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.
Louisiana guide
From Home Insurance in Louisiana: What It Costs and What Actually Covers You
Here is the mistake that quietly does the most damage: setting your dwelling coverage to your home's market value, or to your mortgage balance.
Neither is the right number. Dwelling coverage should equal the cost to rebuild your home from the foundation up, at today's construction prices, with today's labor. That is a construction number, not a real estate number.
Market value includes your land, which does not burn down and does not blow away. Your mortgage balance is a financing number that has nothing to do with construction costs at all — someone who has paid their loan down to $80,000 still needs a full rebuild if the house is destroyed.
Rebuilding in Louisiana runs roughly $210 per square foot — the midpoint of a published $150 to $270 band, covering materials, labor, and general contractor overhead and profit, but not land.
On a 2,000 square foot home:
Against that, note Louisiana's statewide median home price of about $260,300. If you insured to market value, you would be carrying roughly $160,000 less than it costs to put the house back. That is not a rounding error; that is a wing of the house.
Take the band seriously in both directions. At the low end, 2,000 x $150 = $300,000. At the high end, 2,000 x $270 = $540,000. That $240,000 spread is the honest width of a statewide construction figure, and it is why this number is a starting point for a conversation with your agent, not a final answer. Louisiana shares its exact cost band with several other Southern states, which means it is a regional construction-cost band applied to Louisiana rather than a Louisiana-specific survey. And after a major hurricane, demand surge can push real rebuild costs above even the top of that band for a year or more.
Most homeowners policies contain a coinsurance provision requiring you to insure the dwelling to at least 80% of its full replacement cost. If you fall below that threshold, the insurer does not simply cap your total payout at your limit — it reduces every partial claim proportionally.
Work it on the example above. Full replacement cost is $420,000, so the 80% threshold is $336,000. Suppose you carry $300,000 instead, and a storm does $100,000 of damage. Your $300,000 limit is far above the $100,000 loss, so it is tempting to assume you are fully covered. You are not:
You are roughly $16,700 short on a claim well inside your policy limit, purely because your Coverage A was set too low. Nothing about that shortfall is visible until you file.
Review your Coverage A limit annually. Construction costs have moved a lot, and a limit set five years ago is almost certainly too low today.
Read the full Louisiana guide →19 min read · Updated 2026-08-28