Home insurance premiums have jumped 24 percent for the typical U.S. homeowner in just three years, a new study found, with the Midwest hit by the biggest increases.
A NerdWallet analysis of more than 840 million home insurance rate estimates calculated by Quadrant Information Services from insurers’ own filed rating formulas, covering all 50 states and Washington, D.C., found that a U.S. homeowner with good credit, no claims, and a house built in 1984 could expect to pay $496 more for home insurance in January than in early 2023.
In early 2026, the typical U.S. home insurance premium was $2,564, up from $2,068 in early 2023, $2,212 in early 2024, and $2,452 in early 2025. All median rate and rate-of-change calculations are made across three dwelling coverage levels ($300,000, $400,000, and $500,000).
While the entire country saw increases in premiums over this time frame, price hikes were more significant in Midwestern states, where coverage costs rose 25 percent from the first quarter of 2023 to the first quarter of 2026. By comparison, premiums rose by 20.5 percent in the Northeast, 19.2 percent in the South and 16.4 percent in the West.
Why the Midwest Has Been Hit the Hardest
Over the past three years, several Midwestern states posted cumulative increases that rank among the steepest in the country.
In Wisconsin, homeowners faced a +40.9 percent cumulative premium increase between 2023 and 2026, which far outpaces the nationwide increase. Michigan homeowners experienced a +29.9 percent cumulative premium increase within the same period, while homeowners in Iowa (+27.7 percent), Minnesota (+27.3 percent), and Indiana (+27.2 percent) also faced increases outpacing the national average.
The reason why the Midwest has been hit harder than other regions over the past three years can be traced back to the number of extreme weather events—including tornadoes and hail—which have bashed the area recently.
According to NerdWallet's analysis of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) storm event data from 2020 to 2025, three of the four U.S. states with the largest cumulative increase in severe hail events since 2023 are in the Midwest.
Severe hail events, defined by NOAA as a thunderstorm that produces hail with a diameter of 1 inch or larger, jumped by 276 percent in Missouri and by 258 percent in Illinois between 2023 and 2025 compared to the previous three-year period. In Indiana, they increased by a similarly high 183 percent.
Newsweek contacted NerdWallet and NOAA for comment by email on Tuesday morning.
A Glimpse of Hope: Premium Growth Has Now Slowed Down
Premiums continued rising over the past year, as climate change has been found to make natural disasters more frequent and more severe and increase insurers’ risk exposure—but the pace of their growth has slowed down significantly.
Between early 2023 and early 2024, premiums nationwide rose by 7 percent; between early 2024 and early 2025, by 10.8 percent; but between 2025 and early 2026, they rose by a more modest 4.6 percent.
Even more positively, premiums fell in 18 states and Washington, D.C., over the past year, while in each of the two years before that, premiums fell in just three states. These were Alaska, New Mexico and West Virginia between 2023 and 2024, and Florida, Nevada and Wyoming between 2024 and 2025.
The largest premium drops in the nation over the past year were reported in North Carolina (-9.6 percent), Rhode Island (-7.9 percent) and West Virginia (-7.6 percent).
This slowdown over the past year is due to a combination of factors, including a relatively calm Atlantic hurricane season in 2025 and reforms passed by California regulators and Florida lawmakers aimed to stabilize their troubled insurance markets. But one factor might chip away at the optimism this data suggests: timing.
According to researchers, the double-digit premium increases reported between 2023 and 2024 across the country reflect a delay in the time it takes carriers to purchase their own catastrophe coverage, known as reinsurance. When they renewed their policies in January 2023, reinsurers nationwide hiked their rates by 25 to 50 percent for insurers with a relatively clean record of recent losses, and by 45 percent to 100 percent rate increase for home insurers with recent large-dollar claims, NerdWallet found.
Private insurers, already struggling to account for the risk of higher claims posed by more frequent, more devastating extreme weather events, could not immediately pass those higher reinsurance costs to policyholders—causing another delay, if their request to regulators were even approved.
In a majority of the country, premiums continue rising year-over-year in 2026, with four states reporting double-digit increases, led by Pennsylvania (16.4 percent), Arizona (14.9 percent) and Minnesota (10.9 percent).
Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Matthew Robinson and Emma Lee-Sang