Why California Home Insurance Premiums Are Rising — And What To Do If You’re Non-Renewed

California's home insurance market has changed more in the last few years than in the previous few decades — and if you've opened a renewal notice recently and felt your stomach drop, you're not imagining it.

Why premiums keep climbing

A few forces are hitting homeowners at the same time. Wildfire risk modeling has gotten far more precise, and insurers are pricing properties individually rather than by broad regional averages — so a home near open hillside or dense brush can see a very different rate than one a few miles away, even in the same zip code. Reinsurance (the insurance that carriers themselves buy to cover catastrophic losses) has gotten dramatically more expensive industry-wide, and that cost flows directly into what you pay. On top of that, California's rate-approval process moves slowly compared to other states, which has led some carriers to conclude it's easier to write less business here than to keep chasing rate adequacy.

We've placed policies through this market for over 40 years, and we've watched carriers that were once dependable, competitively priced options either stop writing new home policies in California altogether or pull back sharply on the risks they'll accept. For some of our own long-time clients, we've seen renewal premiums come in two to three times what they paid just a few years earlier — not because anything changed about their home, but because the market itself shifted underneath them.

What happens if your carrier drops you

If you get a non-renewal notice, the worst thing you can do is nothing. A gap in coverage — even a short one — can complicate financing, and it puts your home at real risk in between. Here's the order we'd actually walk a client through:

1. Don't wait for the notice to reach its deadline. The moment you know a non-renewal is coming, that's the moment to start shopping the risk, not the week before it takes effect.
2. The admitted market isn't the only option. When standard, "admitted" carriers won't write a property, that's exactly where wholesale and surplus lines markets exist — specialty carriers built to take on higher-risk properties that standard insurers won't touch. This is a different shopping process than a typical quote, and it's where having a broker with real wholesale relationships matters most.
3. The California FAIR Plan is a real, legitimate backstop — not a last resort to be ashamed of. It's a basic fire policy, though, not full homeowners coverage, so it's usually paired with a separate policy (a "DIC," or difference-in-conditions policy) to fill in the coverage the FAIR Plan doesn't include. Structuring that pairing correctly is where a lot of homeowners get it wrong on their own.
4. Ask what you can actually do to the property, not just the policy. Hardening steps — a Class A roof, ember-resistant vents, defensible space around the structure — increasingly affect both your eligibility and your rate, and some carriers now factor them into pricing directly.

The honest version

Nobody can promise you a low rate on a high-risk property right now — and we'd rather tell you that plainly than sell you a number that won't hold up at binding. What we can promise is that we'll tell you exactly what your real options are, including the ones a lot of shopping tools and call centers simply don't have access to, and we'll walk you through it the same way we would for our own family.

If you've received a non-renewal notice, or you're bracing for one at your next renewal, reach out before the deadline gets close. The earlier we start, the more options are actually on the table.