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.
New Hampshire guide
From Home Insurance in New Hampshire: 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 at all.
New Hampshire's median home price is about $574,200. That number tells you nothing about what it costs to rebuild a New Hampshire house, and using it as your Coverage A limit is a guess dressed up as a calculation.
Rebuilding in New Hampshire runs roughly $240 per square foot — the midpoint of a published $175 to $300 band covering materials, labor, and general contractor overhead and profit, excluding land.
On a 2,000 square foot home:
Take the band seriously rather than treating $240 as precise:
That is a $250,000 spread on the same house.
And there is a specific limitation worth stating rather than burying: the source publishing that band assigns New Hampshire the exact same $175-$300 range it assigns Pennsylvania. That makes it a regional construction-cost band applied to New Hampshire, not a New Hampshire-specific survey. No New Hampshire building department or insurance regulator publishes a competing rebuild-cost figure to check it against.
Two other 2026 construction-cost series put New Hampshire much lower — $173 and $172 per square foot. Those two are measuring a narrower quantity: they track to a roughly $162 national average that corresponds to the NAHB construction-cost figure, which does not carry general contractor overhead and profit. After a total loss you are hiring a general contractor, and that contractor's overhead and profit is a real line item on the rebuild, which is why the higher figure is the right one for insurance purposes. But you should know both numbers exist.
The practical instruction: get an actual replacement-cost estimate for your specific home, from your carrier or an independent estimator. A per-square-foot rule of thumb is a sanity check, not an answer.
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 $480,000, so the 80% threshold is $384,000. Suppose you carry the $300,000 reference limit instead, and a fire does $100,000 of damage. Your limit is three times the loss, so it feels safe. It is not:
You are roughly $22,875 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 New Hampshire guide →15 min read · Updated 2026-08-28