Where home insurance eats the most of your house value

Why does the percentage matter more than the dollar amount?

A $7,000 premium on a $230,000 house is 3.00% of its value annually; that same $7,000 on a $700,000 house is 1.00%. The percentage tells you how hard insurance is working against your equity.

Think of it as a recurring drag on your return. A rental property earning 6% gross yield before expenses looks very different if insurance alone consumes 3% of the asset’s value. Dollar figures look tame on expensive homes and alarming on cheap ones. Percentage of value is the apples-to-apples number.

Which counties in the country have the worst insurance-to-value ratio?

All ten are in Texas, Kansas, Oklahoma, and South Dakota — not Florida. Cottle County, TX leads at 4.80% of home value per year, on a median home worth only $54,100.

The pattern is consistent: modest home values combined with high wind and hail exposure. Stonewall County, TX comes in at 4.69%, Cochran County, TX at 4.30%. Grant County, OK and Stanton County, KS both sit at 4.16%. These are not high-premium markets in dollar terms — Grant County’s $3,308 premium would look cheap in Miami — but they are brutal in percentage terms because the homes are worth so little.

And which counties pay the least, as a share of home value?

Santa Clara County, CA pays just 0.10% — a $1,365 median premium on a $1,382,800 median home. San Mateo County, CA is next at 0.12%.

The full bottom-ten list is dominated by coastal California and the Washington, D.C. suburbs. High home values drive the denominator up, and wildfire-zone underwriting has not yet pushed premiums to match. That calculus may change, but these are the 2022 figures in the data.

County	State	Median premium	Median home value	Premium as % of value
Cottle	TX	$2,595	$54,100	4.80%
Stonewall	TX	$2,566	$54,700	4.69%
Cochran	TX	$2,481	$57,700	4.30%
Stanton	KS	$2,673	$64,200	4.16%
Grant	OK	$3,308	$79,500	4.16%
Elk	KS	$2,417	$60,900	3.97%
Todd	SD	$1,786	$45,200	3.95%
Jefferson	OK	$3,013	$77,500	3.89%
Knox	TX	$2,555	$66,800	3.82%
Comanche	KS	$2,291	$59,900	3.82%
Santa Clara	CA	$1,365	$1,382,800	0.10%
San Mateo	CA	$1,768	$1,494,500	0.12%

Where does Florida land in this ranking?

Florida does not own the top of the national list, but its worst county — Escambia — hits 3.00% of value, which is higher than any New Jersey, New York, or Illinois county in the data. And that is before property tax.

Walton County comes in second among Florida counties at 2.66%, on a median home value of $376,400. That means a buyer there is paying about $10,031 per year in insurance alone — more in dollar terms than any other Florida county in the top twelve. Miami-Dade sits at 1.67% on a $425,400 home, which works out to $7,089. Broward is 1.62% on $380,400, or $6,148. These are not rounding errors; they are recurring annual costs that compound across the life of an ownership.

The statewide county median premium is $2,664. The median across all 560 Florida ZIP codes in the data is $3,211. That gap — about $547 — reflects the fact that high-cost coastal ZIPs are real places people buy, not statistical outliers to be averaged away.

How does the insurance burden combine with property taxes in Florida?

Add insurance percentage and effective property-tax rate and you get the full annual carrying cost as a share of the home’s value — before mortgage, maintenance, or HOA. In Escambia County that combined figure is 3.60% (3.00% insurance + 0.60% tax).

Glades County shows a different pattern: insurance is 2.49% but the effective tax rate is 1.01%, making the combined burden 3.50% on a $114,800 home. In raw dollars that is modest — about $4,025 per year combined — but on a low-value home it represents a larger share of any rental income or household budget.

Compare that to a buyer moving from Camden County, NJ, where property taxes alone run 3.08% of value. Add a typical mid-Atlantic insurance rate and the New Jersey carrying cost can exceed Florida’s even in Walton County. That is the case for Florida. The case against it is that the dollar amounts in places like Palm Beach ($8,444 insurance + 0.88% tax on a $407,300 home, roughly $11,028 combined) are large enough to matter even when the percentages look manageable.

Florida county	Insurance premium	Insurance % of value	Effective tax rate	Combined % of value
Escambia	$7,028	3.00%	0.60%	3.60%
Walton	$10,031	2.66%	0.45%	3.11%
Glades	$2,859	2.49%	1.01%	3.50%
Palm Beach	$8,444	2.07%	0.88%	2.95%
DeSoto	$2,797	1.85%	0.87%	2.72%
Bay	$4,662	1.68%	0.60%	2.28%
Miami-Dade	$7,089	1.67%	0.83%	2.50%
Broward	$6,148	1.62%	0.95%	2.57%
Pinellas	$4,764	1.49%	0.73%	2.22%
Jefferson	$2,862	1.44%	0.68%	2.12%

What does this mean for a specific purchase decision?

The county median is a starting point, not a quote. The ZIP-code median in the same county can be hundreds of dollars higher, and any individual property’s premium depends on age, construction type, elevation, and wind-mitigation features — none of which appear in this dataset.

The statewide ZIP-code median of $3,211 is $547 above the county median of $2,664. That difference exists because the data is organized by ZIP, and expensive coastal ZIPs are real places with real buyers. If you are buying on or near the coast in Walton, Escambia, or Palm Beach County, using the county median to underwrite your purchase is likely to understate your actual cost. Get an insurance estimate on the specific address before you make an offer, not after.

The percentage-of-value frame also changes how you compare markets. A buyer leaving Camden County, NJ — where property taxes alone are 3.08% of value — may find that even Escambia County’s combined 3.60% burden is not the shock it first appears, depending on what the home costs. A buyer leaving Santa Clara County at 0.10% insurance will find every Florida county looks expensive by comparison. Neither reaction is wrong. Both are just arithmetic.