For most of the last two decades, resiliency was treated as a regional specialty: hurricane straps in Florida, defensible space in California, a sump pump in the basement for the unlucky. It lived in the code appendix and the insurance fine print, and rarely in the sales conversation.
Intensifying climate events have moved resiliency from the margins of the housing market to its center, and the force driving it isn’t policy or marketing—it’s direct experience. Homeowners across the country have now lived through enough storms, fires, floods, and heat waves to stop treating climate risk as hypothetical, and they are recalibrating what they expect from a home, what they’re willing to pay for, and what they consider non-negotiable.
Experience Is the Accelerant
The latest COGNITION Smart Data research tells the story in numbers. Nearly two-thirds of consumers (61.3%) have personally experienced a natural disaster or extreme temperatures in their home, and they report that these are no longer once-in-a-lifetime events. In COGNITION’s Home recent Insurance and Climate Resilience Survey, 85.5% of respondents experienced at least one climate event in the past year, and more than 41% experienced three or more.
The hazards vary by geography, but the pattern is national. Hurricanes (26.2%) and tornadoes (20.8%) top the list of climate events that most affect where people live, with extreme temperatures (18.5%), wildfires (15.0%) and flooding (10.4%) following suit.
Importantly, catastrophic events make headlines, but extreme heat and cold arrive quietly, every season, through high utility bills, overworked equipment, and homes that can’t hold a safe temperature when the grid goes down. Resiliency is no longer only about surviving the disaster. It’s about living through the ordinary extremes.
And experience changes behavior. Our new resiliency report found that among consumers, resiliency (27.5%) is now almost as important as saving money (33.6%) as a motivation for adopting solutions like solar—a dramatic change from even three years ago. Among those who have lived through a climate hazard, the order flips: resiliency becomes the top priority (39.2%), and saving money drops to 22.8%. Once a household has gone a week without power, or watched smoke come over the ridge, the calculus is permanently altered.
Resiliency Is Now a Buying Criterion
That shift is showing up where it counts: in the decision to buy. Nearly 70% of consumers rate resilience as important (4) or very important (5) when choosing a home, with 42.8% placing it at the very top of the scale. Only 7.6% say it doesn’t matter much.
Buyers also expect the market to reward it. 71.8% believe resilient homes command a higher resale value, and building professionals agree: 84.3% say resilient homes sell for more, and 64.3% say the premium is significant.
Concern with a Price Tag
Consumers aren’t worried in the abstract. 60.9% are highly concerned (4 or 5 on a five-point scale) about the impact of climate events on their homes, and in a separate COGNITION survey, 78.6% say they are concerned about climate change and the damage a climate event might do to their home.
That concern is reinforced every time the insurance bill arrives. 84.5% of homeowners have seen their insurance costs rise over the past three years. More than half (56.9%) report increases of 30% or more, and over a quarter (27.3%) have seen premiums climb 70% or more, including 8% whose premiums have doubled.
Availability is eroding alongside affordability. More than half of consumers (51.3%) say they have seen insurance providers pulling out of their market.
This is “cheap upfront, expensive forever” in its purest form. When a home is built to the minimum, the cost of that decision doesn’t disappear. It is relocated onto the homeowner in premiums, in repairs, in lost days and displaced families.
The response isn’t resignation. It’s investment. Wen asked how much they would invest in resilient products if those products could protect their home from a natural disaster, 92.8% said they would invest something. The largest group (27.0%) would spend $5,000 to $10,000, and 43.4% would invest $10,000 or more.
Our resiliency report also found that 71.3% of homeowners are likely or very likely to invest in resilient features that lower long-term housing costs, and 65.2% of consumers in a separate COGNITION survey say they are already making improvements to harden their homes against hurricanes, wind, hail, and flooding.
Of consumers who have incorporated resilient features into their homes, 50.2% have received a reduction in their insurance premiums. Those who have lived through a climate event are even more likely to have secured a discount (65% versus 50% of general consumers), likely because they are more proactive about documenting the resilient features of their homes.
That’s encouraging: insurers are beginning to recognize hardened construction. But look closely at the size of those discounts. In COGNITION’s Home Insurance and Climate Resilience Survey, 53.1% of respondents whose premiums were lowered saw a reduction of just 0 to 1%. Only 4.8% saw reductions of 5% or more.
Set those discounts against the increases above, and the gap is stark. Premiums are rising by double digits while resilience discounts are measured in fractions of a percent. The insurance market is not yet pricing resilience at anything close to its true value, which means the real return on a resilient home is showing up elsewhere: in avoided damage, continuity of daily life, and resale.
The avoided-damage return is real. When asked whether resilient features minimized the damage to their homes, 59.2% of respondents said yes.
Homeowners are prioritizing the building envelope and energy independence. Upgraded roofing leads (44.4%), followed by backup power, generators, or battery storage (38.7%), firewise landscaping (33.0%), and solar (29.5%). Impact-rated windows (23.8%) and durable, long-life materials (23.0%) round out the top tier.
Their motivations are telling. Reducing long-term costs (52.5%) leads, ahead of protecting personal safety (44.8%) and preventing damage from extreme weather (41.8%). Homeowners are framing resiliency as an economic decision, not a fear-based one. They are moving, in other words, from first cost to full cost.
Resilience Shouldn’t Be an Upgrade
Perhaps the most important signal for builders: consumers increasingly believe resilience shouldn’t be an option at all. Asked which features should be standard in all new homes, 54.9% chose fire-resistant materials, 50.4% chose backup power systems (battery or generator-ready), and 44.7% chose high-performance insulation and air sealing. Solar-ready or solar-installed systems (26.3%) and flood mitigation features (25.9%) follow.
Homeowners who have been through a climate event feel this most acutely: 58.4% want backup power to be standard, compared with 50.2% of those who haven’t.
The demand for backup power points to a broader shift: homeowners want control over their own energy. In COGNITION’s Energy Insights tracking, increasing self-sufficiency has become the dominant motivation for going solar, doubling from 23% in March 2025 to 49% in July 2026. Over the same period, saving money as the primary motivation fell from 32% to 17%.
Consider what that means. For two decades, solar was sold on payback. Today, half of prospective adopters care more about keeping the lights on, the air conditioning running, and the refrigerator cold when the grid fails than about monthly savings.
Solar and Storage Go Mainstream
Homeowners aren’t just talking—they’re acting as well. Among COGNITION Energy Insights respondents, solar panel installations jumped from 9% in July 2024 and 10% in March 2025 to 47% in July 2026. Battery storage climbed even more dramatically, from 3% to 5% to 45%. Smart electrical panels (4% to 29%) and demand-side energy management systems (3% to 28%) rose right alongside them.
These are now the baseline components of a self-sufficient home (generation, storage, and intelligent control), assembled by homeowners who have decided not to depend entirely on an increasingly stressed grid.
What This Means for the Industry
Builders are already feeling the pull. 62.9% of building professionals have seen an increase in requests for resilient features over the past three years, and 63% say rising homeowner insurance costs have directly influenced their design and building decisions.
It’s no surprise that the biggest obstacle to investing in resiliency upgrades is upfront cost, but that barrier points directly to the opportunities: tie resilient upgrades to incentives (40.7% of consumers say utility, state, or federal rebates would be the most effective motivator), develop financing and ROI data that capture lifetime value, and educate buyers and building teams alike on what resilience actually delivers. Move resilience from a premium option to a standard expectation, and the economics follow.
The questions worth asking now: What would it take to price resilience into every appraisal and underwriting decision? Who in your market is already selling homes on avoided risk, and what are they learning? And how long can a home built only to minimum code hold its value when buyers have already redefined the minimum?
Get the Full Report
Our new COGNITION Smart Data report, A Growing Resiliency Economy: Addressing Upfront Cost Challenges, breaks down the experience gap, insurance dynamics, the builder’s perspective, and the levers that can move resilience from premium feature to standard requirement. Download the report here.