The U.S. homeowners insurance crisis has now spread beyond disaster-prone coastal states such as California and Florida, finding its new epicenter in a landlocked state in the Mountain West: Utah. A new analysis by Weiss Ratings of 2025 data reported by insurers to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) found that The Beehive State had the highest insurer-initiated homeowners nonrenewal rate in the country last year, surpassing both California and Florida. This is an important shift.
Since the pandemic, the two coastal states dominated the discourse around a growing threat on the U.S. homeowners insurance industry: the withdrawal of private carriers as they face higher risks, rising costs and dwindling profits. In Florida, where the homeowners insurance sector, until not so long ago, was plagued by excessive litigation and widespread fraud, over 30 carriers either went bankrupt or exited the state between 2020 and 2023. In California, where state regulation significantly limits insurers’ ability to raise premiums on policyholders, several carriers either fled the state since 2022, stopped writing new policies or cut their coverage in the most vulnerable areas, including major players like Allstate and State Farm.
The latter announced in 2023 that it would no longer accept applications for property insurance and other policies in California, and came under fire after the devastating fires in January 2025 in the Los Angeles metropolitan area revealed the company had refused to renew policies of homeowners in some of the neighborhoods affected by the blaze. Both California and Florida are now doing much better, in terms of homeowners insurance, than they were a couple of years ago, even as the risk of more severe and more frequent natural disasters continues growing. That is because, over the past few years, lawmakers and regulators in both states have recognized the risks associated with losing private insurers and acted to restabilize the market.
In Florida, much of the progress made since the end of the pandemic has been attributed to a sweeping tort reform that lawmakers and experts said has curbed litigation and fraud. In California, regulators have moved to prevent private insurers from leaving by modernizing rate-setting rules and allowing forward-looking climate models which help them calculate risk better and set more realistic prices. These improvements do not mean that the two states are out of trouble when it comes to their homeowners insurance markets.
Despite a year-over-year decline, California still placed second-worst nationally last year for nonrenewals, with insurers refusing to renew 2.93 percent of policies in force in 2025, about one in 34. Florida was not even in the top 10—but the state still holds a record for highest premiums in the nation, with most homeowners paying between $6,000 and $8,500 per year depending on their dwelling coverage amount, according to Insurify. Last year, Utah insurers declined to renew 4.45 percent of homeowners policies in force that year—or about one for every 22.
The rate was 8.4 times higher than in 2018 and 2.6 times higher than in 2024, vaulting Utah from 17th highest in the country to first in a single year. "In a very short period of time, Utah has gone from a warning to the nation’s loudest alarm bell," Weiss Ratings founder Dr. Weiss said in a statement.
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