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.
Hawaii guide
From Home Insurance in Hawaii: 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.
In Hawaii this error runs in both directions at once, which makes it unusually confusing. Hawaii's median home price is about $747,660 — one of the highest in the country — and a very large share of that is land. Insure to market value and you are likely paying for coverage you do not need. Insure to your loan balance and you are likely catastrophically under-covered. The only number that matters is the construction cost.
Rebuilding in Hawaii runs roughly $330 per square foot — the midpoint of a published $215 to $450 band covering materials, labor, and general contractor overhead and profit, excluding land.
On a 1,500 square foot home:
And take the band seriously, because Hawaii's is the widest of any state — a 2.1x spread from bottom to top:
That is a $352,500 spread on the same house. No Hawaii building department or insurance regulator publishes a competing rebuild-cost survey to narrow it. If any state's rebuild cost deserves to be treated as a range rather than a number, it is this one — which means the practical instruction is to get an actual replacement-cost estimate for your specific home, from your carrier or an independent estimator, rather than relying on any per-square-foot rule of thumb. Island, access, elevation, and shipping all move this number.
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 on the example. Full replacement cost $495,000, so the 80% threshold is $396,000. Suppose you carry the $300,000 reference limit instead, and a storm does $100,000 of damage. Your limit is three times the loss, so it feels safe. It is not:
You are $25,000 to $30,000 short on a claim well inside your policy limit, entirely because Coverage A was set too low. None of that is visible until you file.
Read the full Hawaii guide →17 min read · Updated 2026-08-28