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The impact of climate change is raising the cost of home insurance premiums.
The average Delaware County homeowner paid a lower premium last year, $1,969, to insure their homes than the average U.S. households paid, which was $2,530.
Delaware County insurance premiums cost about .6 percent of a typical home’s value.
Even so, Delaware County insurance premiums were 29 percent higher than other counties with the same level of relatively low risk, writes Mira Rojanasakul and Christopher Flavelle for The New York Times.
That 2023 premium in Delaware County is also 34.3 percent higher than it was in 2020.
Climate change is driving higher premiums, according to Benjamin Keys and Philip Mulder, who studied what Americans have been paying for home insurance in the past decade.
Costs increased the most where there was the greatest exposure to extreme weather, in the middle of the country and in parts of the Gulf and Atlantic coasts.
The research also showed that insurance costs don’t always reflect actual risk
Though insurance companies deny the practice, when they suffer big losses in tightly regulated states they tend to raise rates in more loosely regulated states, meaning some homeowners are subsidizing the cost of disasters elsewhere, according to Harvard professor Ishita Sen.
Find out more about Delaware County home insurance premiums compared to other counties in The New York Times.
