NAIC's First National Homeowners Baseline Shows Non-Renewals Up 216% in the West

Company-initiated homeowners non-renewals per 1,000 policies in force rose 216% in the Western Zone and 96% in the Southeast between 2018 and 2024, while inflation-adjusted average premium per policy climbed 18.3% to 43.3% across the four NAIC zones (NAIC Center for Insurance Policy and Research, August 5, 2026).

That is the headline of the first countrywide baseline regulators have built from seven years of Market Conduct Annual Statement data, and it establishes the numbers state rate filings will now be measured against.

Key Takeaways

2,019,799 company-initiated non-renewals against 5,819,825 nonpayment cancellations in 2024, a national non-renewal rate of 19.6 per 1,000 policies against 10.5 in 2022.
The Western Zone's non-renewal-to-nonpayment ratio went from 15% in 2022 to 46% in 2024. The Midwest moved 11% to 27%, the Northeast 12% to 24%, the Southeast 28% to 34%.
The countrywide effective rate sat 2.2% below its 2018 baseline in 2024 once premium is divided by median home value, which rose 56% nationally from $229,700 to $360,600.
The Midwest posted a negative 5.9% underwriting result in 2024, a fourth consecutive year trailing the other three zones, on a 21.6% claim severity increase since 2018.

What Seven Years of MCAS Data Show

The report was authored by Jeffrey Czajkowski and Paula Harms of the NAIC's Center for Insurance Policy and Research and finalized July 31, 2026, then released publicly five days later. It draws on the Market Conduct Annual Statement, the uniform data collection the NAIC built in 2002 so state departments of insurance could monitor company-level market behavior rather than relying on group-level financial filings.

For each zone, the authors tracked six fields for every company writing more than $50,000 in annual direct premium: policies in force, direct premium written, claims closed with payment, company-initiated non-renewals, company-initiated cancellations after the effective date, and cancellations for nonpayment. In 2024, 715 companies wrote 103,289,334 policies in force and $165.2 billion in direct premium, an average of $1,600 per policy.

NAIC Zone	Avg. Premium/Policy, 2024	Real Premium Growth, 2018–24	Non-Renewal Rate/1,000, 2024	Non-Renewal Growth, 2018–24	Claim Freq./1,000, 2024	2024 UW Profit (% DPE)
Northeast	$1,396	18.3%	11.7	+147%	45.7	23.3
Midwest	$1,476	24.7%	14.2	+125%	76.2	−5.9
Southeast	$1,818	26.5%	22.0	+96%	90.1	−0.2
Western	$1,600	43.3%	25.1	+216%	63.4	6.7

Converting the 18.3% to 43.3% cumulative, inflation-adjusted premium moves into an annual pace puts the range at roughly 2.4% a year in the Northeast to about 5.3% a year in the Western Zone. Set against a national average claim severity of $13,349 per closed claim in 2024, the premium trend reads less like margin expansion and more like insurers catching up to a loss cost curve that outran pricing for several years.

The report is explicit that the sharpest premium and non-renewal moves landed in 2023 and 2024 rather than evenly across the seven-year window, which matters for any actuary treating 2018 through 2024 as a smooth trend line.

Non-Renewals Are Outrunning Nonpayment

The consequential number sits in Table 7 of the report: the ratio of company-initiated non-renewals to nonpayment cancellations. In the Western Zone that ratio ran 15% in 2022 and reached 46% by 2024. The Southeast moved from 28% to 34%, the Midwest from 11% to 27%, and the Northeast from 12% to 24%.

Nonpayment cancellations are largely a normal feature of any insurance market: policyholders switch carriers, and the churn is not a signal of insurer distress. Company-initiated non-renewals are the insurer choosing not to continue coverage, and nationally they ran 2,019,799 in 2024 against 5,819,825 nonpayment cancellations, a rate of 19.6 per 1,000 policies in force against 10.5 in 2022.

A persistency assumption built on a blended lapse rate is now materially mis-specified in every zone, most severely in the West. If a book's historical experience carries a 20% company-driven share embedded in an aggregate churn number from three years ago, applying that blend to a 2024 or 2025 accident year understates how much of next year's non-renewal volume is underwriting-driven exposure management rather than voluntary policyholder movement. A company shedding policies through non-renewal is self-selecting against the tail of its own book, which should show up as improving loss ratios on the retained population.

A third lever runs the other way and is easy to overlook. Company-initiated cancellations after the policy effective date, excluding rewrites to a related company, fell 8% to 23% across all four zones since 2018 even as non-renewals climbed, standing at 852,908 nationwide in 2024. Carriers are consolidating exposure management into the renewal decision, the administratively cleaner lever for a regulator to review.

Normalizing premium against home values flips part of the picture. Dividing average premium per policy by state median home value each year, the countrywide effective rate in 2024 sat 2.2% below its 2018 baseline, because median home values rose 56% while premiums rose 18% to 43%. Only the Western Zone, at 4.9% above baseline, priced ahead of home-value appreciation.

What the Zone Averages Smooth Over

Underwriting profit as a percent of direct premium earned turned positive in the Northeast at 23.3% and the Western Zone at 6.7%, and came close to breakeven in the Southeast. The Midwest posted negative 5.9%, a fourth consecutive year trailing the other three, on a claim severity increase of 21.6% since 2018, the largest of any zone and much of it tied to severe convective storm losses (Gallagher Re).

AM Best put the countrywide homeowners combined ratio at 105.7 in 2024, improved from 110.9 in 2023. The two figures are not in conflict; they describe different levels of the same market. A national ratio above 100 is consistent with three zones already back in underwriting profit once the Midwest is heavy enough in loss cost to pull the countrywide average back under.

Dispersion inside a state is wider still. Nationally, only 6% of MCAS homeowners companies posted a loss cost ratio above 1.0 in 2024, down from 14% in 2023 and 16% in 2022. Arkansas's aggregate homeowners loss ratio hit 1.20 in 2022, implying a statewide underwriting loss, yet 63% of the 93 individual Arkansas MCAS companies that year ran loss cost ratios below 1.0, a share that climbed to 82% by 2024.

The measurement limit is the one to carry into any rate adequacy review. MCAS premium data cannot separate rate increases from coverage changes, so some nominal premium growth may reflect policyholders shifting from standard dollar deductibles to percentage-of-value deductibles to manage affordability, which reads as flat or falling premium even though the insured retained less coverage.

The ZIP-code-level data call regulators launched in March 2026, due June 15, 2026 and covering policy years 2018 through 2025, is what closes that gap (Insurance Journal, April 2026). Until it reports, a zone average has to carry a distribution in which premiums rose across 95% of the country between 2021 and 2024, with more than a third of homeowners seeing increases of 30% or more (Triple-I).

Sources