Homeowners insurance premiums have been increasing across the United States, driven in part by the escalating frequency of climate disasters such as wildfires and tropical storms. A new survey from Realtor.com® finds that recent and prospective homebuyers are anticipating higher insurance premiums…if they can afford premiums at all.
The survey, conducted among 1,000 new or recent homebuyers from Aug. 7 – 8, builds on Realtor.com’s 2025 climate report, which found that about a quarter of U.S. homes are exposed to some type of extreme weather risk. Eighty-eight percent of those polled believe they will pay more for homeowners insurance—42% said they already experienced a price increase. Seventy-five percent of those surveyed said they believe that homeowners insurance could ultimately become unaffordable.
In comments included in the report, Realtor.com Chief Economist Danielle Hale noted that while homeowners insurance offers protection against home damage, the upfront costs of the insurance have climbed more and more. Responses from some new and prospective homebuyers in the survey suggest that at least some no longer see the upfront insurance costs as worth it or feasible.
“Homeowners are looking for strategies to lower costs, including adjusting their home searches and potentially short-charging or forgoing coverage altogether,” Hale observed.
Fifty-eight percent of those surveyed said they would forgo home insurance if it becomes unaffordable. Among new and prospective Gen Z buyers specifically, 76% said they would forgo insurance if it were to become unaffordable. The survey notes, though, that these young buyers are likely to buy with a mortgage, making homeowners insurance a prerequisite.
According to the survey, 33.7% of home searchers have completely changed the area they’re looking to buy a home in due to high insurance costs; another 30% expanded their search area. However, only 30% of those surveyed looked into an area or home’s natural disaster risk, though 44% surveyed said they plan to do so in the future.
The tendency to change home-buying strategy based on insurance costs largely correlates to age, with younger homebuyers being more likely to do so. For instance, 30.5% of Gen Z buyers said they changed their buying strategy based on insurance costs, compared to 25.9% of millennials, 19.9% of Gen Xers and only 5.9% of Baby Boomers.
Gen Z, millennial and Gen X buyers were almost equally likely to expand their search area based on insurance costs (32.5%, 32.2% and 32.8%, respectively), while only 15.8% of surveyed Baby Boomers reported doing so.
The opposite trend is seen among respondents who said that insurance costs had brought no change to their home search; 32.9% of Baby Boomer respondents said this was the case for them. Conversely, 14.9% of Gen X respondents said so, while 16% of millennials and 15.9% of Gen Zers said the same.
The report also notes that, naturally, high disaster-risk climates are the ones most likely to see high insurance premiums. For example, single-family homeowners using an HO-3 policy (the most common type) in one of the 100 largest U.S. metro areas face the highest premiums in Miami, Florida: 3.7% of the home’s value. It remains to be seen how/if homebuyer wariness of insurance costs will drive migration to high insurance-cost areas.
For the full Realtor.com write-up, click here.
