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.
Missouri guide
From Home Insurance in Missouri: 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 and does not hail. Your mortgage balance is a financing number with no relationship to construction cost.
Missouri's median home price is $299,064. Rebuilding an 1,800 square foot home runs roughly $423,000 at the state's midpoint construction cost — about $124,000 more than the median Missouri house sells for.
This is the reverse of the coastal pattern. In Hawaii or California, land dominates the price and insuring to market value means over-insuring. In Missouri, land is inexpensive and construction is not. If you set Coverage A to your purchase price, or to a real estate site's estimate, or to the county assessment, you are very likely underinsured.
There is a second-order effect worth flagging. Because the wind/hail deductible in Section 2 is calculated from Coverage A, fixing an under-insured limit also raises your storm deductible. Both are true. Fix the limit anyway — the coinsurance arithmetic below shows why the alternative is worse.
Rebuilding in Missouri runs roughly $235 per square foot — the midpoint of a published $170 to $300 band covering materials, labor, and general contractor overhead and profit, excluding land.
On an 1,800 square foot home:
Take the band seriously:
A $234,000 spread on the same house. And a limitation worth stating rather than burying: this source publishes coarse regional cost bands, and Missouri shares its exact $170-$300 range with Ohio. It is a regional band applied to Missouri, not a Missouri-specific survey. No Missouri building department or insurance regulator publishes a competing figure to check it against.
Two other national construction-cost series put Missouri at $160 and $163 per square foot — materially lower. (Missouri is one of the few states where the second cross-check lands above the first, for whatever that is worth.) 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 purposes.
Get an actual replacement-cost estimate for your specific home from your carrier or an independent estimator. Use the per-square-foot rule 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 Missouri example. Full replacement cost $423,000, so the 80% threshold is $338,400.
Scenario one: you carry the $300,000 reference limit — a figure that looks generous next to a $299,064 median home price — and a hailstorm does $100,000 of damage to roof, siding, windows and gutters:
Scenario two: you insured to a $250,000 purchase price years ago and never revisited it. Note that $250,000 is exactly the crossover point from Section 2, where the percentage and the floor tie at $2,500:
In both cases your limit was two and a half to three times the size of the loss. Nothing 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 Missouri guide →23 min read · Updated 2026-08-28