Maine’s home insurance rates have escaped a year of consecutive multi-million dollar natural disasters virtually unscathed, according to a recent report from online insurance comparison company Insurify.

While the rest of the country experienced an average premium increase of 9 percent, Maine saw home insurance rates decrease between 2023 and 2024, earning it the highest score on an Insurify index that measures climate change stability — a perfect 100.

The stability that score represents is a testament to Maine’s isolation from the climate change-supercharged wildfires and tropical storms ravaging other states between 2019 and 2024, according to the report’s authors. 

“Maine’s geography protects it from excessive natural disasters, including tropical cyclones, which are generally the most expensive types of disasters,” the authors wrote. “Those storms rely on warm water and tend to cool and lose strength by the time they’ve reached Maine.”

Like Maine, much of New England’s home insurance rates have also experienced relative stability in the face of climate change. 

New Hampshire was a close second while Vermont and Massachusetts both cracked the top-ten highest stability scores. Maine and New Hampshire both had average annual insurance premiums around $1,200 in 2024, compared to a national average of $2,584.

The authors acknowledged the extreme floods that have ravaged all three states over the past two years, including the $480 million in damages that Maine incurred from last year’s winter storms and summer floods.

That figure pales in comparison to the average state, according to Insurify data analysis manager Chase Gardner, which has seen five times as many disasters at 35 times the cost. 

“I think the biggest factor driving that is just the risk angle,” said Gardner in an interview. “The climate and natural disaster risk in Maine [is] so low in comparison to most other states.”

The report’s analysis pulls on a combination of Insurify’s private data, data supplied by a private third-party insurance data aggregator and the public requests insurance companies must submit to state regulators before hiking premium rates, according to Gardner.

Statewide averages are calculated with premium data from an array of ZIP codes that vary in geography and demographics to paint an accurate picture of each state’s insurance rates. Maine’s data was drawn from densely populated cities, smaller mountain and coastal communities, and Aroostook County towns on the Canadian border, Gardner said.

Insurify’s Home Insurance Climate Stability Index grades on a scale of 0 to 100 based on each state’s frequency of major disasters, the cost of major disasters per capita, average home insurance rate, change in insurance rate, and the ratio of insurers’ losses compared to its premium revenue.

In addition to its relatively infrequent and inexpensive disasters, Maine scored especially high on the index because it has the second-lowest average loss ratio nationwide, meaning insurance claims aren’t outweighing insurers’ premium revenues like they are in Louisiana, which has the highest loss ratio in the country.

Although Maine home insurance rates decreased by four percent between 2023 and 2024, a span bookended by massive floods, Gardner acknowledged that insurance companies might take more than a year after a natural disaster strikes to file for rate increases, meaning Maine’s home insurance stability might not be guaranteed a year from now.

“At the minimum, I would say it would take six months” for insurance companies to respond to natural disasters with rate increases, Gardner said. “But in all likelihood, you probably have to wait a year, if not more, to kind of see the full effects of what a storm might have on an industry.”

A separate Insurify study published last February projected that Maine would see one of the highest year-over-year insurance premium increases, rising from $1,322 in 2023 to $1,571 in 2024. But instead of that projected 19 percent increase Maine insurance rates went down to an average of $1,266 in 2024.

This discrepancy between the projection and reality could have been due to an overemphasis on insurance rates along Maine’s especially vulnerable coast, according to Greg Thayer, a manager for Sanford-based Batchelder Bros. Insurance.

“When you look at Maine and see (average insurance premiums) going up 19 percent, that is slightly misleading,” Thayer told The Monitor in an interview last July. “You’re not seeing that across the board. It really is focused on places with particularly high wind events… and a lot of that is driven by the coast.”

Similar caution should be taken when interpreting Insurify’s most recent report. Gardner emphasized that Maine’s perfect stability score is relative to the rest of the country, and the volatility of disasters influenced by climate change means that Maine and the rest of New England aren’t guaranteed to avoid the same magnitude of calamities hitting other states.

“We say Maine or New England is the most resilient, but hopefully that’s not interpreted as 100 percent resilient,” Gardner said. “There’s always the threat with climate change that something could happen,” like the consecutive summer flooding events that hit Vermont in 2023 and 2024.

This story was originally published by The Maine Monitor, a nonprofit civic news organization. To get regular coverage from the Monitor, sign up for a free Monitor newsletter here.