The short answer: a quote is a comparison, not a price
A home insurance quote is an insurer’s price for covering your house, worked out from the house itself and from the cover you ask for. Two insurers can look at the same house and quote different prices, because their underwriting rules differ: the Texas Department of Insurance (TDI) puts it plainly in its home insurance guide, that one company might be willing to sell you a policy even if another is not, and that different companies charge different rates. That is why a quote is only useful as a comparison, never on its own.
This page quotes no premium of its own: no insurer’s prices, no mock rates, no table of typical premiums, because no such figure could describe your house. What it does instead is show how to get quotes, what to have ready so every insurer prices the same house, how to compare the quotes like for like, and which Texas rules change the quote — so that when the numbers arrive, you can tell a cheaper price from thinner cover. One figure is stated here, labelled for what it is: TDI reports a preliminary statewide average annual homeowners premium of $3,489 for 2025, an average of transacted business across the whole state, not a quote and not a prediction of any one homeowner’s price.
How to get a home insurance quote in Texas
There are two routes to a quote. The first is a licensed agent — in person, by phone, or online — who takes the details of your house, sends them to one or more insurers, and brings back quotes; an agent who works with several insurers can bring back several from a single conversation. The second route is an online quote form, filled in directly with an insurer: you enter the same details yourself and the insurer returns a price, usually on screen or by email.
Whichever route you take, start with your current declarations page if you already have a policy. The declarations page is the first page of your policy, and TDI describes it as the summary of your coverages, dollar limits and deductibles — it tells a new insurer exactly what you have now, so the new quote can be priced on the same cover rather than on a guess. If you are buying for the first time, the equivalent starting point is the list in the next section: gather it once, and give every insurer the same list.
Do not buy on the first quote. Because insurers weigh the same house differently, the spread between quotes for the same house can be wide, and a single quote tells you nothing about where it sits in that spread. Get quotes from more than one insurer, on identical cover, and compare the full documents — not just the headline premium.
What insurers ask for — have it ready before you start
Every insurer prices the same set of facts about your house, so the quotes only compare if the facts you give are the same each time. Have these ready before you start: the address; the year the house was built; the roof’s age and condition; the square footage; the dwelling limit, deductibles and liability limits you want; and any endorsements you want, such as extra cover for jewelry, sewer backup, foundation damage or mold. Give every insurer the same answers, and keep a note of what you gave each one.
Insurers also price things you do not choose on the form. TDI’s home insurance guide lists what most companies consider when setting a premium: your home’s age and condition, its replacement cost, its construction materials, where you live, the availability of local fire protection, your claims history, and your credit score. None of these is a figure you can change on a form.
Expect the insurer to check the claims history of you and your house. Most companies use the Comprehensive Loss Underwriting Exchange (CLUE): its reports show the claims history of people and houses, regardless of who owned them, for the last seven years, and a company can charge you more or refuse to sell you a policy based on what the report shows. You can get a free copy of your CLUE report each year from LexisNexis, and you can challenge wrong information in it.
How to compare quotes like for like
Two quotes can only be compared if they describe the same product. Hold these seven things identical across every quote: the dwelling limit; the roof details, including age and whether settlement is replacement cost or actual cash value; the deductibles, including the separate wind and hail deductible; the liability limits; the personal-property basis, replacement cost or actual cash value; the endorsements; and the exclusions. If any one of those differs, a price difference may reflect a different product, not a different price — and the cheaper quote may simply be the thinner one.
Read the declarations page of each quote side by side, line by line, and ask the insurer or agent to confirm in writing anything the quote does not show separately. If a quote does not state the wind and hail deductible, the roof settlement basis, or an endorsement you asked for, it has not yet described a price you can compare — ask for the missing line before you rank it.
Watch for the same trap in reverse: a higher quote is not automatically better cover, and a lower quote is not automatically a bargain. The comparison that means anything is the same cover from several insurers, with the differences confined to price and to the insurer behind it. Ask each insurer about discounts, too: TDI’s guide lists a monitored burglar or fire alarm system, a sprinkler system, and an impact-resistant roof as the discounts insurers commonly offer. And do not lower the quote by thinning the cover you need — raising a deductible or dropping an endorsement lowers the premium and raises what you pay after a claim. The homeowners calculator on this site can help you work out the dwelling limit and the cover amounts to ask every insurer to price, so the quotes start from the same numbers; it does not quote, bind or compare insurer prices, and it does not include flood or earthquake cover. The quote feeds the monthly payment - see monthly mortgage calculator with taxes and insurance.
Texas factors that change the quote
Wind and hail are the first Texas factor, and they change the deductible rather than the cover. In Texas, wind and hail usually sit on a separate percentage deductible tied to the dwelling limit, not on the flat dollar deductible that applies to other perils. A percentage looks small on the page and large after a storm, so convert it to dollars before comparing: the worked example below shows the arithmetic. Hail is the costliest peril for Texas houses, and wind and hail losses are the largest share of paid homeowners losses in recent years, according to the Texas Department of Insurance — which is why insurers price wind and hail separately, and why a quote that looks cheap on the headline can carry a wind and hail deductible that makes the first claim expensive.
The roof is the second factor, and it changes how a claim is paid. Older roofs are frequently settled at actual cash value rather than replacement cost — replacement cost pays to repair or replace at current prices, while actual cash value pays replacement cost minus depreciation for wear and age, so the same storm leaves you paying more out of pocket on an older roof. That is why the roof’s age and condition are among the first facts an insurer asks for: a quote that prices replacement-cost settlement on an old roof and a quote that prices actual cash value on the same roof are not the same product, however close the premiums look.
Flood is the third factor, and it is the one a standard policy never includes. A standard homeowners policy excludes flood, always: flood insurance is a separate policy, from the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) or from a private insurer. Your lender will require flood insurance if your home is in a designated flood zone, but floods can happen anywhere — TDI notes that more than half of the homes flooded by Hurricane Harvey were outside designated flood zones. Most flood policies have a 30-day waiting period before they take effect, so do not leave a flood quote until a storm is approaching. The flood insurance by state guide on this site covers flood cover state by state, including Texas. A new build in Texas has title risk - see do you need title insurance on a new construction home.
Coastal Texas: when a standard policy will not cover wind and hail
On the Texas Gulf Coast, wind and hail cover can be the hardest part of the quote to get. TDI’s home insurance guide states it directly: if you live on the Texas coast or in Harris County on Galveston Bay, your home policy might not cover wind and hail damage. Some coastal properties cannot get windstorm and hail cover in a standard private policy at all — check the wind and hail line on every quote before you compare premiums.
The fallback for wind and hail on the coast is the Texas Windstorm Insurance Association (TWIA), the insurer of last resort for wind and hail in designated catastrophe areas — 14 coastal counties and parts of Harris County east of Highway 146. To qualify, you work with an agent and need one denial from a private insurer: TDI’s market overview states that TWIA sells wind and hail coverage for coastal residents who have been turned down by an insurance company, and that you apply through your insurance agent. TWIA covers wind and hail only, up to a maximum dwelling limit of $1,773,000, effective 1 January 2026, with contents covered up to $374,000, according to the Texas Department of Insurance’s TWIA overview — and it does not replace a homeowners policy or flood insurance.
Two more TWIA conditions matter. Flood insurance may be needed to qualify, depending on where the property sits, and you might also need a home inspection by an engineer or a windstorm inspector. TWIA will not sell you a policy if there is a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico, so a coastal quote cannot be left until a storm is on its way. The best home insurance for coastal areas guide on this site covers the coastal problem in more detail, including TWIA. Hurricane cover is the Texas coastal question - see hurricane insurance. A Texas quote should include flood - see how much is flood insurance in Texas.
If no private insurer will cover you: the Texas FAIR Plan
TWIA covers wind and hail on the coast. For the rest of the policy — the house itself, against fire and the other perils a homeowners policy covers — the fallback where private cover cannot be found is the Texas FAIR Plan Association. It is the insurer of last resort for homeowners who cannot find private cover anywhere in Texas, not only on the coast, and it exists for exactly the homeowner whose quotes have all come back as refusals.
The bar is higher than TWIA’s: to get a FAIR Plan policy you must have been turned down by at least two private insurance companies, and you will not qualify if a company has offered you a policy or a renewal. You apply through a licensed agent — the FAIR Plan does not sell directly — and cover is on an actual cash value basis, which means replacement cost minus depreciation, so a claim pays what the damaged property was worth with its wear and age, not what a new one costs. A FAIR Plan quote should be compared with private quotes on that basis, not as if the settlement terms were equal.
A FAIR Plan policy is a starting point, not a destination. Keep shopping the private market, because an offer of private cover ends FAIR Plan eligibility and usually buys better settlement terms. If a private insurer turns you down, ask for the reason in writing: it may point to something you can fix, and a fixed reason can turn the next quote from a refusal into a price.
What the statewide average does and does not tell you
TDI reports a preliminary statewide average annual homeowners premium of $3,489 for 2025, from the Texas Statistical Plan for Residential Risks, covering 8,233,096 active policies and $19.75 billion of direct written premium. and an average coverage amount of $432,800. Those are the only premium figures stated on this page.
What the average tells you is the shape of the Texas market: premiums have risen steeply, from $1,791 in 2016 to $3,489 in 2025 on TDI’s own chart. What it does not tell you is your price: it averages every policy actually sold, at every coverage amount, in every county, on houses of every age and roof, and no single homeowner’s house sits at the average on all of those at once. Use it as a sense-check, not a target — if your quotes cluster far above it, ask what is driving them, and if one comes in far below it, check what has been left out. Never treat the average as a quote: no insurer prices from it, and this site quotes no premium of its own.
Worked example: turning a percentage deductible into dollars
Consider one ILLUSTRATIVE house, using figures chosen only to show the arithmetic — not a quote, and not a typical price: a dwelling limit of $300,000 and a wind and hail deductible of 2%. The deductible in dollars is 2% of $300,000, which is $6,000: what you pay yourself on a wind or hail claim before the insurer pays anything. At 1% on the same dwelling limit, the figure would be $3,000. A quote that saves a little on premium while doubling the wind and hail deductible from $3,000 to $6,000 is not a saving the first time hail hits the roof.
Run the same arithmetic on every quote you receive, using the dwelling limit and the wind and hail percentage on that quote’s own declarations page. These are ILLUSTRATIVE figures entered purely to show the arithmetic; they predict no real homeowner’s deductible. Enter your own dwelling limit and your own wind and hail percentage from your own quote, and compare deductibles in dollars, not in percentages.
Illustrative example only — not a fact about any real policy.