Does Georgia require vacant home insurance?

Georgia has no statute that requires a homeowner to carry vacant home insurance. Where a requirement does exist, it comes from two other places: the mortgage lender and the vacancy provision already written into a standard homeowners policy.

A vacancy provision is a clause in a homeowners policy that spells out what happens to coverage once a home sits empty for a set number of days. It commonly suspends coverage for vandalism, malicious mischief, and some water and glass losses, since no one is present to catch a break-in or a leak early. See how long a Georgia home can sit empty before coverage is affected for the day counts most Georgia policies use.

Separately, most mortgage contracts require the borrower to keep the home continuously insured for the life of the loan, occupied or not. If a policy lapses because a carrier canceled it once the home was flagged vacant, or the premium simply went unpaid, the lender can buy its own policy on the structure and bill the borrower for it. That is called lender-placed coverage: an insurance policy the lender purchases to protect its own financial interest in the property. It typically costs more than a policy the homeowner shops for, and it usually covers only the structure, not the owner's liability or any remaining contents.

For example, a Georgia homeowner who relocates for a job and leaves a house on the market for six months still owes the mortgage payment and still needs continuous insurance on the home, even though nobody is living there. If that owner lets the policy lapse to save money during the vacancy, the lender can step in with its own coverage at the owner's expense.

Whether a home counts as vacant or merely unoccupied also affects how the vacancy provision applies; see the difference between a vacant and an unoccupied home in Georgia. Specialty vacant home insurance and Georgia-specific vacant home coverage are built to keep protection in place during exactly this kind of gap. A coverage review can confirm whether an existing policy's vacancy provision has already been triggered on a specific property and what replacing lender-placed coverage would look like.