Mass. home insurer-of-last resort sees spike in enrollment
December 12, 2025
Don’t pull the fire alarm yet, but new data on home insurance in Massachusetts is turning heads across the industry.
Massachusetts enrolled more than 173,000 policies in its insurer-of-last-resort, known as the FAIR Plan, in fiscal year 2024 — marking the first year-over-year increase for the insurer since 2017 and its largest single-year jump since 2007. In fiscal 2023, the FAIR Plan enrolled 158,660 policies.
“Insurance numbers like these are the canary in the coal mine,” said Charlie Sidoti, a former insurance executive who now serves as executive director of the Cambridge-based nonprofit Innsure, which works with insurers and communities navigating climate risk. “It leads to all sorts of other things — property values dropping, tax bases eroding — which puts financial pressure on municipalities. Ultimately, it could lead to declines in bond ratings. It’s an early, leading indicator of the impacts of climate change flowing through the economy.”
Insurers around the country are adjusting to a warming world, rising seas, and more costly extreme weather events by canceling policies, issuing nonrenewal notices, and raising premiums in risky areas — and in some cases, exiting states altogether. The trend is creating massive disruptions in homeowners’ ability to afford and access insurance — which provides a crucial backstop in case disaster strikes — and threatens to negatively impact property values.
Massachusetts, officials and experts stressed, is in a much better place than other parts of the country. The state has a robust market with a number of private insurers offering coverage, though prices have surged throughout New England. And it isn’t suffering from an onslaught of disastrous hurricanes or wildfires like in Florida or California.
Still, signs of change are emerging.
The latest data showing the FAIR Plan increases, from the state insurance commissioner’s recently-released annual report, comes on the heels of Massachusetts’s having the fifth-highest nonrenewal rate in the country in 2023, according to a congressional investigation. That nonrenewal rate is driven by areas most vulnerable to severe storms: In Barnstable County, 1 in 16 policies weren’t renewed in 2023. In Dukes County, it’s 1 in 9.
Statewide, there were 3,483 policy nonrenewals in 2022, 1,300 of which were in coastal areas, according to the state division of insurance. The very next year, that number jumped to 9,248, including a more than tripling of nonrenewals in coastal areas. By 2024, total nonrenewals grew again to more than 13,000.
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Published by MassINC