Are Georgia and other states becoming uninsurable? We have the latest data

By Jake Bittle, Emily Jones, Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco, Vivian La, Anila Yoganathan, Katie Myers, and Clayton Aldern This coverage is made possible through partnerships between Grist and WABE in Georgia, Blue Ridge Public Radio in North Carolina, Flatwater Free Press in Nebraska, Interlochen Public Radio in Michigan, and WBEZ in Chicago. In recent years, as the […]

By Jake Bittle, Emily Jones, Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco, Vivian La, Anila Yoganathan, Katie Myers, and Clayton Aldern

This coverage is made possible through partnerships between Grist and WABE in Georgia, Blue Ridge Public Radio in North Carolina, Flatwater Free Press in Nebraska, Interlochen Public Radio in Michigan, and WBEZ in Chicago.

In recent years, as the United States has suffered a series of damaging climate disasters, experts have warned that the nation is headed toward a homeowner’s insurance crisis. Rates in Georgia have steadily climbed after a string of natural disasters in the last decade, increasing 24% from 2023-2025. They’re expected to rise another 10% in 2026 according to a new report from the price comparison firm Insurify — one of the largest projected spikes in the country this year.

Across the US, insurance companies have dropped hundreds of thousands of customers who live in areas vulnerable to hurricanes and wildfires, and numerous small insurers have gone belly-up after big disasters. This has led some to forecast that a broader market failure in disaster-prone states is looming, or even a housing market collapse. 

That has not happened yet. But in the meantime, insurance has gotten a lot more expensive — and the price hikes are not going anywhere. The Insurify report found that the average American homeowner’s insurance bill rose 12 percent last year, reaching $2,948 per year, and will rise another 4 percent this year. This is much faster than overall inflation for the same period. (These numbers don’t include flood insurance, which instead most often requires a separate plan, backed by the federal government.)

There are a lot of factors behind these rising bills: Insurance companies consider the value of a home, the cost of the materials needed to rebuild it, and even the credit scores of the homeowner. But the primary culprits are the rising damage toll of extreme weather as the planet warms and the millions of new homes developers have built in vulnerable areas. Insured losses from natural catastrophes in the U.S. averaged $100 billion a year between 2023 and 2025, up from an annual average of around $15 billion per year a decade earlier, according to the Insurance Information Institute. 

“When you have these big catastrophes, it’s not just that insurers have to pay out a lot of plans, it’s that they’re all happening fast,” said Matt Brannon, the senior economic analyst at Insurify and the author of the new report. “It creates extreme financial risk for insurers, and they tend to respond to this risk by raising their rates.”

While prices are increasing in almost every state, Brannon says the most eye-watering prices are concentrated in a few regions. Below, we break down some of these hotspots using this new data. We look at where climate change and extreme weather have caused rates to surge in recent years, and which places could feel the pain next.

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Georgia

Past: 24% rise since 2023

Projected: 10% rise by the end of 2026

Hurricane Helene was among the deadliest and most expensive hurricanes ever to hit Georgia, killing 37 people, damaging tens of thousands of homes and buildings, and dealing a $5.5 million blow to the state’s agriculture and forestry industries. Those losses are driving a second year of home insurance rate hikes for Georgia, where Insurify projects a 10 percent increase in premiums in 2026 following a 9 percent increase in 2025. The impact is spread out over multiple years because of local regulations that make it tougher to quickly raise rates, according to Brannon. Neighboring Florida, by contrast, saw an 18 percent jump in 2025 because insurers were able to react quickly to heavy losses from Helene, but is expecting more modest increases this year.

This is an ongoing pattern in Georgia, where insurers consistently collect less money in premiums than they dole out in claims, a figure known as the combined ratio. Georgia ranked third in the U.S. by that metric in 2024 and underperformed compared to the country as a whole for most of the decade before. That means that while Georgia’s rates are cheaper than many other states, they’re artificially low compared to the actual risks. 

Georgia’s lagging insurance rates are now bumping up against a steep increase in damage and risk from hurricanes. Although the state’s coastline, as the Insurify report notes, is relatively small — only about 100 miles — Georgia has taken repeated hits from hurricanes in the last decade. Climate change is also spreading those impacts across much more of the state. Hurricanes and tropical storms typically weaken and break up over land, but warmer temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico are making storms stronger when they make landfall. That in turn means they remain powerful — and damaging — as they track across inland Georgia. 

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There is no easy way out of this problem, no matter what disasters a state is facing. State regulators can’t just refuse insurance companies the permission to raise prices, because then those companies will drop customers or leave the market altogether, as has happened in California. Many states offer their own “public option,” such as Florida Citizen’s and the California FAIR Plan, but these backstops tend to provide worse coverage, and they’re often more expensive than the private market. Such options can also pull money from a state’s tax base, which raises a fairness issue — why should every taxpayer have to fund insurance for those who live in the most expensive and disaster-prone homes?

The only real solution to rising prices — other than slowing down climate change itself — is to reduce the amount of property that is at risk from natural disasters. That entails renovating, rebuilding, or relocating millions of properties across dozens of states until major disasters no longer cause billions of dollars in damages. The cost of disasters such as flooding has gone down over the last century when compared against the value of property exposed to those disasters, indicating that some adaptation has already happened, but it needs to happen even faster.

A recent report from the Natural Resources Defense Council predicted the U.S. could be “an uninsurable country” if no action is taken, and Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse warned that the insurance collapse could cause a “2008 or worse” recession.

The question is who should pay for this. Most individual homeowners don’t have thousands of dollars to spend on new roofs and walls, and states don’t have billions of dollars to hand out for retrofits. Developers tend to resist building codes that require tougher homes, and insurance companies themselves are hesitant to pay for customer upgrades and then have their customers depart for other providers, depriving the insurer of any cost saving. 

The solution may be some mix of all these policies. In another recent report from the Natural Resources Defense Council, researchers argue that states should impose surcharges on their insurers and use the money to fund roof upgrades and vegetation clearance, targeting the most vulnerable homes that are driving claims. North Carolina and Alabama have both scaled such programs. Lawmakers could also upgrade building rules for new homes, imposing a cost on developers, as Florida did following Hurricane Andrew in 1992. Meanwhile, the legislature in Colorado has weighed creating a state-run “reinsurance” program, which would provide a financial backstop for smaller insurers and reduce their costs.

But until we reduce the risk profile of the nation’s homes, the price increases are unlikely to stop, according to Carolyn Kousky, an expert on disaster insurance and former University of Pennsylvania economist who runs the Insurance For Good project, which advocates for just disaster insurance frameworks. 

“We see in the hotspots of climate risk that the premiums have even outpaced [other costs],” she said. “Until we actually focus much more heavily on loss reduction and climate adaptation, that will continue to be a challenge.”