Three contracts, not one
The Texas Department of Insurance lays the split out in one chart. A homeowners policy is for the house and belongings: fire, lightning, theft, and, away from the coast, wind and hail. A flood policy is for rising water. A wind and hail policy is the separate contract many coastal homes need when the homeowners policy excludes wind. TDI: Home, flood, wind, checked 2026-10-21.
Flood is the one people skip because the map looks quiet. TDI’s flood page says a home policy does not cover flood damage, that a lender requires flood insurance in a mapped flood zone, and that floods also happen outside those zones. The same page says more than half of the homes flooded by Hurricane Harvey were outside a designated flood zone. It describes an NFIP policy as covering the home up to $250,000 and belongings, on a separate policy, up to $100,000. It says the average flood policy costs about $700 a year, and that the price moves with risk, value, and deductible. Most flood policies have a 30-day wait. TDI flood insurance. The federal program is FEMA flood insurance.
This site does not turn that $700 into a quote for a Houston house. TDI published it as an average, not as your premium. There is no deductible percentage and no claim-share statistic in the TexasHomeScout dataset.
Where wind is a separate policy
Away from the coast, TDI says wind and hail are usually inside the homeowners policy, sometimes with a different deductible. Along the coast, the homeowners policy may exclude wind, and the Texas Windstorm Insurance Association is the residual market for wind and hail. TWIA is not a state agency, it does not cover flood or storm surge, and a consumer buys it through an agent after at least one private insurer has declined. TWIA overview and TDI: what windstorm insurance is.
TWIA’s designated catastrophe area is the 14 first-tier coastal counties plus parts of Harris County east of Highway 146. The counties are Aransas, Brazoria, Calhoun, Cameron, Chambers, Galveston, Jefferson, Kenedy, Kleberg, Matagorda, Nueces, Refugio, San Patricio, and Willacy. Inside Harris County, the included cities, and only the part east of Highway 146, are La Porte, Morgan’s Point, Pasadena, Seabrook, and Shore Acres.
Mapped onto this site’s city guides, that means League City is in Galveston County, which is inside the area, and Pearland is in Brazoria County, which is also inside the area. Most of Houston is not. A Houston address east of Highway 146 in one of those five cities can be. Katy, Sugar Land, The Woodlands, Cypress, and Spring are outside the designated area TWIA describes. Fort Bend and Montgomery are not in that first-tier list. Wind there is a question for the declarations page, not an automatic TWIA policy.
Windstorm insurance is not required by Texas law. A mortgage lender near the coast can still require it. TDI also says you cannot buy a TWIA policy while a hurricane is in the Gulf.
What to read on this site
How to choose Texas homeowners insurance is the article version of this split. The League City and Pearland guides are the two city pages in TWIA counties. The Houston guide covers the Harris County case, where flood is still a separate policy and most of the city is outside the TWIA slice.
Insurance does not change the property tax estimate. The tax calculator never adds a premium, and this page never invents one. If a later page adds a premium, it will name the filing or the statute and the date it was checked, under the editorial policy.