The problem with PURE: where 40 cents of every dollar goes

Privilege Underwriters Reciprocal Exchange — PURE — is the fastest-growing name in high-value personal insurance. It earned $2.2 billion of direct premium in 2024, 62% of it homeowners, and it has built that book on a specific promise: that the mass-market carriers don't understand a $4 million house, and that paying more for a specialist is worth it.

The first half of that is largely true. The second half is the part worth checking, because "worth it" is a claim about price, and price is one of the few things in insurance that carriers are legally required to explain in public.

The number an insurer files about itself

Before a carrier can charge you a rate, it files that rate with your state's insurance department, and the filing has to show the arithmetic. Buried in that arithmetic is a figure called the target loss ratio — the share of premium the insurer is planning to pay out in claims. Everything above it is the provision for expenses and profit. It is not a forecast that can be spun after the fact; it is the assumption the price was built on, submitted under the insurer's own name.

Here is what the high-value carriers have been filing on homeowners since the start of 2023.

Carrier	Target loss ratio	Kept for expense and profit	Filings
PURE	45.0%	55.0%	103
Chubb (Federal, Great Northern, Pacific Indemnity, Vigilant)	59.0%	41.0%	67
Cincinnati	58.1%	41.9%	133
Every homeowners filer	58.4%	41.6%	4,035

Mean target loss ratio across homeowners rate filings submitted from 1 January 2023, counting only filings where a real ratio could be read from the exhibits. The market row covers 4,035 such filings.

Thirteen points is not a rounding difference. On a $12,000 PURE homeowners premium it is about $1,600 a year that the pricing never intended to send back to policyholders as claims — money that, at Chubb's or Cincinnati's filed assumption, would have been.

Personal auto is wider still. PURE's auto filings since 2023 target a 49.3% loss ratio. Across the 5,264 personal auto filings in the corpus over the same period, the average is 65.9%.

Where the other 55 cents goes

A target loss ratio says what an insurer plans. The annual statement says what happened. Every property/casualty insurer files a five-year operating summary that splits each premium dollar into losses, the cost of handling those losses, and everything else — salaries, technology, rent, marketing, commissions, the cost of running the business. For 2024:

Per $1 of net premium earned, 2024	Losses	Loss handling	Everything else	Underwriting result
PURE	53.6¢	9.4¢	40.2¢	−3.2¢
Chubb pool (Federal / Pacific Indemnity)	61.3¢	11.5¢	24.8¢	+2.3¢
Cincinnati Insurance Company	54.3¢	9.9¢	30.9¢	+5.0¢

Five-Year Historical Data, operating percentages, from each company's 2024 annual statement. Net of reinsurance and countrywide across all lines. Great Northern and Vigilant cede fully into the Chubb pool and report the pool's ratios or none; Cincinnati Casualty likewise reports into Cincinnati Insurance Company.

PURE spends roughly 60% more of each premium dollar on non-claim expense than Chubb does, and about 30% more than Cincinnati. And 2024 was PURE's second-best year of the five:

Other underwriting expense, % of net premium earned	2020	2021	2022	2023	2024
PURE	47.2%	54.2%	52.1%	39.6%	40.2%
Chubb pool	22.8%	22.8%	22.6%	22.6%	24.8%
Cincinnati Insurance	30.6%	30.9%	30.8%	30.6%	30.9%

Same source. Chubb and Cincinnati hold their expense ratios flat within two points across five years; PURE's has moved fourteen.

In 2021 and 2022, more than half of every net premium dollar PURE collected was consumed before a single claim was paid.

It isn't the commissions

The obvious explanation would be that PURE pays its brokers more. It doesn't. Direct commission and brokerage as a share of direct earned premium, in 2024:

• PURE — $329.8M on $2.23B, or 14.8%
• Federal Insurance (Chubb) — $1,132.4M on $7.88B, or 14.4%
• Cincinnati Insurance — $857.8M on $5.33B, or 16.1%

Three carriers, effectively the same commission load. Whatever is driving the fifteen-point gap in PURE's expense ratio, broker compensation is not it.

One line item that does stand out is advertising. PURE booked $18.9 million of it in 2024 — more than Federal Insurance ($8.7M) and Cincinnati Insurance ($6.1M) spent combined, and both of those companies carry their whole group's pooled expenses against books three and a half and two and a half times PURE's size. The specialist that says the mass-market carriers waste your money on marketing is outspending them on marketing by something like eight times per dollar of premium.

And it isn't profit

This is the part that should worry a PURE member more than the expense ratio itself. A carrier keeping 55 cents of the dollar might at least be a very profitable carrier. PURE is not. Its net underwriting result, as a percentage of premiums earned:

Net underwriting gain / (loss)	2020	2021	2022	2023	2024
PURE	−21.9%	−30.2%	−30.2%	−7.8%	−3.2%
Chubb pool	−0.8%	+4.9%	+6.6%	+7.9%	+2.3%
Cincinnati Insurance	+2.2%	+11.1%	+0.3%	+3.6%	+5.0%

Five straight years of underwriting losses, two of them at thirty points. The high price is not buying shareholders a return; it is funding a cost base that the premium has not yet caught up with. Which is precisely why the premium keeps moving.

What that looks like on your renewal

Since the start of 2023 PURE has filed homeowners rate changes in 45 states. Compounding each state's filed changes gives the cumulative increase applied to that book — before any change in your home's insured value, and before the individual factors that move a specific policy further.

Compounded overall rate impact across PURE homeowners filings submitted from 1 January 2023, by state. "Policyholders" is the count in the largest single filing for that state — about 134,000 across the book. The 2024 filings alone averaged +11.6%, weighted by written premium, across $1.05 billion of homeowners premium.

Averages hide the individual policies. PURE's own filings disclose the range of change inside each one, and the top of that range is a long way from the headline: a single Texas filing in March 2024 carried an average of +19.9% and a maximum of +126.3%. Montana in August 2025 went to +123.9%, Georgia in June 2024 to +102.5%, Missouri to +92.1%. If your PURE renewal doubled, you were not misreading it, and you were not alone.

What actually came back

Filed targets are intent. The State Exhibit in each annual statement shows what the homeowners book actually paid out, countrywide, before reinsurance:

Homeowners direct loss ratio	2023	2024
PURE	60.7%	47.8%
Chubb personal lines companies	51.5%	41.7%
Cincinnati	68.7%	58.2%
U.S. homeowners market	—	61.6%

Direct incurred losses over direct earned premium, countrywide, from each group's State Exhibit. Market figure from the 2024 NAIC property/casualty market-share report.

Two honest readings of this table. The first is that the entire high-value segment paid out less than the market in both years — Chubb least of all. If your objection to PURE is "specialists keep too much," Chubb is not the escape.

The second is the one that distinguishes PURE. Chubb's 41.7% came in seventeen points below what its own filings targeted: a light catastrophe year against a price built for a worse one. Cincinnati landed at 58.2% against a 58.1% target — dead on plan. PURE's 47.8% against a 45.0% target was also close to plan, because the plan was to keep 55 cents. Chubb had a good year. PURE had a designed one.

What can fairly be said for PURE

Three things, and they are real.

PURE is a reciprocal exchange, not a stock company. Members are subscribers, and part of what they pay builds surplus that is nominally theirs rather than a shareholder's. PURE's surplus grew from $333 million in 2020 to $815 million in 2024. That is a genuine structural difference from Chubb, and a member who values it is not being irrational — though it is worth being clear that money held as surplus is not money in your pocket, and the comparison above is about what leaves the exchange as claims.

PURE's book is also concentrated in exactly the places insurance has become hardest to buy — coastal wind, California wildfire, Texas hail — and a heavily reinsured, catastrophe-exposed book can distort net-basis expense ratios in either direction. Some part of the gap is mix, not waste.

And service is not in these tables at all. Claims handling, appraisal quality, risk management, whether anyone picks up the phone after a fire — none of it appears in a loss ratio, and a carrier that pays claims generously and quickly is worth paying for. The measure here is what share of the price is even earmarked for claims. It doesn't rank the experience of making one.

What it does say is that the premium PURE charges is not primarily explained by the risk it takes, or by what it pays its brokers, or by what it earns for its owners. It is explained by what it costs PURE to be PURE — and after five years of underwriting losses, that bill is still being handed to members one rate filing at a time.

Read next

Home loss ratios by carrier — what every homeowners insurer actually paid out, ranked. And how much of your premium comes back as claims, for why this measure is the one to check before you buy.

You can watch PURE — or Chubb, or Cincinnati — and get an email the moment it files a new rate with rate alerts, or put the filings side by side in the filing comparison tool.

How this was built

Target loss ratios come from the rate filings themselves, submitted to state insurance departments through SERFF and read out of the supporting exhibits. Only filings where a real ratio could be extracted are counted; filings whose exhibits carry no determinable rate content are excluded rather than treated as zero. The window is filings submitted from 1 January 2023 onward. PURE's homeowners sample is 103 filings, Chubb's personal lines companies 67, Cincinnati's 133, and the market comparison 4,035.

Expense ratios, underwriting results and surplus come from the Five-Year Historical Data exhibit of each company's 2024 statutory annual statement, on a net-of-reinsurance, countrywide, all-lines basis. Commission and advertising come from Part 3 of the same statements. Because Chubb and Cincinnati run intercompany pools, the pool leader's statement carries the group's expenses — Great Northern, Vigilant and Cincinnati Casualty report the pool's ratios or none, and are represented here by Federal / Pacific Indemnity and Cincinnati Insurance Company respectively.

Homeowners loss ratios are direct incurred losses over direct earned premium from the countrywide row of each company's State Exhibit, which is before reinsurance — what the carrier collected from and paid to policyholders directly. The market figure is the premium-weighted direct loss ratio for homeowners in the 2024 NAIC market-share report.

Two caveats worth carrying. The expense and underwriting figures are all-lines: PURE is 62% homeowners and almost entirely personal lines, while Federal Insurance and Cincinnati Insurance write large commercial books, so mix differs and the comparison is directional rather than exact. And a single year of loss ratio on a catastrophe-exposed book says very little on its own — which is why the target loss ratio, which is a statement of intent rather than an accident of weather, is the number this piece leans on.