This coverage is made possible through a partnership between BPR and Grist, a nonprofit environmental media organization.
New data from a national insurance-comparison platform, Insurify, shows that homeowner’s insurance rates are rising across the nation – in many cases, due to climate risk.
Insurify projects North Carolina’s insurance premiums to rise only by about 5% in 2026, and have risen 14% overall since 2023, though rates actually fell a little in 2024. Compared to other high climate-risk states, the premiums are fairly flat — but there’s more to the story.
Between 1980 and 2024, North Carolina’s seen 121 billion-dollar disasters with an average of over seven billion-dollar disasters per year since 2020, according to climate data from the National Centers for Environmental Information.
North Carolina has had an interesting few years when it comes to insurance premiums. The state’s rate bureau asked for a 42% rate hike last year, citing both increased risky development in hurricane-prone coastal areas and billions of dollars in storm damage from Hurricane Helene. The state insurance commissioner granted just a 7.5% increase.
Much of the damage incurred by North Carolina homeowners over the past several years is flood damage from extreme, multi-billion-dollar storms like Helene in Western North Carolina, and Florence in the coastal region, but flooding damage is not covered by homeowners’ insurance.
Other storm damage is covered in certain cases, like wind-related tree damage, but that too is proving to be problematic. One homeowner, Bob Tatum in Avery County, N.C., told BPR that his State Farm homeowners’ insurance – with a premium of $2,000 per year – wouldn’t cover tree and wind damage after it totaled his house during Hurricane Helene. Because the trees had pushed his house off its foundation, it had flooded.
“They kept saying, ‘No, it's flood,’ they wasn't going to cover anything.” Tatum said. He had previously had flood insurance for $9,000 per year, but had quit because it was so expensive.
“In North Carolina and in higher-risk coastal states, insurers are not providing coverage, like in your base home policy plan, for things like high wind damage,” said Jayson O’Neill, a spokesperson for Unlocking America’s Future, which recently released a report on North Carolina’s insurance trends. A quarter of homeowners’ insurance claims after Helene were closed without payment last year, according to data from the North Carolina Department of Insurance. Furthermore, some insurance companies are abandoning the state, or risk-prone swaths of it, entirely. Insurance company Nationwide, for example, dropped 10,000 customers in hurricane-prone zip codes of coastal North Carolina in 2024. O’Neill believes these denials keep rate increases on the moderate side — with upfront costs to homeowners.
Finally, a “consent to rate” loophole in state law allows companies to directly ask homeowners to approve monthly increases, which can open the door to future increases for individual households.
It’s a delicate balance, according to Mike Causey, the state’s Commissioner of Insurance. “You can't run the companies out of business, or we'd all be in trouble,” Causey said. “So, we've been trying to keep the increase as close to zero as possible.”
Jake Bittle, Emily Jones, Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco, Vivian La, Anila Yoganathan, and Clayton Aldern contributed to this story. You can read the national version here.
