Review How Many Homeowners Are Not Insured Per State

29 Aug

One of the major costs of owning a home is protecting it with homeowners insurance. This will ensure your home is repaired or rebuilt if it is damage or destroyed by a covered peril. It also helps protect you against lawsuits, theft and even vandalism. If you have a mortgage on your home, your lender will require that you carry homeowners insurance and even if you own it outright you should have a homeowners policy in place, otherwise all repair costs will have to be paid out of pocket. 

However, as insurance costs have increased dramatically over the last few years, more and more homeowners are going without homeowners insurance. According to data from the Consumer Federation of America, a shocking one in 13 U.S. homeowners didn’t have homeowners insurance in 2021, the most recent year for which data is available.

This breaks down to roughly 6.1 million homeowners, or 7.4% of the total.  In purely financial terms, this represents at least $1.6 trillion in unprotected market value.

In a recent press release, the CFA warned that stronger oversight of the insurance industry is necessary as is significant investment in climate change adaptation or the problem of uninsured homes will only continue to grow

“Being uninsured poses a potential threat not only to individual homeowners but also to communities and our national housing stock,” the press release said, adding that the problem can foster “deeper economic precarity for millions of homeowners across the country.”

Here are just a few of the key findings from the CFA’s press release:

  • Homeowners earning less than $50,000 a year are twice as likely to lack insurance compared to homeowners in general. Among lower-income homeowners, 15% are without coverage.
  • Certain demographics of homeowners are disproportionately at risk. Twenty-two percent of Native American homeowners, 14% of Hispanic homeowners and 11% of Black homeowners have no insurance.
  • More than one-third (35%) of owners of manufactured homes and 29% of homeowners who inherited their homes lack coverage.

Rising premiums are one of the major reasons that homeowners are forgoing insurance. According to data from Forbes Advisor, the average homeowners premium has hit $140 per month for a policy with $350,000 worth of dwelling coverage which translates into roughly nearly $1,700 a year.

Here are the estimated percentages of homeowners not carrying coverage in each state:

  • Mississippi: 13% of homeowners
  • New Mexico: 13%
  • Louisiana: 12%
  • West Virginia: 11%
  • Alaska: 11%
  • North Dakota: 11%
  • Alabama: 11%
  • Oklahoma: 11%
  • Florida: 10%
  • Texas: 10%
  • Arkansas: 10%
  • Kentucky: 9%
  • South Carolina: 9%
  • South Dakota: 9%
  • Montana: 9%
  • Kansas: 9%
  • Michigan: 8%
  • Wyoming: 8%
  • Arizona: 8%
  • Indiana: 8%
  • Nebraska: 8%
  • Tennessee: 7%
  • Iowa: 7%
  • Missouri: 7%
  • Maine: 7%
  • Wisconsin: 7%
  • North Carolina: 7%
  • Georgia: 7%
  • Ohio: 7%
  • Minnesota: 6%
  • Hawaii: 6%
  • Rhode Island: 6%
  • Delaware: 6%
  • Nevada: 6%
  • Idaho: 6%
  • New York: 6%
  • Pennsylvania: 6%
  • Vermont: 6%
  • Illinois: 6%
  • Connecticut: 6%
  • Washington: 6%
  • New Jersey: 5%
  • Virginia: 5%
  • Colorado: 5%
  • California: 5%
  • Massachusetts: 5%
  • New Hampshire: 5%
  • Maryland: 5%
  • District of Columbia: 5%
  • Oregon: 5%
  • Utah: 4%

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