Homeowners insurance has gotten a little cheaper, easier to come by. Is the crisis over?

For the first time in several years, home sale activity across major markets in south Louisiana picked up in the first half of 2026. Busy real estate agents mostly attribute the uptick to one thing: a slight improvement in the state's insurance picture.

After homeowners saw double-digit hikes to their homeowners' premiums following the back-to-back hurricanes of 2020 and 2021, premiums are coming back down, and nearly two dozen new carriers are licensed to do business in the state.

Perhaps more telling, so far this year, nearly twice as many companies have filed with the Louisiana Department of Insurance for rate decreases than increases, while several other carriers have indicated they plan to hold rates steady.

The developments are a welcome reprieve to those on the front lines of the state's insurance crisis, which climaxed in the early 2020s when a dozen carriers doing business in Louisiana went belly up amid catastrophic losses, others stopped writing policies, premiums soared and the number of homeowners forced to seek coverage from the state-funded insurer of last resort quadrupled.

"Even just a year or two ago, many homeowners saw premiums double or even triple, forcing some to consider selling because their monthly escrow payments became unaffordable," said real estate broker Craig Mirambelle. "Today many buyers are able to obtain insurance premiums much closer to pre-spike levels."

But there's still a long way to go before the market could be considered healthy.

Many of the companies newly licensed to do business — small carriers that do not have the industry's gold standard AM Best rating, aren't actually writing policies yet or have just a tiny fraction of market share. Some don't cover wind damage. Others are staying away from high-risk areas along the coast or in New Orleans.

And it's been five years since Louisiana has been hit by a major hurricane, raising questions, ahead of this season's peak, about what happens if it does.

"Overall, it's a little bit better," Insurance Commissioner Tim Temple said in a phone interview last week. "We can say things are improving, but I am certainly not satisfied where we are."

'Doing better'

Premiums vary widely depending on the property and location and overall, they're continuing to increase, much as they always have, because of inflation. But the rate of increase is much smaller today, on average, than it has been this decade, statistics show.

According to Temple's office, annual premium increases are essentially flat so far this year, after increasing 4.6% last year, 6.6% in 2024 and by double digits in 2023 and 2022.

Also significant is a drop in the number of carriers proposing rate increases, which has fallen from 50 in 2024 to 27 last year and just four so far this year. At the same time, nine carriers this year have filed for decreases so far this year, while three are seeking no change.

The number of rate changes does not necessarily correlate to the number of companies doing business in the state because companies can file for multiple rate adjustments in a single year.

"That tells you we're doing better than we were," Temple said.

Another encouraging data point, experts say, is an increase in the number of new carriers licensed to do business in Louisiana over the past three years, which total 21 altogether, including seven this year.

Temple said the fact the companies do not carry the AM Best rating does not make them risky or financially unstable.

"No new carrier starts our with an AM Best rating," said Temple of the new carriers licensed in the state. "And we're looking closely at these companies and their finances to make sure they are healthy."

Local brokers say more important than the new, small carriers is the return of larger, well capitalized companies to parts of the market that they had shunned after the successive disasters of Hurricanes Laura, Delta, Zeta and Ida.

"There are some large carriers that were staying out of vulnerable areas for a few years," said Ben Albright, president and CEO of the Independent Insurance Agents of Louisiana, which represents some 300 agencies. "They've started coming back. For new buyers, that's a big deal."

A few years ago, homeowners shopping for new policies would be lucky to get two or three quotes, he said. "Now, they can get six or seven."

The availability of new options has helped reduce the number of homeowners forced to rely on the state-backed Citizens Property Insurance Corp. As of June, the rolls of the "insurer of last resort" had fallen to roughly 114,000, down from about 122,000 last November and nearly 20% from its peak of 140,000 in 2022.

Reinsurers still driving rates

Temple attributes part of the positive movement to a couple of key reforms passed by state lawmakers to address the insurance crisis and make Louisiana more competitive. Those changes made it harder to file excessive bad faith claims following catastrophic events and did away with the "three-year rule," which banned insurers from dropping policyholders who had been customers for three years.

A couple of other factors have played a more significant role.

One is the adoption of more resilient building standards in the state and the increase in the number of fortified roofs which, though still small at some 14,000, is among the fastest growing in the country, according to the Department of Insurance.

"Homeowners are seeing decreases if they have a new roof or a fortified roof," said Justin Thibodeaux, an agent with Hartwig Moss, an independent brokerage in New Orleans.

Even more significant is the reinsurance market, which is flush with cash after recovering from the losses of 2020 and 2021. Reinsurers back the smaller, less-well capitalized insurance carriers that write the majority of policies in Louisiana. They've attracted major investors over the past couple of years, since they haven't been hit with the volume of claims they experienced a few years ago.

As of June 30, global property-catastrophe reinsurance prices were down 16% year over year, the steepest annual decline in 25 years, according to industry sources.

"The reinsurance market is recapitalized and has been profitable," Albright said. "We haven't had the storms that we had in 2020 and 2021, so investors who stayed in the insurance market have made good money these last few years and others have said, 'I want a piece of that.'"

One step forward, two steps back?

For the local real estate market, the availability of more options at better prices has helped jumpstart home sale activity, which was up 10% in the Greater New Orleans area in the first half of the year over the same period in 2025. In Baton Rouge and Lafayette it was up 4% and 5% respectively.

"There are fewer restrictions on key metrics that were really onerous a couple of years ago, like age of a roof and water heaters," said David Favret, regional vice president at Compass. "And there are more carriers."

The commercial real estate market has experienced even greater easing, according to Albright. Rates for owners of apartment buildings and other commercial properties have come down about 30% on average due to rate decreases in the reinsurance market.

"Commercial coverage has gotten much better, but it also got worse much faster a few years ago," he said. "It is always more volatile because it is more susceptible to changes in the reinsurance market."

Despite signs of hope, it is unclear how stable the state's insurance market really is. If Louisiana is spared a major hit from a tropical system again this season and next, experts say the market will continue to improve.

If it doesn't— or if neighboring states along the Gulf Coast sustain a major hit or multiple blows, as they did in 2020 and 2021 — the progress of the recent past could be all but wiped out.

What's more, even if the Gulf is spared a major storm, increasingly frequent weather-related disasters elsewhere could destabilize the reinsurance market with repercussions felt around the globe.

"Whether a tropical system on the Gulf Coast, a forest fire in Europe or storms spinning up a lot more hail in the Midwest, losses continue to go up globally," Albright said. "So that gets baked into the models and that drives rates."

He added: "But the longer we can go without a storm, the better our rates look."