Research institute · Pew Research Center
How US homeowners blame insurers when prices rise
A Pew Research Center survey finds 71% of US homeowners report higher insurance costs in recent years, and the attribution is unflattering: 65% blame insurer profit-seeking as a major cause. The pattern matters for any UK brand whose customers are paying more this year than last.
Source published Summarised
Key findings at a glance
- 71% of US homeowners say their home insurance costs have gone up over the last few years.
- 42% say costs have gone up "a lot", the dominant share within the price-rise group, not the smaller "a little" group.
- 65% blame insurance company profit-seeking as a MAJOR reason for the rise, the most-cited cause across all attribution options.
- 46% cite repair and rebuild costs as a major reason, the second most-cited driver, behind profit motive.
- 80% of upper-income US homeowners report their insurance costs have risen, the high end of the income gap.
- 54% of lower-income US homeowners report rises, 26pp behind upper-income; 17% of this group have no home insurance at all.
- 62% of US Democrats say extreme weather is a major reason for the rises. Just 39% of Republicans agree, politicisation of attribution is real.
What the report covers
Pew surveyed 3,524 US adults between 16-22 March 2026, with a random half (1,236 homeowners) answering questions specifically about home insurance costs. The other half answered parallel questions about home energy costs, which Pew published as a sibling report. The two-half split is methodologically interesting, it means each homeowner attribution comes from an isolated frame rather than a "compare insurance vs. energy" framing that would bias the responses.
Three findings drive the report: how widespread the price-rise perception is (71% across all homeowners), how steep the rises feel (42% say "a lot"), and what consumers blame when asked. The attribution question is what makes this report useful beyond the headline, Pew offered respondents multiple causes (insurer profits, repair costs, extreme weather, government regulations) and let them rate each as major / minor / not a reason. The aggregate ranking and the partisan splits inside it are the operational bits.
Pew's American Trends Panel methodology applies, nationally representative, address-based sampling, weighting back to population proportions. Sample size on the homeowner subset is robust enough to break down by income, region, and party.
What this means for UK marketers
Three things UK marketers should take from this, even though the survey is US-specific, the consumer-attribution pattern is broadly transferable.
Profit-motive is the default blame story when prices rise. 65% of US homeowners cite "insurance companies wanting to make more money" as a MAJOR reason for their bills going up. That's the most-cited driver, ahead of repair costs (46%) and extreme weather (39%). For any UK brand operating in a category where prices are visibly increasing, utilities, mobile, banking, motor/home insurance, streaming, food retail, the attribution challenge is the same. Customers default-attribute to your margin, not your costs. Your messaging needs to compete with that default. "Costs have risen for us too, here's how we've absorbed some of it, here's what's passed through" lands far harder than silence or a generic price-rise letter.
Income skew matters for which conversations to have where. The 80%/54% gap between upper- and lower-income homeowners noticing rises tells you who's actively tracking and who's priced out of the conversation entirely (17% of lower-income don't have insurance at all). For UK brands, the implication is that price-rise communications work differently up the income ladder, upper-income customers want a granular cost breakdown and absorb a "we've absorbed X" message; lower-income customers are more likely to be churning to a competitor or dropping the product entirely. Don't use the same comms for both.
Politicisation of attribution is a UK signal, not just a US one. The 62% vs. 39% partisan gap on whether extreme weather drives insurance costs maps to a similar UK pattern on energy and environmental costs. UK brands operating in any category where the political narrative around pricing is contested (energy, plant-based food, EVs, anything with a sustainability premium) need to assume that the same finding applies, different audience segments will accept different attribution stories. Tailor segmented comms or accept that one message will land hard with half your audience and bounce off the other.
The other implication, easy to miss: when 65% of consumers blame your industry's profit motive, the brands that win share are the ones that visibly behave differently. That's an opportunity, not just a defensive posture.
How they got the data
Pew Research Center surveyed 3,524 US adults from 16-22 March 2026. Respondents are members of Pew's American Trends Panel, a nationally representative panel recruited via address-based sampling on the US Postal Service's Computerized Delivery Sequence File. Roughly half the sample (1,236 homeowners) received the home-insurance questions; the other half received parallel home-energy questions. Within each split-half, only homeowners who reported their costs had increased were asked the attribution follow-ups.
The survey was fielded online and via live telephone, in English and Spanish. Subgroup oversamples are weighted back to reflect the correct population proportions. Pew publishes the full questionnaire and detailed cross-tabs alongside the report.
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From Pew Research Center · published 06/05/2026