Personal · why · scenario
Why did my rates go up?
No tickets. No claims. New number on the bill anyway. In 2024, Kansas homeowners premiums rose 10.9 percent and auto premiums rose 12.2 percent statewide, and the loss ratios behind those filings explain why carriers had no choice. Here is what to audit on your own dec page, and the two realistic moves once we know.
What's actually happening.
The mail arrives. The envelope is heavier than last year. You open it on the way back from the box, and the new premium is up double digits before you have made it to the kitchen. Nothing happened on your end. No tickets, no claims, no late payments, no new driver, no new roof. And yet.
The thing almost no carrier explains in the renewal letter is that the pressure is mostly upstream of you. In 2024 the Kansas homeowners market wrote $1.85 billion of premium and ran a 68.2 percent loss ratio against a five-year average of 54.2, meaning carriers paid out fourteen cents more on the dollar than they did across the prior five years combined. After expenses, the average combined ratio sat at 96 percent, which is industry shorthand for "essentially break-even, no margin to absorb anything."
Auto told a similar story. Kansas private-passenger auto premiums rose 12.2 percent in 2024 alone, with a 66 percent loss ratio and a 91 percent combined ratio across the market. When carriers run a 96 or 91 combined for the year, their next state filing is not a question of whether rates rise; it is a question of by how much, and approved by when.
Most of the work on this page is separating what is upstream from what is on your own profile. Six rating factors are doing almost all of the work on most Kansas renewals. Once we know which two or three of those six are biggest for your household, we know whether the move is to stay and adjust, or to leave.
What changes inside the policy.
Carriers do not raise your rate the way most people imagine. They file a broad rate change with the Kansas Insurance Department or the Missouri Department of Commerce and Insurance, get it approved, then apply it uniformly across every renewing policy in the affected class. The increase is not personal; it is the carrier catching up to its own book. But the size of the increase varies dramatically by carrier, in the same Kansas homeowners market in 2024, one major writer ran a 70 percent combined ratio and another ran 140 percent. The 140 percent carrier is filing for double-digit increases two years running. The 70 percent carrier has room to be patient.
On top of the broad filing, your specific renewal is touched by six household-level rating factors: your insurance score (credit-based), your ZIP-code territory rate, your dwelling Coverage A (which auto-inflates every year), your roof age and settlement basis, your active discount stack, and any household change since the prior term. Two or three of those six are usually doing most of the work on any one renewal jump.
On auto, the equivalent levers are insurance score, vehicle make and model (driven by parts and labor costs, not just sticker price), garaging ZIP, annual mileage, the household discount stack, and the underwriting tier you fall into based on how those signals combine. The base territory rate has been rising faster than household-specific changes for three years running in both KS and MO, most of the auto-premium pressure is in the territory line, not the household line.
And the line item that quietly does the most work on a clean homeowners renewal is Coverage A inflation. Replacement-cost coverage rides a construction-cost index, not consumer-price inflation. A dwelling line at $385,000 in 2024 is often $410,000-plus at 2026 renewal with no remodel, no addition, no change at all on your end. The protection went up. The premium followed. This piece, at least, you are getting something real for.
The coverages involved.
- Dwelling Coverage A (rebuild cost)
Auto-inflates every year on the construction-cost index. The single biggest line item on most homeowners renewals, and the one most often misunderstood as 'the value of the house.' Worth confirming the new number reflects rebuild cost in your ZIP, not a national average.
- Roof settlement basis
Replacement cost versus actual cash value. Most KS and MO carriers shift to ACV settlement on roofs over 10 to 15 years, which both raises the premium and reduces the eventual hail-claim payout by depreciation. The single most leveraged conversation on any aging-roof renewal.
- Wind/hail deductible
Often a percentage of dwelling, not a flat dollar. On a $400,000 home, a 1 percent wind/hail deductible is $4,000 out of pocket on every hail claim. Some carriers will write a flat deductible for a small premium add; worth knowing the trade-off before the next storm.
- All-other-perils deductible
The flat dollar amount you pay before the carrier responds on non-wind claims. Raising it from $1,000 to $2,500 typically saves 8 to 12 percent and is the single most-used lever to absorb a rate filing without changing carriers.
- Insurance score (credit-based)
Both Kansas and Missouri permit credit-based insurance scoring for homeowners and auto. The score is run by LexisNexis or TransUnion, weights credit data differently than FICO, and can move premiums 5 to 15 percent on its own. We cannot see your score directly; carriers will not share it. But comparable quotes across carriers usually reveal whether scoring is the lever.
- Discount stack
New-business honeymoon, claims-free, paid-in-full, autopay, multi-policy, affinity, and telematics. Each rolls off on a cycle you did not pick. Half of the renewal jumps we see at clean profiles are at least partly explained by a discount silently expiring.
The stack we'd build.
- All-other-perils deductible
$2,500. Up from $1,000. Saves 8 to 12 percent on most homeowners policies; the cheapest carrier-stay move.
- Coverage A reflects actual rebuild
Confirm. Carriers inflate Coverage A automatically. Sometimes it overshoots the rebuild reality in your ZIP and is genuinely too high, worth confirming, not assuming.
- Active discount stack
Audit. Walk every discount on the dec page against carrier eligibility. Loyalty, autopay-from-checking, paid-in-full, and certain professional affiliations are commonly missed at renewal.
- Carriers re-quoted
5+. If the audit shows the form is no longer competitive or the carrier is filing aggressive increases in KS, re-shopping across 20+ carriers usually surfaces a 10 to 25 percent delta.
About 30 percent of the dec pages we review end with ‘stay where you are, here is the small fix.’ The other 70 percent end with a carrier move, almost always with broader coverage at a lower number. The only way to know which side you are on is to actually look at the policy.
Re-shopping is not a vote of no confidence in your current carrier. It is the same audit your carrier's own underwriters perform every year on their book. You are simply doing it on your own side.
Pitfalls.
- 01Assuming the increase is personal.
It almost never is. Carriers file broad rate changes with the state and apply them uniformly. Your clean record matters; it just does not exempt you from the filing.
- 02Assuming all carriers raise rates at the same pace.
They do not. In Kansas homeowners in 2024 one major writer ran a 70 percent combined ratio and another ran 140 percent. The 140 percent carrier will keep filing aggressive increases for years; the 70 percent carrier has room to be patient. Which carrier wrote your policy is a real factor.
- 03Bundling for the discount without comparing the unbundled total.
Multi-policy discounts are real (8 to 17 percent), but two competitively-priced standalone policies sometimes beat a bundled pair when one side of the bundle is being repriced upward. We model both before recommending either.
- 04Forgetting the dec page changed inside the renewal.
Carriers occasionally rewrite the form at renewal, swapping replacement-cost roof for ACV, narrowing water-backup, moving wind/hail to a percentage deductible, or trimming the personal-property limit. Same 'limit' on the front page, different policy on the back.
- 05Letting a discount cycle expire silently.
New-business honeymoon, claims-free, paid-in-full, autopay-from-checking, and certain professional affiliations all expire on cycles you did not pick. Half the renewal jumps we see are partly explained by a quiet roll-off.
- 06Re-shopping while a claim is open.
Open claims follow you for three to five years and price-in at every carrier. Wait until the claim closes; the comparison is more honest then.
- 07Re-shopping every year out of habit.
Rates do not move that fast. Once every two to three years on a clean profile is the natural cycle. Annual re-quotes are noise.
The timeline.
- Renewal arrives.
T − 30 days. Read the dec page in full. Confirm the form did not change quietly. Note any line item that moved double digits, most often Coverage A, the deductible structure, or a missing discount.
- Pull the audit.
T − 21 days. Send us the dec page. We mark it up by hand, confirm the discount stack against carrier eligibility, and flag the two or three of six factors doing most of the work.
- Decide: stay or move.
T − 14 days. If the audit points to a deductible move, a missed discount, or a Coverage A overcorrection, we paper it with your current carrier. If it points to a carrier whose KS book is forcing aggressive filings, we quote across 20+ and let you choose.
- Bind the chosen path.
T − 7 days. Carrier handoffs land cleanly inside a 30-day window. Lender (if applicable) and DMV stay current; no coverage gap, no escrow shortage at the next analysis.
- Re-audit at next renewal.
+12 months. The audit has a half-life of about a year. Carriers re-rate annually; we re-audit annually. Most of those follow-up audits end with 'no move needed.'
The increase is not personal. The fix usually is.
Kansas homeowners loss ratios moved from a 54 percent five-year average to 68 percent in a single year. Combined ratios sit at 96 percent statewide. Auto premiums rose 12.2 percent. None of that is about your clean record. All of it is about the broad math the carriers are catching up to.
Our job is to figure out which of the six household-level rating factors on your specific policy are doing the most work, and whether the right move is a deductible reset and discount reclaim with your current carrier, or a clean handoff to a different one. About a third of the dec pages we look at end with the first answer.
If you have a renewal letter in front of you with a number you did not expect, the cheapest twenty minutes you will spend this year is sending the dec page over. Worst case, we tell you the increase is fair and the rest of the market is no better. Best case, we save you several hundred dollars and broaden your coverage in two line items.
Nick RhodesAgency owner · Personal lines · NPN 19488203 · KS + MO licensed
Questions we answer often.
Why did my rate go up if I have no claims and no tickets?
How does my specific carrier's situation affect my rate?
What is an 'insurance score' and how does it differ from FICO?
Is the Coverage A inflation on my homeowners policy fair?
Is replacement-cost roof coverage worth keeping?
How often should I re-shop my policies?
Does paid-in-full still beat autopay-from-checking?
Will my carrier match a competitor's quote?
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- We're moving in together.
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