New data compiled from 2025 filings that insurers make with the National Association of Insurance Commissioners shows that Utah carriers declined to renew 4.45% of homeowners policies in force last year - about one in every 22 policies. That is 8.4 times the state's 2018 nonrenewal rate and more than 2.6 times its 2024 figure, according to an analysis released September 8 by Weiss Ratings.
A year ago, Utah ranked 17th worst in the country on this measure. It now sits at No. 1.
"In a very short period of time, Utah has gone from a warning to the nation's loudest alarm bell," Weiss Ratings founder Dr. Martin D. Weiss said in the report.
Utah's homeowners insurance market has long been cited as one of the country's more affordable, with premiums running well below the national average even as the state absorbed rapid population growth. That reputation is now colliding with a mounting wildfire threat: large swaths of the state sit inside the wildland-urban interface, and homebuilding has continued to expand into fire-exposed terrain even as loss activity climbs.
California, by contrast, has been the more familiar face of insurer retrenchment for years, and its 2025 numbers show why the state remains a cautionary tale rather than a one-off event. Company-initiated nonrenewals in California came in at 2.93% of policies in force in 2025, about one in 34, placing the state second worst nationally. That is down slightly from 2024, when Weiss found California's nonrenewal rate had climbed to 3.18%, but it is still 3.6 times higher than the state recorded back in 2018.
The more consequential story, industry watchers say, is what happens after a nonrenewal notice lands. Homeowners who lose admitted coverage frequently end up shopping in the surplus lines, or excess and surplus (E&S), market a segment of the industry built to underwrite unusual or elevated risks that standard insurers won't touch. Surplus lines carriers are not bound by the same rate-approval processes as admitted insurers, and so have been able to step in to help embattled homeowners.
California again illustrates how far that migration can travel once it gets underway. Homeowners surplus-lines premiums written in the state rose from $85 million in 2018 to $1.3 billion last year a 15-fold jump.
Utah's version of that shift is still small in dollar terms but is scaling quickly. Surplus-lines homeowners premiums in the state grew from $1.1 million in 2018 to $13.7 million in 2025 a 12.3-fold increase that roughly tracks the trajectory California saw several years ago, before its own surplus market ballooned into the billions.
The Utah findings land as state and federal regulators are already pressing insurers for more granular data on where coverage is thinning out. Earlier this year, the NAIC launched a nationwide, ZIP-code-level homeowners data call, described by regulators as the most comprehensive such effort ever undertaken - built in part on a prior agreement between the U.S. Treasury's Federal Insurance Office and the NAIC to standardize how homeowners' market stress gets tracked and reported nationally.
For brokers and agents working Utah's residential book, the immediate implication is practical: clients who have never had trouble renewing a policy may now need to be steered toward E&S markets earlier in the renewal cycle, with the accompanying conversation about cost, coverage limits, and the absence of guaranty-fund protection that comes with a nonadmitted policy.
Whether the state responds with the kind of moratoriums, insurer-of-last-resort expansion, or mitigation incentives that California and Florida have each tried in various forms (and have largely failed) remains to be seen.
