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.
Maryland guide
From Home Insurance in Maryland: 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 correct. 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.
Rebuilding in Maryland runs roughly $230 per square foot - the midpoint of a published $165 to $290 band covering materials, labor, and general contractor overhead and profit, excluding land.
Now hold that against Maryland's median home price of $463,449. A 2,000 square foot home costs about $460,000 to rebuild - within about $3,500 of the state median sale price.
That near-equality is worth pausing on, because it breaks a rule of thumb people repeat constantly. The usual advice is "market value overstates rebuild cost because it includes land, so don't insure to market value or you'll overpay." In Maryland, at a typical house size, those two numbers land essentially on top of each other. The shortcut gives you the right answer by accident and teaches you the wrong lesson.
And the statewide median hides an enormous internal spread. In Montgomery County, land is a large fraction of price and market value runs far above rebuild cost. In parts of Western Maryland and the lower Eastern Shore, land is cheap and rebuild cost can exceed market value, which is the more dangerous direction, because insuring to market value there leaves you underinsured.
Take the band seriously too. At $165/sq ft, that 2,000 square foot home rebuilds for $330,000. At $290/sq ft, it rebuilds for $580,000. That is a $250,000 spread on the same house, and no Maryland building department or insurance regulator publishes a competing rebuild-cost survey to narrow it. Get an actual replacement-cost estimate for your specific home rather than relying on any per-square-foot rule.
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 2,000 square foot example. Full replacement cost $460,000, so the 80% threshold is $368,000. 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 $19,500 to $24,500 short on a claim comfortably inside your policy limit, entirely because Coverage A was set too low. None of that is visible until you file.
Read the full Maryland guide →15 min read · Updated 2026-08-28