Washington, D.C.—Today, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, released a first-of-its kind public dataset and accompanying staff report that expose the scale of the climate change-driven crisis in homeowners’ insurance. With this release, the Committee makes publicly available—for the first time—an accounting of insurance non-renewals at the county level from all 50 states and the District of Columbia, covering the years 2018 through 2023.
“Climate change is not just about polar bears and melting icebergs anymore,” said Chairman Whitehouse. “It’s also about climate-flation bleeding family budgets—with higher costs for insurance, groceries, and health care—and cascading economy-wide shocks. What our new data reveal is that the failure to deal with climate change is also affecting whether families can even get homeowners insurance, which threatens their ability to get a mortgage, which spells trouble for property values in climate-exposed communities across the country. If Republicans are serious about staving off such an economic catastrophe, they must take their hands out of Big Oil’s pockets and take climate change seriously. Our economy, our country, and our future are on the line.”
This new report is the culmination of an investigation the Senate Budget Committee launched last fall. Over the course of the probe, the Committee obtained national county-level non-renewal data from nearly two dozen companies that collectively account for about 65 percent of the national homeowners’ insurance market. The data cover 249 million total insurance policies over the six-year period beginning in 2018 and ending in 2023. While sky-rocketing insurance premiums have been well documented, comprehensive non-renewal data of this scope and magnitude has never been publicly available—until now.