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.
Tennessee guide
From Home Insurance in Tennessee: 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 blow away. Your mortgage balance is a financing number with no relationship to construction cost.
In Tennessee the error typically runs toward underinsurance, because construction costs have outrun what a lot of Tennessee housing sells for. The median home price is about $383,600. As you are about to see, that is below what it costs to rebuild a typical Tennessee home.
Rebuilding in Tennessee runs roughly $210 per square foot - the midpoint of a published $150 to $270 band covering materials, labor, and general contractor overhead and profit, excluding land.
On a 2,000 square foot home:
Take the band seriously:
That is a $240,000 spread on the same house. Two honest limitations behind that width. First, the source publishes coarse regional bands - Tennessee shares its exact $150-$270 range with Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Texas, which makes it a Southern regional band applied to Tennessee rather than a Tennessee-specific survey. Second, no Tennessee building department or insurance regulator publishes a competing rebuild-cost figure to check it against.
Two other construction-cost series read Tennessee lower - $158 and $144 per square foot. Those are real numbers and worth knowing about, and they are also measuring a narrower quantity: both land near a $162 national figure that excludes general contractor overhead and profit. Rebuilding after a loss includes those, because you are hiring a contractor at post-disaster prices. That is why the higher figure is used here.
The practical instruction: get an actual replacement-cost estimate for your specific home from your carrier or an independent estimator. A per-square-foot number is a sanity check, not an answer.
Suppose you own that 2,000 square foot home, it is worth roughly the state median of $383,600, and you insured it to market value because that seemed like the sensible figure.
Rebuild cost is $420,000. You carry $383,600. On a total loss you are $36,400 short, and nothing fills that gap. In a tornado - which is precisely the peril that produces total losses in Tennessee - you find out at the worst possible moment.
Insure to a mortgage balance instead, say $290,000, and you are $130,000 short and, as the next subsection shows, below the coinsurance threshold as well.
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 $420,000, so the 80% threshold is $336,000. Suppose you carry the $300,000 reference limit - which feels enormously more than enough for a roof claim - and a tornado does $80,000 of damage.
You are roughly $11,600 to $14,600 short on a claim well inside your policy limit, entirely because Coverage A was set too low. None of it is visible until you file.
Read the full Tennessee guide →21 min read · Updated 2026-08-28