LexisNexis Risk Solutions has released its 2026 US Home Trends Report, an annual analysis of by-peril claims trends in the US home insurance market, and this year's edition showed severity reaching an all-time high even as overall claims frequency continued its post-pandemic decline.
The report found that All Peril severity rose 25.9% from 2024 to 2025 and was up 93.2%, compared with 2019. All Peril loss cost fell 4.4% and frequency dropped 23.8% year over year, but loss cost remained the third highest in seven years and 50% above 2019 levels, showing how much more expensive individual claims have become even as fewer of them occur.
The report tied much of that severity increase to an unusually costly year for catastrophic weather. The US recorded 23 climate disasters causing $1 billion or more in damage during 2025, totaling $115 billion, the third-highest annual figure on record. The January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires, including the Palisades and Eaton fires, accounted for more than half of that total at an estimated $61.2 billion, making them the costliest wildfire event in US history.
Fire and Lightning were the defining peril of the year as a result, with loss cost up 76.8%, frequency up 6.0% and severity up 67.3% year over year, almost entirely attributable to the January fires.
George Hosfield, vice president and general manager of home insurance at LexisNexis Risk Solutions, said the findings reflect a market under sustained strain.
"US home insurers continue to face increasing pressure and uncertainty as they contend with a 'perfect storm' of rising severity, rising inflation-driven replacement costs and a reshaping of loss patterns in the face of shifting climate-driven catastrophes," Hosfield said.
Meanwhile, wind loss cost fell 50.4% and severity dropped 12.0% from 2024 to 2025, largely reflecting fewer catastrophe wind claims, though a central US tornado outbreak in mid-March was still the second-costliest billion-dollar weather event of the year, at an estimated $11 billion. Hail loss cost fell 38.4% from its seven-year high in 2023, while severity held roughly flat.
Among non-weather perils, non-weather-related water loss cost fell 6.4% and frequency dropped 7.8% from 2024 to 2025, but severity rose 2.5%, and has climbed 63.16% since 2019, which the report attributes largely to inflation and rising material and labor costs tied to water damage remediation.
Liability loss cost fell 4.0% and frequency dropped 14.6% year over year, but severity rose 12.8%. LexisNexis said this pattern may point to social inflation, the trend in which liability claims costs rise faster than general economic inflation due to increasing litigation costs.
The strain the report documented is drawing a coordinated regulatory response.
At its 2026 Spring National Meeting in March, the National Association of Insurance Commissioners issued a nationwide Homeowners Market Data Call, described by the NAIC as the most comprehensive collection of homeowners insurance policy data ever assembled in the US. All 50 jurisdictions agreed to participate. The call required insurers writing at least $50,000 in relevant premium to submit ZIP-code-level data spanning policy years 2018 through 2025, covering premiums, claims and losses by peril, deductibles, cancellations, non-renewals, coverage limits, replacement cost versus actual cash value, and mitigation discounts, with submissions due by June 15, 2026, and a public report expected in early 2027.
Florida Insurance Commissioner Mike Yaworsky, who chairs the NAIC's Homeowners Market Data Call Task Force, said the effort would help regulators speed resilience efforts, prepare for severe weather and ensure insurers hold enough capital to pay claims quickly when policyholders need it most.
The report's California findings sit alongside a broader body of evidence that the state's homeowners insurance market remains under pressure well beyond the immediate wildfire footprint.
Research published by Stanford's Climate and Energy Policy Program in June 2026 found that average California homeowners insurance premiums rose 84% between the end of 2020 and March 2026, while average deductibles climbed from $1,813 to $2,553 over the same period. The state's FAIR Plan, its insurer of last resort, covered about 5% of California's single-family homes as of March 2026, up from roughly 1.5% at the end of 2020, and backed close to 6% of new single-family mortgage originations, according to the same research.
Seven of California's 12 largest home insurers have reduced or halted new underwriting in the state in recent years, a retrenchment that has pushed a growing share of both high-risk and moderate-risk properties into the FAIR Plan, which by statute covers only fire, smoke, lightning and in-home explosion damage, leaving many policyholders to buy supplemental coverage to fill the gaps.
Hosfield said the way forward is translating these broad trends into property-level insight. "The real opportunity for carriers is using those trends to help better understand what to look for at the individual-property level," he said.
Taken together, the NAIC's nationwide data call and California's own deepening reliance on its insurer of last resort point to the same underlying shift: regulators and carriers alike are now racing to measure, at the individual-property level, a pattern of rising severity and shrinking private-market capacity that this year's LexisNexis data suggests is still accelerating rather than stabilizing.
