About Insurance Guide NY
Last updated: July 2026
Insurance Guide NY is an independent information resource for New York homeowners, with a focus on Long Island, where the home and flood insurance market has become one of the hardest in the state. Carriers have pulled back from coastal ZIP codes, premiums have climbed, and a standard homeowners policy still does not cover flood. Our job is to explain what is happening and what your options are, in plain language, backed by real data.
How we build these guides
Every town guide and explainer on this site is built the same way. We start from primary sources, not from generic summaries. Flood zone information comes from live queries against FEMA's National Flood Hazard Layer. Claims figures come from FEMA's own National Flood Insurance Program claims records. Housing and population figures come from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey and decennial census. Regulatory rules are tied to the New York Department of Financial Services and the specific sections of Insurance Law or NYCRR that govern them.
Before a page is written, we build a claim ledger: a line-by-line record of every factual statement the page will make and the source that supports it. Nothing gets written that we cannot source. After a page is drafted, a separate review pass checks it against that ledger for accuracy, for compliance, and for anything that overstates what the data actually shows. We date our figures so you can see how current they are, and we re-check them over time.
What we are not
Insurance Guide NY is not an insurance carrier, agency, or broker. We do not sell policies, bind coverage, or provide binding quotes. Nothing on this site is insurance, legal, or financial advice for your specific situation. We explain how programs and rules work in general and point you to a licensed New York professional for decisions about your own property. When it comes to what a specific carrier will charge or cover for your home, only a licensed agent looking at your actual property can answer that.
How we make money
We want to be direct about this, because it affects how much you can trust what you read here. When you use the form on this site to ask for help, we may refer you to a licensed New York insurance professional who can follow up. We are paid a flat referral fee for connecting you, owed the same amount whether or not you ever buy a policy. We do not take a percentage of your premium, we are not paid more if you buy one type of coverage over another, and we do not discuss the specific terms of any policy with you. That structure is deliberate: it keeps us on the information side of the line drawn by New York Insurance Law, and it means we have no reason to steer you toward one product over another. Our incentive is to be genuinely useful, not to make a sale.
Our editorial standards
We cite sources you can check yourself, and we link to them directly rather than to a homepage. We avoid claims we cannot support, we do not publish carrier appetite or pricing lists because they go stale quickly, and we do not promise outcomes. If you find something on this site that is wrong or out of date, we want to know. Tell us through the coverage form and note the page, and we will review and correct it.
Privacy
If you want to know exactly what we collect when you use this site and what we do with it, read our privacy policy. The short version: we collect only what you choose to share through the form, we use privacy-friendly analytics that do not track you across the web, and we do not sell your information.