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By Giulia Carbonaro
Senior Reporter
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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.
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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.
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How Have California and Florida Brought Things Around?
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.
"Florida’s insurance market has shown vast improvement since legislative reform addressed the factors causing the state’s man-made risk crisis: legal system abuse and assignment of benefits claim fraud," Mark Friedlander of the Insurance Information Institute (Triple-I) told Newsweek.
"New lawsuit filings have declined 50 percent since 2020, reducing legal defense expenses for insurers. This has led to statewide rate reductions. During the first half of 2026, average home insurance premiums decreased in 51 of 67 Florida counties," he added.
"Additionally, state-backed Citizens Property Insurance Corp. has reduced its risk exposure by more than 1 million customers via depopulation as a stabilized private market has taken on this risk. Citizens has reached a historic low of less than 300,000 active policies, with market share declining from 15 percent to 2 percent. More than 20 new insurers have entered Florida, and existing national and regional insurers are growing their market share across the state."
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.
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Why Are Non-Renewals Rising in Utah, of All Places?
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. Martin D. Weiss said in a statement. "A homeowner who has paid premiums faithfully for years can suddenly be forced to hunt for replacement coverage that may be more expensive and less protective."
As it has been the case in California and Florida, not only homeowners are seeing options for coverage disappearing from the market, but those lucky enough to hold on to their policies are facing much higher premiums.
According to the Consumer Federation of America, homeowners insurance premiums in The Beehive State surged by an average of 59 percent from 2021 to 2024—the highest percentage jump in the country.
Since then, premiums have continued climbing: according to Insurify, Utah homeowners now pay an average of $1,548 per year ($129 per month) for a standard policy with $300,000 in dwelling coverage and a $1,000 deductible.
Despite the increases, Utah homeowners still pay less than the national average for insurance, which currently is estimated at $2,808 per year for the same policy. But this affordability advantage is quickly eroding, and for one reason only: the growing risk of wildfires facing the state.
This is why carriers are increasingly refusing to renew homeowners’ policies, especially as the state has continued to build homes in fire-exposed terrain over the past few years to keep up with its rapid population growth.
This rapid growth in wildfire-prone areas, combined with rising losses from wind and hail storms and higher rebuilding costs, have pushed insurers to become far more aggressive about managing catastrophe exposure.
As a result, carriers are raising premiums and increasingly declining to renew policies in areas they consider too risky, pushing Utah from a relatively affordable insurance market to the nation’s highest homeowner nonrenewal rate last year.
What Happens Next?
At this point, Utah lawmakers and regulators appear to be more focused on wildfire-risk mitigation and insurer transparency than on directly restricting nonrenewals, as California has done.
Last year, the state enacted HB 48, or Wildland Urban Interface Modifications, a measure requiring the state to develop official wildfire-risk maps and identify high-risk wildland-urban interface (WUI) areas. Under this bill, insurers writing coverage in high-risk WUI areas must reference Utah's official wildfire-risk maps when evaluating properties.
Newsweek contacted the Utah Insurance Department for comment by email on Thursday morning and is awaiting a response.
Meanwhile, the surge in nonrenewals in the state is pushing more homeowners towards surplus-lines premiums, which have grown from $1.1 million to $13.7 million between 2018 and 2025, according to Weiss Ratings.
In simple words, a homeowner who first tried to buy coverage from a traditional, state-regulated insurer such as State Farm, Allstate or Farmers, but has failed to obtain it, may have to turn to the surplus-lines market.
Surplus-lines insurers specialize in risks that standard insurers may not want to cover, such as homes in wildfire-prone areas, coastal properties exposed to hurricanes, high-value or unusual properties, and properties with previous claims histories. Because the risks are considered greater, surplus-lines policies are often more expensive, subject to fewer rate regulations and not protected by state guaranty funds if the insurer becomes insolvent.
The increase reported in Utah fits into the findings of a recent report by the Climate Cabinet Education, which found that, as traditional insurers retreat, more homeowners are being pushed into a market that was originally designed for unusual risks, not to become a substitute for basic homeowners insurance.
While the market remains relatively small, the rapid rise of homeowners having to rely on the surplus-line market could be an early warning sign that insurance is becoming harder to obtain and afford in parts of the state most exposed to wildfire risk—an alarm bell the rest of the country should also be listening to.
Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Ben Kelly and James Debens
Update, 09/10/26 11:14 a.m. ET: This article was updated with a comment from Mark Friedlander.
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