Best (and Worst) Homeowners Insurance Companies

Our exclusive surveys reveal where insurers rate when it comes to premium pricing, customer service, and more

By Lisa L. Gill
Investigative Reporter

Updated June 12, 2025

Illustration of a house in a bubble. — The best homeowners insurance companies offer financial protection for weather events, break-ins, lawsuits, and other perils, plus a top-notch customer experience.

If you’ve received a homeowners insurance policy renewal lately, your new rate may have taken your breath away. A 2025 report by the Consumer Federation of America found that premiums increased by an average of 24 percent over the past three years. That, says CR policy advocate Chuck Bell, is the new normal.

Analyses by various federal agencies point to multiple culprits. For one, inflation has triggered a 40 percent hike in labor and costs for building materials that insurers build into your premiums. Another is the significant rise in the number of natural disasters in the U.S. over the past decade, costing a billion dollars or more. And the cost of reinsurance—coverage that insurance companies buy to cover their own risks—doubled between 2017 and 2023, an increase passed on to you.

In fact, a September 2024 CR nationally representative survey (PDF) of 2,146 adults in the U.S. found that 83 percent of homeowners who had the same insurer for at least five years saw their rates go up. Of those, about 1 in 10 said they jumped 50 percent or more.

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But it’s possible you’re facing even worse problems than just rising costs. Some homeowners are losing coverage entirely as insurers across the U.S. aggressively cancel policies or leave certain markets. Allstate and State Farm, for example, have stopped writing new policies in California, and Farmers and Progressive have done the same in Florida.

Rate hikes and cancellation can mean you’re suddenly forced to shop around with other carriers to see if you can get coverage at all, or a better deal. Use CR’s latest exclusive homeowners insurance ratings to help. These are based on a national sample of 23,917 homeowners insurance policyholders in the U.S. who reported on 26,936 experiences with insurance companies.

CR rated homeowners insurance companies based on customers’ satisfaction with the cost of premiums, the claims process, the service they received for non-claims-related matters, the quality of available help and advice in choosing a policy, the clarity of the policy, quality of coverage, thoroughness of their policy review, and the utility of the company’s website and mobile app.

This year’s surprising takeaway: Of the 28 companies rated, not a single one received an exemplary rating overall, which appears as dark green in our ratings tables. But three companies—NJM, Erie Insurance Group, and USAA—rose to the top of the pack, reaching our second-highest (light green) tier.

At the other end of the spectrum was Citizens Property, which operates exclusively in Florida. That insurer rated poorly on every attribute.

Overall Scores for popular companies—Progressive, State Farm, and Travelers—were middling, and none of them received top marks for any of our attributes. Companies that wound up in the near-bottom portion of the ratings included Allstate, American Family, Farmers, Liberty Mutual, and Nationwide.

Survey respondents gave even the top three insurers only middling grades on premiums, likely because prices have increased so substantially across the board. “Given that many homeowners across the country have experienced price hikes that greatly exceed inflation, it’s not surprising that consumers aren’t very happy about rising premium costs,” says CR’s Bell.

Erie’s typical premium of $1,153 clocked in at the lowest among all the companies CR rated, and well below the national median at $1,695. USAA’s typical premium was $2,013.

CR members can read on to see which companies top our full homeowners insurance ratings.

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We investigate, research, and test so you can choose with confidence.

Lisa L. Gill

Lisa L. Gill is an award-winning investigative reporter. She has been at Consumer Reports since 2008, covering health and food safety—heavy metals in the food supply and foodborne illness—plus healthcare and prescription drug costs, medical debt, and credit scores. Lisa also testified before Congress and the Food and Drug Administration about her work on drug costs and drug safety. She lives in a DIY tiny home, where she gardens during the day and stargazes the Milky Way at night.