More than a year ago, on “Liberation Day,” President Donald Trump unilaterally imposed double-digit tariffs on imports from nearly every country on the planet. As a direct result, Americans have suffered higher prices ever since.
This holds true even in less obvious sectors of the economy. For example, I wrote last year that Trump’s tariffs would likely drive up the cost of car insurance.
Similarly, the tariffs appear to be raising homeowners’ insurance premiums, as well.
“Tariffs will add an extra $106 to the average homeowner’s annual insurance costs,” insurance comparison site Insurify projected earlier this year.
“Since April 2025, a 10 percent universal tariff has been applied to most imported goods, with steeper tariffs of 25 percent targeting imported vehicles, auto parts, steel, lumber, and aluminum,” Wawanesa General Insurance Company wrote in August. “At first glance, these trade policies may seem unrelated to your insurance policy, but they lead directly to higher premiums through increased repair and replacement costs. Put simply, when the cost of vehicle parts and home-building materials rises, insurance companies face higher claim payouts. These increased costs eventually result in higher premiums, affecting auto and home policyholders everywhere.”
“Almost half (47%) of homeowners insurance customers in the United States have experienced a premium increase in the past year, the highest rate of insurer-initiated rate raises in more than a decade,” J.D. Power noted last September.
The National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) estimated the tariffs’ impact at $10,900 per home. It added that in 2025, the U.S. imported $14 billion worth of building materials used in residential construction—around 7 percent of the total.
Of course, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Trump’s tariffs in February, finding that his use of an emergency statute to implement them was improper. But that only came after American companies paid over $100 billion in improper tariffs, which the administration is only now getting around to refunding.
Besides, immediately after the Supreme Court’s decision, Trump imposed 10 percent global tariffs using other statutes. As a result, the NAHB reported this week that for framing lumber, “Prices were 4.3% higher than one month ago, and 2.0% higher from a year ago.”
In February, Sens. Jacky Rosen (D–Nev.) and Chris Coons (D–Del.) introduced a bill that would exclude building materials from Trump’s new tariffs, though so far it has not left committee.
Of course, tariffs are not the only cause of high homeowners insurance premiums. In 2021, during the recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, lumber prices skyrocketed, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis—though they had mostly fallen back to earth by 2023.
And in addition to high material costs, the insurance company Travelers notes that “hurricanes, floods, droughts, wildfires and other severe weather events have become more frequent, destructive and costly.”
But that just underscores the point that imposing tariffs, much less on something as foundational as building materials, only serves to drive up costs for Americans. When it becomes more expensive to build a house, it’s also more expensive to rebuild that same house, driving up the cost of insurance.
It’s bad enough for costs to go up because of external factors, but it’s especially galling for insurance premiums to rise simply because the president wills it.
