For the past two years, insurance premiums have kept going up, but by a little less each year. That’s the national trend, and it’s the reason many people assume the insurance market is finally settling down. Whether that’s actually true depends heavily on which state you’re in, and getting it wrong with a buyer can cost more than credibility.
Christi Burkhardt, Vice President of National Sales and Growth at Westwood Insurance Agency, breaks down what the state-by-state data really shows and how builders can put it to work this fall.
Ask a builder in California and a builder in Florida how the insurance market is affecting their buyers right now, and it’s likely you’ll get two different answers. Both would be right. Knowing which answer applies to which market is what turns a vague sense that “insurance is stabilizing” into something a sales team can actually use with a buyer.
What the national number doesn’t show
New research from S&P Global Market Intelligence (GMI) shows the U.S. effective approved homeowners rate change has <a href="https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2026/08/13/881295.htm” rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank”>fallen fast — from roughly 13.6% in 2024, to about 6.3% in 2025, to just 1.8% through July 2026. On its own, that number reads as good news: The insurance market is easing.
S&P GMI’s own explanation adds important context. The firm describes 2026 as entering a “fragmented, state-by-state” phase. The national average is falling in large part because some states have already completed their rate corrections — the process where regulators approve the rate increases insurance companies need to catch up with rising rebuild costs and disaster losses — while others are still working through theirs.
A cooling average doesn’t mean every state is cooling at the same pace. It means the states furthest along are pulling the national number down, even as others continue to see increases.
The National Association of Insurance Commissioners arrived at a comparable finding through an entirely different lens. Its first national analysis of homeowners insurance data, built from seven years of state-level reporting, found inflation-adjusted premiums up 18% in the Northeast, 25% in the Midwest, 27% in the Southeast and 43% in the West, with non-renewal rates climbing between 96% and 216% depending on the region. Regulators describe a market that remains outwardly steady while still working through real, uneven pressure underneath.
Two organizations, working from two very different data sets, arrived at the same useful insight: There isn’t one insurance market to track. There are many, moving at their own pace. For a builder, that means the same sentence about insurance conditions can be accurate in one division and misleading in another.
A closer look at builder confidence
That same regional variation shows up in builder sentiment. The National Association of Home Builders’ (NAHB) Housing Market Index, which measures builder perceptions of current and future new home sales conditions on a scale where 50 marks the line between positive and negative sentiment, ticked up slightly to 35 nationally in August — the 16th straight month below 40, a threshold NAHB has flagged as a sign of sustained weakness.
The regional breakdown tells a more layered story: the Midwest held at 45, the Northeast eased to 44, the South dropped to 31 and the West sat at 27. NAHB Chairman Bill Owens pointed to the Midwest as a “bright spot,” citing new home sales up more than 2% there so far this year.
Comparing that regional confidence map to the regional insurance data reveals something builders can put to direct use: the two don’t always move together. A division seeing strong buyer demand may be operating in a state where carriers are pulling back and non-renewals are rising, meaning insurance could still be a real point of buyer hesitation even in a strong sales market.
A division in a slower sales market may actually be in one of the more stable insurance states, meaning insurance certainty could be a genuine differentiator worth highlighting even when other parts of the pitch are harder to make. Knowing both maps, rather than just one, changes what a sales team should be saying in each market.
Why this matters
This isn’t a temporary mismatch that resolves itself by year-end. Rebuild costs, tied in part to the price of imported materials, continue to push up replacement values and insurance premiums in some states, even as rate filings — the requests insurance companies submit to state regulators for approval to raise or lower what they charge — have slowed in others. That means the regional differences builders are seeing now are likely to shape budgets, pricing and buyer conversations well into next year.
For a builder in one state, that’s a reason to keep sales messaging current with local conditions rather than relying on the national headline. For a builder operating across multiple states or divisions, it’s a reason to check whether every division is actually getting market-specific insurance guidance, or whether some are still working off assumptions that stopped being accurate months ago.
How builders can get ahead of it
The builders who navigate this well over the next several months will be the ones who treat regional variation as something to plan for, not something to wait out. That starts with working alongside an insurance partner who already has the insurance company relationships and state-level knowledge to inform each division. That kind of partner can tell each market what’s actually happening on the ground and equip sales teams with buyer-ready answers, rather than a one-size-fits-all message.
Westwood was built for this. With relationships across more than 60 insurance companies nationwide, Westwood can track a California market and a North Carolina market on their own timelines, giving every buyer a reliable insurance experience no matter where they’re closing.
Founded by a home builder more than 70 years ago, Westwood specializes in new construction homes and delivers embedded insurance with market-specific guidance for every division, so builders can sell with confidence and buyers can close with certainty, no matter the market.
