Whether the dwelling coverage on your policy would actually rebuild your house — and what a shortfall costs you at claim time. Planning estimate only, not an appraisal.
Your renewal jumped and the carrier said 'rates went up.' Here is what is actually driving it, how to tell whether yours outran your state's, and the four levers that genuinely move the number.
Flood and earth movement are excluded from every standard homeowners policy — and the clause that excludes them is written so a wind-and-water loss can be denied entirely. Here is what is out, and what fills each gap.
Non-renewed, cancelled, or declined: read the notice correctly, stop force-placed insurance, fix the reason code on it, and get the house insured again in 30 days.
The exact sequence to run when your house is damaged — mitigation, documentation, the claim call script, the adjuster visit, reading the estimate, and every escalation step in order.
Georgia guide
From Home Insurance in Georgia: What It Costs and What Actually Covers You
The most consequential number on your policy is your Coverage A limit, and the most common way it goes wrong is setting it to your home's market value or your mortgage balance.
Neither is right. Dwelling coverage should equal the cost to rebuild your home from the foundation up at today's construction prices. Market value includes land, which does not burn. Your mortgage balance is a financing number unrelated to construction cost.
Rebuilding in Georgia runs roughly $220 per square foot — the midpoint of a published $160 to $280 band covering materials, labor, and general contractor overhead and profit, excluding land.
On a 2,000 square foot home:
Take the band seriously:
A $240,000 spread on the same house. Georgia shares that exact band with Arizona, Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota — nine states, which tells you plainly it is a regional construction-cost band applied to Georgia rather than a Georgia-specific survey. No Georgia building department or insurance regulator publishes a competing figure to check it against. Treat $220 as a starting point and get an actual replacement-cost estimate for your specific home.
The rebuild figure is roughly $80,000 above the median sale price. Insuring to what you paid — or to what Zillow says the house is worth — leaves that gap uncovered on a total loss, and triggers the coinsurance penalty below on a partial one.
The gap will be different on your house. In a north-metro Atlanta neighborhood where lot values are high, land is a bigger share of price and the gap narrows or reverses. In rural south Georgia, where land is cheap and construction is not, it widens. The statewide comparison tells you the direction of the error, not its size on your property.
Most homeowners policies contain a coinsurance provision requiring you to insure the dwelling to at least 80% of its full replacement cost. Fall below that and the insurer does not merely cap your payout at your limit — it reduces every partial claim proportionally.
Work it. Full replacement cost $440,000, so the 80% threshold is $352,000. Suppose you carry the $300,000 reference limit, and a storm does $100,000 of damage:
You are $15,800 to $20,800 short on a claim well inside your policy limit, entirely because Coverage A was set too low. None of it is visible until you file.
Read the full Georgia guide →19 min read · Updated 2026-08-28