By August 2024, Universal Property & Casualty had finished leaving the Hawaiʻi homeowners market, and roughly 1,500 households, most of them on Hawaiʻi Island, had already received letters saying their policy would not be renewed. Premiums then climbed further after the 2023 Maui wildfires, with some homeowners seeing renewal increases of 32% to 54%. At that point, availability matters more than price.
A homeowner who lost coverage this way needs to know which carriers can actually provide coverage this year. Scrolling through a national top-ten list will not answer that question.
Why the National Rankings Are Already Out of Date
Type “best insurance companies in Hawaiʻi” into a search bar and most results trace back to research built for the mainland market, scoring carriers on complaint counts and app design rather than whether they are actually writing new policies here. One comparison site still in circulation shows sample quotes from a carrier that shut down its Hawaiʻi operation for good in 2024. Chase a list like that and a homeowner can spend a week collecting rejections from carriers that stopped taking new business years ago.
A better comparison starts with a different question. Is the carrier even authorized to write in Hawaiʻi at all? From there, two things matter most. What an independent rating agency says about the company’s ability to pay a claim, and what is left to fall back on if the carrier has already left Hawaiʻi altogether.
What “Admitted” Actually Means in Hawaiʻi
Ask a broker who works this market to sort a stack of quotes, and the first split they make is regulatory. Whether the carrier is admitted or surplus lines. Admitted carriers hold a Hawaiʻi Insurance Division license, submit their rates for review before they can charge them, and sit behind the Hawaiʻi Insurance Guaranty Association if one ever goes under. Surplus lines carriers skip that licensing step entirely and end up on a quote sheet almost exclusively because an admitted carrier already turned the property down, whether it is an older home, a lot inside a lava hazard zone, or a stretch of coastline standard carriers stopped writing years ago.
Surplus lines coverage is often the only option available for a property that admitted carriers have already declined, and Lloyd’s syndicates and other surplus lines markets write a meaningful share of Hawaiʻi’s higher-risk homes. This matters because surplus lines policies carry no guaranty fund backstop. If the carrier fails, no state-run safety net stands behind the claim and becomes the top reason to check a carrier’s financial strength before signing anything.
How to Check a Carrier’s Financial Strength Before You Commit
AM Best is the agency brokers check first, and the letter grade matters less than which side of one line a carrier falls on. Anything A++, A+, A, A-, B++, or B+, sits in AM Best’s Secure tier. Drop to a B or below and the company moves into what AM Best itself calls Vulnerable territory, its own label for a real risk that the carrier will struggle to pay future claims. The exact grade inside the Secure tier matters less for a homeowner than confirming the carrier has not slipped below that line at all.
An admitted carrier with a lower rating is worth a second look, and a surplus lines carrier with the same rating and no guaranty fund backstop is closer to a deal breaker. Checking the rating takes one search on ambest.com before signing anything, a step a national listicle typically fails walks the reader through.
When the Hawaiʻi Property Insurance Association Is Your Fallback
HPIA exists because the private market walked away from certain properties first, on the Big Island specifically, when insurers stopped writing new policies in lava hazard zones. The Hawaiʻi legislature set up the association in 1991 to fill that gap, and the mandate has grown well past lava zones since then. Today HPIA covers any property across the islands that cannot find a private carrier willing to write it, not just homes near active flow paths. HPIA policies carry real limitations, including narrower coverage than a standard homeowners policy, but for a property every admitted and surplus lines carrier has declined, it is often the only path to compliant coverage for a mortgage.
The market got materially more complicated in July 2025. Lawmakers passed Senate Bill 1044, which extended HPIA’s authority to cover condominium buildings that cannot secure private insurance and gave the Hawaiʻi Hurricane Relief Fund the ability to write hurricane coverage for high-rise condos for the first time. Coverage is capped at 60 months for high-rise buildings as a stopgap, and each condo association must submit its governing documents so HPIA can see how a claim would split between the master policy and individual units.
What This Means for AOAO Boards
Condo and AOAO boards researching carriers are shopping a thinner market than single-family homeowners, and master policies for larger buildings increasingly route through surplus lines carriers instead of admitted ones. A board evaluating options should confirm two things an individual homeowner would also check. Whether the carrier is admitted or surplus lines, and what its AM Best rating is.
A separate condo-specific question matters just as much. Whether the master policy coordinates cleanly with the HO-6 policies unit owners are required to carry. Gaps between the two policies usually surface only after a loss. A broker who places AOAO master policies regularly can work this comparison against the thinner, surplus-lines-heavy market boards are shopping.
Why the Mainland Shopping Approach Falls Short Here
Military families and mainland transplants often arrive with a shopping method built for a market with a dozen national carriers actively competing for their business. That approach runs into trouble fast in Hawaiʻi. The active carrier list is shorter, hurricane coverage is frequently a separate policy from the base homeowners policy instead of bundled in, and Hawaiʻi maintains two last-resort mechanisms, HPIA and the Hurricane Relief Fund, that most mainland markets do not need and most transplants have never encountered.
Small business owners run into a commercial version of this same carrier question, though the shopping considerations there are different enough to warrant their own separate discussion. A business owner’s policy is the starting point for most of those conversations, since it folds property and liability coverage into one policy rather than forcing an owner to weigh two separate carrier decisions at once.
Bring These Three Numbers to Your Next Broker Conversation
A homeowner or board member working through a non-renewal or a market gap gets more out of a broker conversation by arriving with specifics rather than a stack of quotes. Three numbers get that conversation started quickly. The effective date on the non-renewal or expiration notice, the AM Best rating and admitted status of any carrier already offering a quote, and the property’s specific risk factors, whether lava zone designation, distance from the coast, or building age, that are driving the carrier’s decision either way.
Talk to a Broker Before the Next Non-Renewal
Atlas Insurance Agency has been part of the Hawaiʻi community since 1929. That is nearly a century of placing coverage across the islands, with broker relationships spanning the admitted market, the surplus lines market, and the backstop mechanisms Hawaiʻi maintains for both. Our local knowledge is what makes the difference when a non-renewal notice lands and the national top-ten list has already stopped being useful. If you are working through a market gap or a coverage decision on a property standard carriers have declined, contact our team and we can walk through which carriers are actually taking new business on your property right now.