Texas Multifamily Insurance Cost Per Unit: What the Published Benchmarks Actually Say

Nearly every published benchmark measures property insurance only, one line on an operating statement. Most owners describing their own cost mean the whole program. Those differ by 30 percent or more.

What Is Inside, and What Is Not

• Inside: buildings, business personal property and loss of rents, including wind and hail where that peril sits in the policy rather than carved out.
• Outside: general liability and umbrella, a separate placement and the hardest habitational line to buy. Flood is always separate.
• Outside on the coast: in the first-tier counties wind and hail is stripped out to the Texas Windstorm Insurance Association or private wind, so a coastal property's property line can exclude its largest peril.
• Outside, usually: equipment breakdown, crime, cyber, workers compensation, and surplus lines taxes and fees.

Normalize first. Divide property, liability, flood and standalone wind premium by unit count separately. A blended figure never shows which layer got expensive.

There is no single national figure. There are three well-sourced ones, and the spread between lowest and highest is about 28 percent.

The Three Baselines

• Yardi Matrix, $636 per unit: the national average property insurance cost per unit as of January 2024, up 27.7 percent year over year and 129 percent since 2018, from a special report covering roughly 22,000 properties of 50 units or more.
• NAA, IREM and BOMA Income & Expense IQ, $777 per unit: insurance in 2024, up 10.8 percent after a roughly 25 percent jump in 2023, across more than one million units at 4,666 properties in 109 metro markets. Taxes and insurance together hit $2,998 per unit against total operating expenses of $8,657.
• Federal Reserve staff research, about $816 per unit: a September 2025 FEDS Note put average property insurance at $68 per unit per month in 2024, up from $39 in 2019 in inflation-adjusted 2023 dollars, a real increase of about 75 percent. The sample ran 24,000 to 28,000 properties a year across 150-plus metros, averaging 172 units and a 1977 vintage.

Why They Disagree

• Sample and window: Yardi's floor is 50 units, while RealPage, cited alongside Yardi in Fannie Mae's May 2024 multifamily commentary, includes 5 to 49 unit properties and reports higher premiums. And $636 is trailing data at January 2024 against full-year 2024 for $777.
• The 2018 base: that same commentary, citing Yardi, put the trailing average near $23 per unit per month in December 2018, roughly $280 a year, rising to about $41 by December 2022. RealPage showed the same trend near $31 and $52.
• The consequence: the Federal Reserve note found insurance had reached roughly 5 percent of revenue by 2024, and that a dollar of added cost produced only 25 to 40 cents of added revenue, leaving about 72 cents out of net operating income.

No public dataset publishes a clean Texas-wide per-unit average. What the data supports is that Texas sits on the expensive side of the national figure and has grown faster than it. Three drivers explain it.

1. Catastrophe Exposure, and Not Mostly Hurricanes

• Volume: NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information counts 190 billion-dollar disaster events affecting Texas from 1980 through 2024, CPI-adjusted at $300 billion to $440 billion.
• The mix underwriters price: 126 of those 190 are severe storms, meaning hail, tornado and straight-line wind. Tropical cyclones account for only 16 events but 56.9 percent of the dollars; severe storms account for 22.6 percent. Hurricanes drive severity, hail drives frequency, and frequency resets rate.
• The trend: Texas averaged 4.2 billion-dollar events per year across the full 1980 to 2024 record, and 13.6 per year over 2020 to 2024. The Insurance Information Institute recorded 53 US severe convective storm events in 2023 producing roughly $57.6 billion in insured losses.

2. Insured Value Per Unit Keeps Climbing

Premium is a rate applied to insured value, so valuation drives premium even when rate is flat. Texas carriers spent 2022 through 2024 pushing replacement cost valuations upward, and construction cost indices kept reporting increases through 2025 and into 2026. A 20 percent increase in stated replacement cost is a 20 percent premium increase at an unchanged rate, and it enlarges every percentage deductible on the policy.

3. Claim Cost and Litigation

Texas hail claim litigation was severe enough to produce Insurance Code Chapter 542A in 2017, imposing pre-suit notice requirements on first-party claims arising from forces of nature, and carriers still load Texas rate for it. Habitational liability capacity also loosened well after property did, and aging supply lines plus the February 2021 freeze produce steady water losses.

The growth differential is documented. Yardi Matrix data showed Houston insurance costs rising 31.6 percent in the twelve months ending June 2023 against a national average of 18.8 percent, and Federal Reserve researchers found 2019 to 2024 growth was largest in Florida and along the Louisiana and Texas coasts.

We are deliberately not publishing a per-unit dollar table by Texas metro. No public dataset supports one at that granularity, and the honest reason beats a fake table: the spread within any Texas metro is wider than the spread between metros. These tiers describe the floor a market sets before your building's facts are considered.

The Four Tiers

• Tier 1, the coast: structurally different, not just costlier. In the 14 first-tier counties wind is commonly carved out to TWIA or private wind, so you buy three or four policies, and per-unit comparisons against inland property mean nothing unless every layer is added back. See Corpus Christi. Houston sits just off that line: most of Harris County is outside the TWIA catastrophe area, so wind usually stays on the property policy behind a named storm percentage deductible rather than being stripped out. See Houston.
• Tier 2, the DFW hail corridor: priced for repeat frequency rather than a once-in-a-generation storm, so roof settlement terms and deductible structure matter more than headline rate. Garden-style stock exposes far more roof surface per dollar of value than mid-rise. See Dallas, Fort Worth, Arlington and Irving.
• Tier 3, Central Texas: real hail exposure against newer inventory. Fannie Mae's May 2024 commentary flagged 2023 hailstorms affecting Austin and parts of Dallas as recent Texas loss events, and the April 2016 Bexar County hailstorm remains among the costliest single hail events in state history. See Austin and San Antonio.
• Tier 4, far West Texas: the lowest catastrophe load in the state, with no coastal wind and materially lower hail frequency. The one Texas market where a below-national figure is plausible rather than a warning sign. See El Paso.

Two 200-unit garden communities eight miles apart, same metro, same year built, routinely price far apart. These are the variables that do it.

Roof, Deductible, Vintage, Losses, Values

• Roof age and documentation: the largest swing factor in Texas. It drives rate, drives whether roofs settle at replacement cost or actual cash value, and drives whether some carriers open the file at all. Age defaults to building age unless you prove replacement, and overlays do not reset the clock. Tear-off invoices and permits do.
• Impact-resistant covering: products meeting the UL 2218 Class 4 impact standard earn filed credits from many Texas carriers on the wind and hail component, and the Texas Department of Insurance maintains the qualifying product list. On commercial multifamily the credit is discretionary.
• Deductible structure: the trade is not linear. Moving from 2 to 5 percent often buys far less rate than the retention it creates, and application language outweighs the percentage. Read our guide to Texas wind and hail percentage deductibles first.
• Vintage and construction: frame versus masonry is a rating class, not a description. On pre-1990 stock the pressure points are original panels, aluminum branch wiring, cast iron or polybutylene supply lines and original roof decking.
• Loss history and valuation: frequency hurts more than severity. One hurricane claim is an act of God; nine water losses is a management finding. Under-reporting values does not help either, since coinsurance and margin clauses cut the recovery.

No underwriter prices per unit. They apply a rate per $100 of total insured value, and per-unit cost falls out the back end. The formula is annual premium = (TIV divided by 100) multiplied by the rate. Take a 200-unit property at $150,000 per unit: $30,000,000 of insured value, or 300,000 hundreds.

Same Property, Three Illustrative Rates

• $0.25 per $100: $75,000 premium, or $375 per unit.
• $0.60 per $100: $180,000 premium, or $900 per unit.
• $1.00 per $100: $300,000 premium, or $1,500 per unit.

Those rates are illustrative arithmetic, not quoted pricing.

The Trap Per-Unit Reporting Hides

Hold the rate flat at $0.60 and raise valuation from $150,000 to $200,000 per unit. TIV becomes $40,000,000, premium becomes $240,000, and per-unit cost becomes $1,200. Cost per door jumped 33 percent and the rate never moved. The first renewal question is not what the rate did, it is what the schedule of values did.

It also breaks cross-property comparison. A lease-up at $280,000 per unit of insured value and a 1978 workforce property at $95,000 per unit can carry identical per-unit premiums at very different rates, and the older property is the one being punished. Demand three numbers every renewal: expiring rate per $100, renewal rate per $100, and the change in TIV.

Per-unit benchmarks carry one permanent flaw: they always lag the market. They are built from completed operating statements, so the freshest credible figures describe policies bound one to two years earlier.

Three Ways the Benchmark Lies

• The lag: the most-cited per-unit figures are 2024 operating data. Published commercial insurance rate indices showed property rates falling 12 percent in the second quarter of 2026, after 9 percent declines in each of the two preceding quarters, and NMHC had already flagged the first rate decline since 2017 following 27 consecutive quarters of increases.
• Composition drift: samples skew toward institutional, larger properties. If you own three 1980s properties totaling 240 units, the national sample does not describe you.
• Scope and denominator: if the comparison property carves wind out to TWIA and yours does not, the comparison is meaningless. Per unit, per square foot and per $100 of TIV also tell different stories about one policy.

Renewal Prep: The Timeline That Works

• 120 days out: pull five years of loss runs and reconcile every open reserve. Assemble a per-building roof schedule with install dates, invoices and permit numbers.
• 90 days out: document capital work with invoices and photos, including roofs, panels, supply-line replacement and any Class 4 covering. Confirm your loan's maximum permitted deductible before you shop deductible.
• 60 days out: get expiring and renewal rate per $100 in writing, model real retention on a partial hail loss under the proposed deductible language, and get the roof valuation basis stated.
• 30 days out: compare on rate and terms, not premium. Confirm whether any cosmetic damage or roof surfacing limitation is attached, and check loss-of-rents duration and ordinance or law limits.

Owners who beat the benchmark are rarely the ones who shopped hardest. They are the ones whose file answered the underwriter's questions before they were asked. Call (512) 893-3795.