Five charts
The New Climate Divide
Five charts on the Australian homes becoming too risky to insure
Poorna Shree Sathesh Kumar | June 2026
Australia’s next big inequality problem may not just be rent, groceries
or mortgage repayments. It may be something many people only think about
once a year: whether they can still afford to insure their home. As
floods, storms, bushfires and cyclones become more damaging, insurance
is becoming more expensive and harder to access. This is creating a new
divide between households that can keep paying for protection and
households that may be priced out and forced to carry disaster risk on
their own. These five charts show where that divide is already
appearing, who is most affected, and how much wider it could become.
15%of households faced
affordability stress in 2024
520,944properties projected
effectively uninsurable by 2030
1 in 4households could be
without protection by 2050
Chart 1
Insurance stress is climbing fast
The share of households spending an unaffordable amount on home
insurance has jumped in just three years, reaching 1.61 million
households in 2024 — a 30% rise in a single year.
Source: Actuaries Institute (2024). 2024 is highlighted in tomato.
In three years, affordability stress rose by half — from 10% to 15% of
households.
Chart 2
The squeeze is not shared evenly
The pressure is concentrated in the disaster-exposed north. Each state
shows two measures: the share of households under affordability stress
today (tomato) and the share of homes projected to be effectively
uninsurable by 2030 (dark). Queensland leads on both.
Sources: Actuaries Institute (2024) and Climate Council of Australia
(2022).
Queensland carries both the highest affordability stress today and the
largest projected uninsurable share by 2030.
Chart 3
The communities already on the front line
Behind the percentages are large numbers of homes. Each bar stacks the
high-risk and medium-risk properties in the ten most exposed federal
electorates. Riverine flooding drives roughly 80% of the risk, and this
is not only a Queensland problem — Victoria, New South Wales and South
Australia also appear.
Source: Climate Council of Australia, Uninsurable Nation
(2022).
Single electorates already contain tens of thousands of high- and
medium-risk homes — and the risk spans four states.
Chart 4
The gap between protected and exposed homes
Today around 15% of households face high affordability pressure. Under
current emissions policies, that could reach around a quarter of all
households by 2050 — roughly a million more homes pushed toward going
without cover.
Source: APRA, Mind the Gap: An Insurance Climate Vulnerability
Assessment (2026). “No extra” means no additional climate change;
“Current” means Current Policies Scenario; “Delayed” means Delayed
Transition Scenario.
APRA’s stress test suggests the protection gap could widen from 15%
today to around one in four households by 2050.
Chart 5
Disasters already cost billions
Bigger disasters cost more, but not in a simple way. This plots each
recent event’s total claims cost against the number of claims lodged,
coloured by hazard type — the spread shows how a single cyclone or storm
season can dominate the bill.
Source: Insurance Council of Australia Data Hub (2026).
A single cyclone and one storm season drove the largest recent payouts
and the highest claim volumes — pressure that flows back into premiums.
Final takeaway
What this means
Climate change is no longer only about the environment. It is also
becoming part of everyday household finance. The same extreme weather
events that are driving large insurance losses are also pushing premiums
beyond the reach of more Australians. Without stronger action on flood
protection, resilient housing, smarter planning and emissions reduction,
the gap between protected and exposed homes could become permanent.
Insurance affordability is now an early warning sign of how climate risk
is starting to reshape ordinary life.
Acknowledgement of generative AI
I acknowledge the use of Claude AI and ChatGPT for planning support,
code troubleshooting, formatting assistance and wording refinement. The
data sources were selected and checked by me, and I made the final
decisions about the story angle, chart selection, interpretation and
submission content.