Texas Homeowners Insurance Rates Are Finally Dropping — Here's How to Get It Into Your Mortgage Payment

After three brutal years, Texas homeowners insurance finally turned a corner — and almost nobody has told homeowners what to do about it.

On October 8, 2026, the Texas Department of Insurance reported that most homeowners insurers who filed rate changes since July 1 filed decreases. Over the preceding 90 days, filed homeowners rate changes averaged a 4.3% decrease, affecting roughly 700,000 policyholders. Two of the larger filings: ASI Lloyds, a Progressive company, filed a 6% decrease covering 71,000 policyholders, and Texas Farm Bureau Mutual filed a 5.2% decrease covering 133,000 policyholders. Insurance Commissioner Amanda Crawford called the lower filings "an encouraging sign for Texas consumers" and urged Texans to shop around.

I'm Bond Peter Njoku (NMLS #2670329), a Garland-based mortgage loan officer, and here is why I'm writing about insurance on a mortgage site: for most of my clients, insurance does not arrive as a bill. It arrives inside the monthly mortgage payment, buried in escrow. Which means a premium decrease does not automatically lower your payment. It sits there until something triggers a recalculation — and if you don't know how that works, you can pay the old amount for the better part of a year while your carrier charges you less.

This post is the mechanics: what the TDI numbers do and don't mean, how to get a decrease into your actual payment, and how a lower escrow line changes what you can qualify for at today's 7.40% rates.

What exactly did TDI report, and what does it not mean?

Precision matters here, because there are two different "4.3%" figures floating around Texas insurance coverage and they point in opposite directions.

Read that series top to bottom and you can see the actual story: +21.1% in 2023, +18.7% in 2024, +4.3% in 2025, and now a 4.3% decrease in recent filings. The market didn't just slow down — it reversed. That is genuinely good news, and it is the first time in four years I've been able to write that sentence.

Three caveats I want to be straight about, because most coverage skips them:

• These are filings, not refunds. Insurers file rates with TDI, TDI reviews them, and the new rates apply to new business and renewals. Nothing lands in your mailbox as a check. Your decrease shows up when your policy renews.
• "Average" hides a lot. Roughly 160 companies sell homeowners and auto insurance in Texas. An average decrease of 4.3% is entirely consistent with your carrier filing an increase. You have to check yours specifically.
• A rate decrease is not necessarily a premium decrease. If your home's insured replacement cost was revalued upward at the same time, a lower rate applied to a higher coverage amount can still produce a higher premium. Rate and premium are different things.

How do I find out whether my own insurer filed a decrease?

This is the practical part, and TDI handed Texans a tool for it in June 2026 that very few people know exists. Two of them, actually, both free and both on tdi.texas.gov:

1. The rate filing search tool. You can look up whether your specific home or auto insurer filed a rate change with TDI, and what it was. Search your carrier's name, look at the most recent homeowners filing, and note the percentage and effective date.
2. The homeowners market overview. This one shows average annual premiums in every Texas county from 2019 through 2025. If you want to know whether what you're paying in Dallas, Collin, Rockwall, or Kaufman County is normal, this is the answer, straight from the regulator rather than from a lead-generation site.

Then do the thing the commissioner actually recommended: shop. Get three quotes at renewal. In my experience the spread between carriers on the same DFW home is routinely 20–40%, which dwarfs a 4.3% average filing. The filing trend is a tailwind; shopping is the lever.

Why didn't my mortgage payment go down when my premium did?

Because of how escrow works, and this is the single most misunderstood part of a mortgage payment.

Your servicer collects 1/12 of your projected annual taxes and insurance with each payment, holds it in an escrow account, and pays the bills when they come due. They set that monthly amount from an annual escrow analysis — a once-a-year projection of next year's costs. Between analyses, your escrow payment generally does not move, even if your underlying premium changed the day after the last analysis ran.

Under federal escrow rules (RESPA), the servicer may also hold a cushion of up to two months of escrow payments. When the analysis finds you've over-collected, the rules are specific: a surplus of $50 or more must generally be refunded to you within 30 days, while a surplus under $50 may be refunded or credited against future payments at the servicer's option.

So if your premium drops in November and your escrow analysis runs each February, you can spend three months paying the old escrow amount before anything changes. That money isn't lost — it comes back as a surplus refund or a lower payment going forward — but you float it in the meantime.

What to do about it: you can ask your servicer to run an off-cycle escrow re-analysis after a documented premium change. Not every servicer will, and none advertise it, but many will when you send them the new declarations page showing a lower annual premium. Call the servicer, say you have a reduced insurance premium and are requesting an escrow re-analysis, and send the documentation. Worst case they decline and you wait for the annual cycle. Best case your payment drops months earlier.

How much is a 6% premium cut actually worth per month?

Let's be honest about scale. Insurance is a real line item but it is not the biggest one, and I'd rather give you the true number than oversell it:

So a 6% filing on a typical DFW premium is worth somewhere between $13 and $20 a month. That is not life-changing on its own. But two things make it matter more than the raw number suggests.

First, it compounds with shopping. If the filing trend gives you 6% and switching carriers gives you another 25%, you're looking at $70–$100 a month on a $4,000 premium — real money.

Second, and more importantly for anyone currently buying: it changes your qualifying ratios.

How does lower insurance affect what I can qualify for?

This is the part no insurance article covers, and it's the reason a loan officer should be the one telling you.

When I qualify you, I'm not looking at principal and interest. I'm looking at PITI — principal, interest, taxes, and insurance, plus HOA and mortgage insurance where they apply — measured against your income as your back-end debt-to-income ratio. Insurance sits inside that number. Lower it and the whole ratio improves, which means the same income supports a slightly larger loan.

In Texas this matters more than almost anywhere else, because our escrow line is unusually heavy. We have no state income tax and comparatively high property taxes, so taxes plus insurance can run $700–$900 a month on a mid-priced DFW home. That is a large share of PITI, and it is why Texas buyers lose more buying power per rate point than buyers in low-tax states.

Here's what the escrow line does to a qualifying price. Same borrower, same $2,800 monthly PITI budget, 5% down, 7.40% rate, $2,600 annual insurance — only the county tax rate changes:

Look at the spread: the same borrower qualifies for $21,003 more house in Collin County than in Tarrant County purely because of the tax rate feeding the escrow line. Nothing about their income, credit, or down payment changed. That is how much escrow moves the needle — and it's why a $20/month insurance decrease is worth more than $20 to a buyer sitting right at the edge of qualifying. On these numbers, $20 a month of escrow relief is roughly $2,800 of additional purchase price.

What if my payment is still going up?

For a lot of Texas homeowners it will, and I'd be doing you a disservice to pretend otherwise. Insurance is only half the escrow equation. The other half is property taxes, and those are reassessed annually by your county appraisal district. A 6% insurance decrease worth $16 a month gets erased instantly by a 5% increase in appraised value on a $350,000 home.

If your escrow payment is rising despite the insurance news, the cause is almost certainly one of these:

• Property tax reassessment outran your insurance savings. Check your CAD notice and consider protesting.
• You didn't file a homestead exemption, or you filed late. This is the largest single lever most Texas homeowners have and a surprising number never pull it.
• An escrow shortage from last year is being repaid in 12 monthly installments on top of the new projection.
• Your home sits in a MUD district, where the district's tax stacks on top of county and school taxes.
• Your carrier revalued your replacement cost upward, so a lower rate still produced a higher premium.

A Mesquite homeowner who got the decrease into her payment early

Here's a composite from a conversation I had recently. A homeowner in Mesquite — Dallas County, a $312,000 home, FHA loan from 2023, escrow payment of about $810 a month covering roughly $6,240 in taxes and $3,480 in insurance. Her mortgage payment had gone up twice in three years and she assumed that was permanent.

Her renewal quote came in at $3,245, down about 6.8% from $3,480, because her carrier had filed a decrease. Her servicer's annual escrow analysis wasn't scheduled for another seven months. Left alone, she'd have paid the old escrow figure until then and received a surplus refund at analysis.

Instead she did two things. She sent her servicer the new declarations page and requested an off-cycle escrow re-analysis, which they ran. That alone moved about $20 a month. Then she shopped three carriers and found coverage at $2,690 — another $555 a year below her renewal. Combined, her escrow dropped roughly $66 a month, about $790 a year.

Worth noting what did not work: she also hoped the savings would offset a Dallas County reassessment, and it only partly did. Her net payment still rose about $18 a month, just far less than it would have. That's the realistic outcome for most Texas homeowners this year — not a lower payment, but a much smaller increase than they were braced for.

What should I do this month?

1. Look up your carrier on TDI's rate filing search tool and find out whether they filed a decrease.
2. Check your county's average premium on TDI's homeowners market overview and see where you stand.
3. Get three renewal quotes. The spread between carriers beats the filing trend by a wide margin.
4. Send your servicer the new declarations page and request an off-cycle escrow re-analysis if your premium dropped.
5. Confirm your homestead exemption is on file with your county appraisal district.
6. If you're buying, get real insurance quotes before you finalize your budget — not a lender's placeholder estimate. At 7.40% rates, an accurate escrow number is the difference between qualifying and not.

If you're shopping for a home in DFW right now and want to see how your actual insurance quote and county tax rate change your qualifying price, send me both numbers and I'll run it. Call or text me at 469-545-7180.

More on this from my site: why your escrow payment went up, what homeowners insurance costs in DFW, the rising-cost years that led here, how Texas property taxes hit your payment, filing your homestead exemption, and my mortgage calculators.