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.
Maine guide
From Home Insurance in Maine: 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 with no relationship to construction cost.
In Hawaii, market value is wildly above rebuild cost because land dominates. In Kansas, rebuild cost is above market value because land is nearly free. In Maine the two numbers sit close together, and that is precisely what makes the error hard to notice.
Maine's median home price is $428,478. Rebuilding a 1,700 square foot home runs roughly $391,000 at the state's midpoint construction cost. Those are within about $37,000 of each other — close enough that "insure it for what it's worth" produces a roughly plausible number and therefore never gets questioned.
But "roughly plausible" is not the same as right, and Maine's variation is enormous. A waterfront lot in Camden and an inland lot in Aroostook County carry wildly different land shares of the same purchase price. On the coast, market value is mostly land and insuring to it means over-insuring. Inland, market value can sit well below rebuild cost and insuring to it means being under-covered. The statewide averages hide both errors. The only number that matters is the construction cost of your specific house.
Rebuilding in Maine runs roughly $230 per square foot — the midpoint of a published $170 to $290 band covering materials, labor, and general contractor overhead and profit, excluding land.
On a 1,700 square foot home:
Take the band seriously:
A $204,000 spread on the same house. And a limitation worth stating rather than burying: this source publishes coarse regional cost bands, and Maine shares its exact $170-$290 range with Indiana and Michigan — not with its New England neighbors. It is a regional band applied to Maine, not a Maine-specific survey. No Maine building department or insurance regulator publishes a competing figure to check it against.
Two other national construction-cost series put Maine at $172 and $165 per square foot — materially lower. They are not hidden here and they are not averaged in either, because they measure a narrower quantity: both land near a $162 national average, which is the construction-cost figure that excludes general contractor overhead and profit. Your rebuild will include a general contractor's overhead and profit. The higher figure is the right one for insurance.
There is also a Maine-specific reason to treat the top of that band seriously. Older housing costs more to rebuild than square footage suggests. Plaster, plank subfloor, custom millwork, granite foundations, and post-and-beam framing are not cheap to reproduce, and a great many Maine houses have some or all of them. If your house predates the Second World War, the per-square-foot midpoint is likely to understate you.
Get an actual replacement-cost estimate for your specific home from your carrier or an independent estimator. Use the rule of thumb to sanity-check a number someone hands you, not to set your policy.
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 Maine example. Full replacement cost $391,000, so the 80% threshold is $312,800. Suppose you carry the $300,000 reference limit instead, and a winter storm does $100,000 of damage:
That is a $5,092 shortfall — real, but modest, because $300,000 sits only just under the threshold.
Now the version that actually happens. Suppose you bought a Maine house for $250,000 some years ago and insured it to the purchase price, never revisiting it:
Note the mechanism carefully: your limit is still two and a half times the size of the loss. Nothing about the claim exceeded your coverage. The reduction happens entirely because Coverage A was set below the coinsurance threshold, and none of it is visible until you file.
Read the full Maine guide →24 min read · Updated 2026-08-28