Need to know
- Many Australians are being hit with an above-average increase to their home insurance policies
- Over a third of insurers have increased prices by more than 15% in the last year
- The insurers with the highest average price increases include Kogan, RAC and Honey, while just one insurer, Guild, actually reduced their prices on average
Opened up an email or letter from your home insurer recently to find an eye-watering increase to your annual premium? You're not alone.
For the majority of Australians who have home and contents insurance, it's a household cost that's becoming increasingly expensive. Over the past year, the average home insurance premium has increased by 16% or $359.
But which insurers have lumped their customers with the biggest price increases?
To assess how much prices have jumped in the last year, CHOICE experts compared thousands of quotes from 35 insurers collected in January 2024 to quotes collected for the same scenarios in January 2025. Then we calculated the average change for each brand.
CHOICE insurance expert Daniel Graham says: "In the vast majority of cases, the price went up. Out of the 35 insurers we looked at, 19 of them increased prices for at least 90% of the test addresses we looked at."
CHOICE tip: With a huge variety of policies out there that can vary in price by thousands of dollars, it's important to ensure you're getting the best deal possible on the coverage that suits you best. Compare home and contents policies.
The insurers with the biggest price increases
The insurers with the largest average price increases between January 2024 and January 2025 were:
Average price increases don't tell the whole story
Graham says that while insurers may boast low average price increases, this often doesn't tell the whole story, as insurers don't raise all their prices uniformly.
"Insurers have many levers at their disposal to change the way their algorithm calculates your premium," he says. "Sometimes this means an insurer will increase prices for some addresses, while keeping them the same or even dropping them for others.
"Take NRMA, for example, which hiked prices at one third of addresses, kept them the same at another third, and dropped prices for the rest. This means their average price change was 1.7% – great on paper, but there's clearly more going on beneath that figure.
Don't write off an insurer you might previously have dismissed as too expensive
"Looking only at the addresses that had an increase, NRMA prices went up 24.4%. For addresses that saw a decrease, prices dropped 20.7%. Lucky for some!"
Graham says this is a good reason to not write off an insurer you might previously have dismissed as too expensive. It's possible they've changed their underwriting approach in a way that means it's now cheaper to insure your home with them.
The insurers with more reasonable price hikes
Even though CPI inflation is currently at 2.4%, for insurance and financial services alone that figure is 5.4%.
Here are the insurers whose prices went up by less than financial services inflation, on average:
*As with NRMA prices, RACQ prices changed at most properties. Some went up, some went down, and the average evened out to 0.02%.
The insurer that dropped prices for most addresses
Surprisingly, one insurer actually reduced their prices. Guild had an average price drop of 15%, with three quarters of addresses seeing a decrease and most of the rest static.
Graham says: "In the past we've called this insurer one to avoid, specifically because of cost, so it's promising to see them trying to bring prices down in a world where insurance is getting ever more expensive. That said, Guild remains one of the more expensive brands on the market, despite its sharp price drop."
The factors affecting price
CHOICE experts spend a lot of time analysing quotes and policies offered by various insurers, so we know there are many factors that influence the quote you get as a potential new customer.
These include where in Australia you are, the level of security you have, how much you've insured your property for and what excess amount you choose.
It pays to shop around, because prices vary a lot from insurer to insurer. Instead of declining cover to high-risk properties they don't want to insure, some insurers will offer ludicrously high quotes to see if you bite. For two addresses we looked at, the most expensive quote was more than 20 times greater than the cheapest. Read more about how to get the best value home insurance.
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Stock images: Getty, unless otherwise stated.
