Which Companies Offer the Lowest Homeowners Insurance Rates?
Last updated May 2023
Most of us stick with our homeowners insurance for years without checking for lower rates elsewhere. That’s usually a costly mistake: Checkbook collected price quotes from major insurers for several families living in seven major metro areas and found most could save more than $1,000 per year by choosing a low-priced company over a high-priced one. That’s easy money.
You don’t have to choose an unsound company or a bare bones policy to save big. For example, for essentially the same coverage, our family living in suburban Cook County, Illinois, would pay $706 per year with Liberty, $769 with Auto-Owners, $813 with Nationwide, or $823 with Farmers, compared to $1,550 with State Farm, $1,645 with Amica, $1,653 with AAA, $1,672 with Progressive, or $1,871 with Hippo. We’ve done these types of comparisons for property insurance for 30-plus years, always turning up big price differences among the largest insurers. And often, highly rated companies offer low premiums.
Don’t wait until the end of your policy term to shop for a better rate. If you change insurers, your old company must reimburse you for the unused portion of any payments you’ve made.
Unfortunately, we found some companies make it difficult to comparison shop. We had to push for weeks to get several to process our requests; a few refused to quote prices at all.
Also, many agents didn’t honor our requests to provide policy proposals with our requested coverage amounts. For example, companies often disagreed on the needed replacement costs for our sample homes. To make sure their prices aren’t influenced by these different higher or lower coverage amounts, we made adjustments to their quoted premiums.
Another complication? Some companies offer dual-policyholder discounts if you have them insure both your home and car. Some knock off five percent, 10 percent, or even more from either the homeowners or auto rate; some knock off a percentage from both.
For consumers, dual-policy pricing makes comparison shopping more difficult. To find the exact savings you’d realize by switching companies, you have to shop for both types of coverage at once. But the discounts aren’t usually large enough to have a major effect on the relative rankings of companies. Click here for our advice on auto insurance.
