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 numbers state rate filings will now be measured against.

What Seven Years of MCAS Data Show

The report, "Examining Homeowner Property Insurance Market Dynamics: An Assessment of Countrywide State-Level Data From 2018 to 2024," 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 pulls from the Market Conduct Annual Statement, a 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 of the four NAIC zones, 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 homeowners policies in force and $165.2 billion in direct premium, an average of $1,600 per policy, according to the report. Virginia Insurance Commissioner and NAIC President Scott White framed the exercise as a data-gap fix rather than an alarm: "As we work to maintain healthy and competitive insurance markets, state insurance regulators are committed to ensuring consumers have access to reliable homeowners insurance coverage" (NAIC, August 2026). The report's own framing is dual: underwriting results improved across all four zones in 2024, and more than half of the 700-plus companies in the dataset wrote fewer policies in 2024 than in 2018. Both statements are true, and neither cancels the other out.

The Cross-Region Series

The report presents its premium, non-renewal, claims, and profitability findings in separate charts by zone. Compiling those series into a single table, an original computation for this analysis rather than something the report itself tabulates, makes the regional dispersion legible in one view.

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, a compound calculation this analysis ran off the report's own inflation-adjusted percentages (NAIC CIPR, August 2026). Set against a national average claim severity of $13,349 per closed claim in 2024, itself up from an inflation-adjusted 2018 baseline in every zone but the Western, 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 running. The report is explicit that the sharpest premium and non-renewal moves landed in 2023 and 2024, not evenly across the seven-year window, which matters for any actuary treating 2018-2024 as a smooth trend line rather than a series that accelerated late.

Normalizing premium against home values rather than inflation flips part of the picture. The NAIC's authors divided average premium per policy by state median home value each year to build an effective rate, roughly a rate per $1,000 of insured value, and found that despite double-digit nominal premium growth, the countrywide effective rate in 2024 sat 2.2% below its 2018 baseline, because median home values rose 56% nationally over the same period, from $229,700 to $360,600, while premiums rose 18% to 43%. The Northeast and Southeast effective rates remained 5.5% and 5.8% below their 2018 baselines in 2024; only the Western Zone, at 4.9% above baseline, priced ahead of home-value appreciation. The report flags a related measurement risk worth carrying into any rate adequacy review: because MCAS premium data cannot separate rate increases from coverage changes, some of the nominal premium growth may reflect policyholders shifting from standard dollar deductibles to percentage-of-value deductibles to manage affordability, a substitution that would show up in the data as flat or falling premium even though the underlying insured retained less coverage, not more favorable pricing.

Non-Renewals Are Outrunning Nonpayment

The more consequential number for a pricing or retention actuary sits in Table 7 of the NAIC report: the ratio of company-initiated non-renewals to nonpayment cancellations. In the Western Zone, non-renewals ran at 15% of the nonpayment-cancellation rate 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, the report notes, 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 a different animal entirely; they are the insurer choosing not to continue coverage.

A persistency or retention assumption built on a blended lapse rate that does not separate these two mechanisms is now materially mis-specified in every zone, and most severely in the West. If a book's historical lapse experience carries, say, a 20% company-driven share embedded in an aggregate churn number from three years ago, applying that same 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. That has direct pricing consequences: 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, exactly the pattern the report's underwriting-profit figures partially confirm.

Nationwide, insurers reported 2,019,799 company-initiated non-renewals in 2024 against 5,819,825 cancellations for nonpayment, a national non-renewal rate of 19.6 per 1,000 policies in force. Three years earlier, in 2022, the total non-renewal rate stood at 10.5 per 1,000, meaning the national rate has nearly doubled inside the most recent three-year window even though the seven-year figures cited in the report's headline (96% to 216%) already looked steep. The compounding is not evenly spread within the period either: Table 6 of the report shows the Midwest and Western Zones nearly tripling their non-renewal rates in just the three years from 2022 to 2024, from 5.5 to 14.2 and from 8.0 to 25.1 per 1,000 policies, respectively.

A third, smaller lever moves in the opposite direction and is easy to overlook next to those two. Company-initiated cancellations after the policy effective date, excluding rewrites to a related company, actually fell 8% to 23% across all four zones since 2018, even as non-renewals climbed. In 2024, insurers reported 852,908 such cancellations nationwide, with the Southeast and Western Zones accounting for 74% of them against roughly 60% of total policies in force. Carriers appear to be consolidating their exposure management into the renewal decision rather than mid-term cancellation, which is the administratively cleaner and more defensible lever for a regulator to review. A reserving actuary building a mid-term cancellation assumption into unearned premium or return-premium liabilities should treat the declining cancellation-after-effective-date trend and the rising non-renewal trend as two sides of the same underwriting-discipline shift, not as independent signals.

National Carriers Pull Back, State-by-State Writers Absorb the Growth

Total homeowners policies in force grew in every zone since 2018, from 7.4% in the Midwest and Northeast to 11.1% in the Southeast, yet the report's Table 2 shows the market getting more concentrated at the same time. In 2024, the ratio of policies in force to the number of homeowners companies operating, a rough proxy for average carrier scale, stood at 107,600 policies per company in the Western Zone, 78,500 in the Southeast, 75,900 in the Midwest, and 49,300 in the Northeast. That ratio has risen in all four zones since 2018 because the number of companies writing homeowners coverage grew only about 1.47% on average over the period while policies in force grew roughly 7.13%, meaning the same or a slightly larger pool of carriers is absorbing nearly five times as much policy growth.

The report's Northeast Zone deep dive shows what sits underneath that aggregate concentration number. Of 370 unique companies that wrote Northeast homeowners business at any point from 2018 to 2024, 263 wrote consistently in every one of the seven years. Fifty-four percent of those 263 companies, 141 carriers, shrank their total Northeast policy count by an average of 38.7% over the period, while the other 122 grew theirs by an average of 60.0%. The growers skew toward companies writing in 14 states or fewer: of 179 consistent state-by-state writers, 47% grew their Northeast book, while among 51 consistent national carriers writing in 31 or more states, also 47% grew and 53% shrank, a split close enough to even that it is the state-by-state segment's larger population, not a sharper directional tilt, driving most of the net absorption. The same pattern repeats in the other three zones: more than half of consistently operating companies (55% in the Midwest and Western Zones, 54% in the Southeast) reduced their policy counts from 2018 to 2024, with state-by-state and regional writers again picking up a disproportionate share of the growth.

That dynamic is the national-scale version of a pattern actuary.info has tracked at the state level in Florida, where Citizens Property Insurance's depopulation program shifted hundreds of thousands of policies from the residual market onto private carriers, many of them state-domestic writers capitalized well below the national multilines they now sit alongside. The NAIC's Northeast and Midwest breakdowns confirm that this is not a Florida-specific artifact of one state's residual-market politics; it is a structural feature of how the countrywide homeowners market is redistributing risk as larger writers reassess concentration in cat-exposed geography. For capital adequacy work, a regional or state-by-state carrier absorbing outsized policy growth in a market where national writers are retreating is, by construction, taking on business that a larger, typically better-capitalized competitor decided it no longer wanted at the price offered. Loss ratio data in the report is mixed on whether that adverse selection is currently showing up in results, smaller Northeast writers ran loss ratios only modestly above national carriers' through 2023 before both converged in 2024, but the underlying capacity shift is the kind of structural change that a static reinsurance program sized to a prior book of business will not automatically track.

Three Zones in the Black, One Still Underwater

Underwriting profit as a percent of direct premium earned turned positive in the Northeast (23.3%), the Western Zone (6.7%), and came close to breakeven in the Southeast (−0.2%) in 2024. The Midwest was the outlier, posting a −5.9% underwriting result, the fourth consecutive year the zone has trailed the other three, driven by a claim severity increase of 21.6% since 2018, the largest of any zone, much of it tied to severe convective storm losses the report links to a Gallagher Re analysis of Midwest cat losses since 2021.

That regional bifurcation sits underneath a national combined ratio that, on its own, tells a flatter story. AM Best put the countrywide homeowners combined ratio at 105.7 in 2024, improved from 110.9 in 2023, still an underwriting loss at the aggregate level (Best's Market Segment Report, August 2025). Read next to the NAIC's zone breakdown, the two figures are not in conflict; they are describing different levels of the same market. A national combined ratio north of 100 is consistent with three zones already back in underwriting-profit territory once the fourth zone, the Midwest, is heavy enough in loss cost to drag the countrywide average back underwater. An actuary benchmarking a single-state or single-zone book against a national industry combined ratio alone would misread how much of that number is a Midwest-specific severity problem versus a broad-market pricing shortfall.

The improvement itself is not uniform even within the positive zones. Loss cost ratio distributions the report pulls from matched NAIC financial data show that 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, and the share of companies below a 0.75 loss cost ratio rose from 64% in 2023 to 81% in 2024. Arkansas illustrates how a state-level headline can mask that dispersion: the state's aggregate homeowners loss ratio hit 1.20 in 2022, implying an underwriting loss for the state as a whole, yet 63% of the 93 individual Arkansas MCAS companies that year had loss cost ratios below 1.0. By 2024, that share had climbed to 82% of Arkansas companies. Wisconsin shows the same pattern at a larger scale: roughly half of its 140 MCAS homeowners companies ran loss cost ratios under 1.0 in 2022, versus more than 80% in both 2023 and 2024.

What the Zone Averages Hide

The report's own caution, that "there is no single national homeowners insurance market and, therefore, no single national solution," is worth taking seriously rather than treating as regulatory hedge language. actuary.info's coverage of individual state filings this year backs it up with texture the zone averages cannot carry. Texas alone accounted for nine of the ten largest homeowners rate filings nationwide in the first quarter of 2026, a concentration the state's file-and-use system permits precisely because it does not require prior regulatory approval before a rate takes effect. California's FAIR Plan raised statewide wildfire-exposed rates 35.8% in April 2026 while some Central Valley homeowners saw cuts of up to 78%, a dispersion inside one state that a Western Zone average of $1,600 per policy and a 25.1 non-renewal rate cannot reveal on its own. Florida's Citizens Property Insurance secured its first rate decrease since 2015 in June 2026, an 8.7% reduction resting on reinsurance, litigation, and non-catastrophe loss conditions that could each reverse independently, a reminder that a Southeast Zone average sitting at breakeven underwriting can still contain states moving in opposite directions simultaneously.

Illinois took a different approach to the same underlying tension: its 2026 rate-review law requires carriers to support homeowners and auto rate changes with credible, state-specific claims data, with a 40-day Department of Insurance objection window that took effect July 1, 2027, after State Farm's 27.2% increase had already cleared under the old regime. That kind of statute is a direct regulatory response to the exact data gap the NAIC's national report was built to close: a state insurance department deciding whether a filed rate is adequately supported needs more than a zone-level average, and more than what a single carrier's own book can show in isolation.

From a Seven-Year Baseline to a ZIP-Code Map

The MCAS analysis is explicitly a placeholder for something more granular. State insurance regulators, coordinated through the NAIC, launched a separate homeowner property insurance market data call in March 2026 that collects ZIP-code-level data from property-casualty insurers representing a significant share of the homeowners market, covering premiums, policies, claims, losses, limits, deductibles, non-renewals, and coverage types. Insurance Journal reported the data call carries a June 15, 2026, submission deadline with no extensions, covering policy years 2018 through 2025, and that regulators plan a public report in early 2027 (Insurance Journal, April 2026). The NAIC's own report calls the MCAS baseline "an initial prelude" to that more comprehensive dataset, and says plainly that MCAS zone-level aggregation cannot show localized protection gaps inside a state that is, on the whole, reporting healthy figures.

That gap matters most for availability, the harder half of the affordability-and-availability pairing regulators keep citing. A rising non-renewal rate at the zone level is a symptom; the ZIP-code data call is designed to show where those non-renewals concentrate geographically, which is the information residual markets and state guaranty mechanisms actually need. Triple-I data show homeowners carriers raised premiums across 95% of the country between 2021 and 2024, with more than a third of homeowners seeing increases of 30% or more, a distribution wide enough that a national or even zone-level average premium figure understates the experience of the households facing the steepest increases (Insurance Information Institute, 2025). Once the 2027 ZIP-level report is public, the same non-renewal-to-nonpayment ratio computed in this analysis at the zone level becomes computable at the ZIP level, which is the resolution at which a state can actually identify where a FAIR Plan or a state-run residual market is likely to see the next wave of policy volume land.

For now, the practical takeaway for a rate or reserving actuary is that the seven-year MCAS baseline gives a defensible floor for testing whether a company's own non-renewal and premium trend looks like an outlier against its zone, without yet being granular enough to say whether that outlier status is a company-specific underwriting decision or a symptom of a geography the zone average is smoothing over. The 2027 data call closes that gap. Until then, the zone-level series compiled here, non-renewal growth outpacing nonpayment cancellation growth in every region, premium growth concentrated in the last two years of the study period, and underwriting results diverging sharply between the Midwest and the other three zones, is the most detailed national reference point regulators and carriers have.

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