Home Insurance Calculator: Estimate Your Rate (2025 Guide)

Buying a home means you also need to buy something else: homeowners insurance. And while you may have bigger expenses, how much you pay for insurance will affect your home ownership costs.

The national average cost of home insurance is $2,110 a year, according to NerdWallet’s most recent rate analysis. But the amount you pay could be more or less, depending on many factors. Here’s how to get a better idea of what your home insurance might cost.

Where you live is an important factor in determining your home insurance premiums. Use the homeowners insurance calculator below to find the average cost of home insurance in your ZIP code, based on a policy with $300,000 in dwelling coverage, $300,000 in liability coverage and a $1,000 deductible.

You can also estimate your home insurance costs by following the steps below. This process may provide you with a home insurance estimate that’s closer to what you’d actually pay if your home doesn’t fit the profile used for the calculator. Read more about our methodology.

• Dwelling, which pays for damage to the main structure of your home.

• Loss of use, which pays for additional living expenses if you need to move while your home is repaired.

• Medical payments, which pays to treat someone injured on your property, regardless of fault. It also may pay if you, a family member or a pet injures someone away from your home.

Each of these types of insurance comes with its own limit. You’ll pay more for higher limits, but the extra coverage will give you more financial protection if disaster strikes.

Typically, you need enough dwelling coverage to pay the cost of completely rebuilding your home. An insurance agent can help you estimate this amount.

Insurance companies often calculate several of the other coverage limits as a percentage of your dwelling coverage — such as 10% for other structures, 50% to 70% for personal property and 20% for loss of use.

Liability coverage usually starts at $100,000 and can be higher depending on your needs. Medical payments coverage typically has a low limit, between $1,000 and $5,000.

Your house’s physical characteristics affect the cost of insurance. These could include:

• What materials your house is made of.

• The condition of the roof.

• Whether the house has any custom features or high-end finishes.

• Whether the house is up to current building codes.

• The size and number of other structures such as sheds or fencing.

Additionally, a swimming pool or trampoline could mean higher premiums because insurance companies consider these features to be a liability risk.

Insurers also weigh factors about where you live, such as the threat of natural disasters, the local crime rate and how close the home is to the coast.

Your insurance deductible is the amount you pay out of pocket for a covered claim before insurance kicks in. A typical homeowners insurance deductible ranges from $500 to $2,000.

The higher the deductible you set, the lower your premium. However, you should consider whether the annual savings are worth paying a higher amount in an emergency. If you might not have enough to cover the deductible, choose a lower amount.

If you live in a part of the country that’s prone to hurricanes, tornadoes or hailstorms, you may have a separate deductible for damage from wind or hail. These deductibles are often a percentage of your home’s dwelling coverage. For example, if you have a 2% hail deductible on a home with $250,000 of dwelling coverage, your deductible for a hail claim would be $5,000.

You may want coverage for events that a standard home insurance policy won’t cover. Examples include floods, earthquakes, sinkholes and backed-up drains. Though this extra coverage will cost you more, it could come in handy if your home is at risk.

Many insurers offer online tools for estimating how much their home insurance will cost. These features typically use a limited set of information, but they will at least give a sense of your potential costs.

We recommend you get at least three home insurance quotes to find the most competitive one. Make sure each quote has similar deductibles and coverage limits.

NerdWallet offers a ZIP-code-based calculator to help you estimate your homeowners insurance premium. NerdWallet calculated median rates for 40-year-old homeowners from a variety of insurance companies in the largest 25 cities in each state by population.

Sample homeowners were nonsmokers with good credit living in a single-family, two-story home built in 1984. They had a $1,000 deductible and the following coverage limits:

• $300,000 in dwelling coverage.

• $30,000 in other structures coverage.

• $150,000 in personal property coverage.

• $60,000 in loss of use (additional living expenses) coverage.

• $300,000 in liability coverage.

• $1,000 in medical payments coverage.

We made minor changes to the sample policy in cases where rates for the above coverage limits or deductibles weren’t available.