New data shows that Utah is now a major epicenter in the national homeowners insurance crisis. Other Western states are also in trouble.
The numbers come from the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, which represents state industry regulators. In 2025, roughly 4.5% of Utah homeowners policies — or nearly 1 in 20 — were not renewed by insurance providers. That’s the highest rate in the country, and 1.5% higher than the number two state, California. It’s also well more than double the 1.73% nonrenewal rate Utah saw in 2024, according to the NAIC.
Utah Republican state Rep. Matt MacPherson called the data “very troubling.”
“The jump in nonrenewals is raising a lot of eyebrows, and it should,” he told the Mountain West News Bureau. He said he’s exploring potential legislative responses.
Dave Jones, director of UC Berkeley’s Climate Risk Initiative, said the record-high nonrenewal rate is “very bad news for homeowners in Utah.”
Jones served eight years as California’s insurance commissioner, a tenure that included the state’s devastating 2018 Camp Fire, which killed dozens and largely destroyed the town of Paradise. He said it’s climate change-fueled disasters like that, as well as increasingly powerful storms and the damaging winds and hail they bring, that are destabilizing insurance markets across the West.
Because insurance is required for mortgage holders, he said rising nonrenewals can have serious downstream impacts.
“The net result is very bad for mortgage availability, the ability of people to get a mortgage, the ability of people to maintain a mortgage, and then overall the home and real estate market,” Jones explained.
Those who are nonrenewed can also find themselves forced into so-called “last resort insurance policies” — often called FAIR plans. But in states like Utah, which doesn’t have a FAIR plan, those customers may have to turn to surplus line policies, which don’t have to follow many of the rules that state-licensed plans do.
State officials in neighboring Idaho warn consumers that surplus lines can be more expensive, have limited coverage and higher deductibles and drop customers midyear.
“A healthy insurance market does not rely on surplus lines for traditional products, like homeowners’ coverage,” a fact sheet from the Idaho Department of Insurance reads.
Speaking at a state legislator-organized forum in January, a representative of that department described surplus line policies as “the Wild West of insurance.”
Homeowners without mortgages may also simply choose to go without insurance after nonrenewals, and Jones said that’s on the rise. Analysis from Insurify shows that some 14% of American homes are uninsured, and data provided to the MWNB by the company shows that 11.3% of Utah homes have no coverage. At 23%, New Mexico has the second highest rate nationally.
The NAIC data shows that a number Western states have homeowners insurance nonrenewal rates above 1% — the point where Jones said officials should start to be concerned. Arizona is just over 2%, and Nevada and New Mexico are close to that. Idaho and Colorado are both around 1.4%.
Because climate change is a key driver, Jones said “in the long term, we've got to reduce fossil fuel emissions, and we need every state to take steps to do that. In the short and intermediate term, more investment in mitigation can help.”
But he also said it’s important to ensure that insurance companies account for mitigation efforts in their models — as the Colorado legislature did last year.
“Unless state legislatures intervene,” Jones said, “it's only going to get worse.”
This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Boise State Public Radio, Wyoming Public Media, Nevada Public Radio, KUNR in Nevada, KUNC in Northern Colorado, KANW in New Mexico, Colorado Public Radio and KJZZ in Arizona as well as NPR, with support from affiliate newsrooms across the region. Funding for the Mountain West News Bureau is provided in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Eric and Wendy Schmidt.
