Homeowners insurance premiums are increasingly driven by a property's disaster risk — the riskiest areas now pay over 55% more than the safest, up from about 30% a decade ago. But risk isn't the only factor. Researchers have found a policyholder's credit history can matter just as much, a second cost channel most buyers never think to check.
Ask most buyers what determines their homeowners insurance quote, and they'll say the house — its age, its roof, its location. That's true, and it's become truer every year. It's not the whole story.
How Much Has Disaster Risk Actually Changed What Homeowners Pay?
The gap between what the riskiest and safest areas pay for insurance has nearly doubled in a decade.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and University of Wisconsin built a dataset of over 74 million homeowners insurance premiums, inferred from mortgage escrow payments between 2014 and 2024 — and cross-checked against independent Treasury data on zip-code-level premiums to confirm the estimates hold up. What they found: in 2014, homes in the riskiest disaster-exposure quintile paid about 30% more for insurance than homes in the safest quintile. By 2024, that gap had grown to more than 55%. The relationship between risk and price hasn't just held — it's roughly doubled in strength.
The overall numbers moved fast too. The national average annual premium rose from $1,690 in 2017 to $2,750 in 2024, a 28% increase — and more than $900 of that increase happened in just the last three years of the study period. Part of that came from what the researchers call a "reinsurance shock": rising prices in the global reinsurance market added roughly $425 to 2024 premiums in the most catastrophe-exposed zip codes and explains 45% of the increase in disaster risk’s pass-through to premiums in those areas — on top of pushing some insurers to cancel policies there entirely. The mechanism behind it is fairly direct: between 2017 and 2024, the price insurers themselves pay to reinsure catastrophic property risk more than doubled, according to the Guy Carpenter Rate-on-Line Index — and that cost gets passed down to homeowners in the highest-risk areas. The effect reaches beyond the insurance bill, too — premium increases are capitalized into home values, cutting price growth by more than $40,000 in the most exposed zip codes.
Is Location the Only Thing That Determines Your Premium?
No — a policyholder's credit history can matter just as much as disaster risk, according to the same research base.
The Keys and Mulder paper cited above makes the point directly, citing a companion study that found "a policyholder’s credit history can be as important as their disaster risk" in setting what they pay. That’s a notable claim to find inside a paper whose main focus is climate risk, not credit — it means two separate teams of researchers, working with different datasets, have independently landed on the same conclusion: location isn’t the only lever on this number.
Unlike a property's flood zone or wildfire exposure, credit history is something a buyer has some ability to act on before they ever request a quote. It doesn't get the same attention as disaster risk in most home-buying advice, largely because it's the less visible of the two — nobody puts a credit-score disclosure on a listing.
What Can You Actually Do With This Before You Buy?
You can see a specific property's disaster-risk-driven cost before you make an offer, and you can work on your credit profile independently — both matter, and only one shows up on a listing.
QuollHomes.com shows a property's climate risk score directly — the same kind of disaster-risk signal that Keys and Mulder's research shows is driving a widening share of every premium. That's the half of the equation tied to the house. The other half is tied to you, and it's worth checking on its own timeline: a credit report review well before you're shopping for insurance or locking in a mortgage rate gives you room to address anything that might be working against you on both fronts at once.
See a property's climate risk at QuollHomes.com.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does disaster risk actually affect homeowners insurance premiums?
Significantly, and increasingly so. Research using over 74 million premiums found that the gap between the riskiest and safest disaster-exposure quintiles grew from about 30% in 2014 to more than 55% by 2024.
Does my credit score really affect my insurance rate, not just my mortgage rate?
Yes. A 2024 study cited in the Keys and Mulder NBER paper found that credit history can weigh on a premium about as heavily as the property's own disaster risk does — two separate factors, both feeding the same number, not one substituting for the other.
Can I see a specific home's climate-risk-driven insurance cost before I make an offer?
Yes. QuollHomes.com shows a property's climate risk score directly, before you make an offer.
Read next: Home Buying Cost Breakdown · Building a Real Home-Buying Budget · Is Climate Risk Now a Bigger Price Factor Than Interest Rates?
Sources: Keys, Benjamin J. and Philip Mulder, "Property Insurance and Disaster Risk: New Evidence from Mortgage Escrow Data," NBER Working Paper 32579 (June 2024, revised November 2025)