wildfire deductible works out to as a dollar figure against that Coverage A, rather than as a percentage of it.

Sources, read or queried 22 August 2026: Texas Insurance Code chapter 827 and chapter 981 on the Texas statutes site; California Insurance Code section 675.1 on leginfo; Colorado HB23-1288 and the Colorado FAIR Plan; the Texas Department of Insurance SERFF page; the 52 SERFF Filing Access jurisdiction pages, reached through the NAIC's SERFF page; Citizens Property Insurance Corporation policies in force with the October 2023 and July 2026 detail reports behind it; Florida OIR's market overview and residential market share reports; and the NAIC Center for Insurance Policy and Research report Examining Homeowner Property Insurance Market Dynamics, dated 31 July 2026.

I hold no insurance licence. Nothing here names a carrier, a policy form or an agent to use, because that is not a question this site is equipped to answer. Where the public record lives, and what order to read it in, is.