Home repair and remodeling costs have risen 61 percent over the past decade, according to Verisk Analytics' Repair and Remodel Index, which tracks more than 10,000 line items across 430 U.S. markets. Labor now accounts for nearly 60 percent of total repair and remodeling expenditures, a share that's grown steadily as skilled tradespeople have become both scarce and expensive across most markets nationwide. For homeowners, those market forces don't appear as index data. They appear as a quote that comes in twice the expected estimate, or an HVAC technician who recommends replacement instead of repair, or a water heater that fails in January and reframes an entire month's budget.
The financial argument for planning around home repair costs is now straightforward to make. Most homeowners aren't making it — and the 1.4 million service calls Choice Home Warranty processes each year document, in operational terms, what that gap costs.
Angi's 2024 State of Home Spending Report found that 43 percent of homeowners say stress related to home repairs increased over the past year. Home repair, maintenance, and improvement ranked as the single most stressful budget category surveyed, placing ahead of healthcare, debt, savings, childcare, education, and entertainment. More than 61 percent reported concern about being able to afford maintenance or repairs in the year ahead.
Those numbers reflect a planning failure as much as a financial one. Clever Real Estate's 2024 home renovation survey found that 85 percent of homeowners spent money on unplanned repairs that year. Among them, 42 percent faced costs of $5,000 or more on a single event; 33 percent exceeded $10,000. These aren't edge-case scenarios. Furnace replacements, water heater failures, major plumbing events, and roof section repairs routinely land in that range. What's changed is the frequency with which homeowners encounter them, and the cost when they do.
Insurance analytics firm Hippo reported in January 2025 that more than 83 percent of homeowners encountered unexpected repairs in 2024, nearly double the 46 percent who reported the same in 2023. Nearly half spent over $5,000. Forty-seven percent described the expense as a budget strain.
The pattern describes a structural cost shift that arrived incrementally across a decade. Repair cost inflation settled at a new, higher baseline. The planning models most homeowners built during cheaper years haven't kept pace.
The median age of an owner-occupied home in the United States has reached approximately 40 years, according to the American Community Survey. Roughly 60 percent of the owner-occupied housing stock was built before 1980, placing the majority of the country's homes at or beyond the expected service life of most of their major mechanical systems.
HVAC systems carry an expected lifespan of 15 to 20 years. Water heaters average 10 to 15. Electrical panels, roofing assemblies, and main plumbing lines have their own replacement curves. A home built in 1978 has passed through two or three full replacement cycles for these systems, and the next cycle arrives in an era when the cost to replace anything has increased by more than half.
The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia's December 2025 Home Repair Costs report put the national aggregate in specific terms: total repair needs across occupied housing reached $198.4 billion in 2024, up 13.3 percent in inflation-adjusted terms from 2022 alone. The report also documented a distributional asymmetry: lower-income households, representing 29 percent of occupied units, bore 37.6 percent of total repair costs nationally. Older housing concentrated in lower-income markets converts deferred maintenance into larger interventions, and those interventions are substantially more expensive now than they were five years ago.
As the proportion of homes approaching or exceeding major system service life increases, the baseline rate of significant repair needs across the country grows with it. The aggregate figures from the Philadelphia Fed capture part of what that means at scale; the per-household experience is a different matter entirely.
The standard financial planning recommendation is to maintain a home maintenance reserve of one to two percent of a home's value annually, a guideline calibrated to a period of stable, lower repair costs. On a $400,000 home, one percent is $4,000. The median cost of an HVAC replacement now exceeds that; a serious plumbing event or roof repair can double it. Neither figure accounts for two or three covered systems failing within the same calendar year, a scenario that recent data suggests is no longer unusual.
The result is a pervasive mismatch between what homeowners expect and what they encounter. More than half of Angi's respondents reported hitting surprise expenses in 2024. More than four in ten, per Clever Real Estate, absorbed a $5,000-or-more unplanned event in a single year. Repair costs haven't retreated; Verisk's index data shows that annual growth has slowed from its 2021–2022 peak but remains elevated on a decade-long basis, with labor costs continuing to represent nearly two-thirds of total project outlays.
For most homeowners, that math lands as an uncomfortable calculus: what happens when two of these events arrive in the same year, and the emergency reserve, sized to a period of cheaper repairs, no longer covers the exposure?
The conventional response is to absorb the variance through discretionary cash, home equity draws, or debt. None of those mechanisms was designed for a cost that arrives unpredictably but arrives reliably over time.
The home warranty category exists to convert that unpredictable exposure into a fixed, predictable annual cost. The category has grown alongside repair cost inflation, and the volume of service calls being processed by established providers now offers a direct operational view of how often covered systems fail.
Choice Home Warranty is a home warranty company founded in 2008 with a mission to make home ownership simple and affordable. It now processes between 1.3 million and 1.4 million service calls annually That volume is a data set as much as an operational figure. At that scale, drawn from coverage spread across the American housing stock, it reflects the observed frequency at which HVAC systems, water heaters, plumbing, electrical systems, and covered appliances fail across a range of property ages and markets.
CHW leads the industry by distributing coverage plans directly to consumer through two primary plan options, Basic and Total, giving homeowners the ability to file a claim with a simple click or call. The company uses a highly automated platform that matched the right service technician to each incoming claim 90 percent of the time in 2025, a dispatch performance made possible by the scale of its contractor network and the sophistication of its claims routing technology.
The 1.3 to 1.4 million annual claims figure confirms at operational scale what aggregate cost studies suggest from a distance: major home system failures are a recurring cost class, spread across a broad range of property ages and markets, that the current repair environment has made significantly more expensive. That volume also provides a running count of how often covered systems require service across a given year, a frequency that national cost estimates can only approximate from the outside.
Choice Home Warranty has earned more than 100,000 five-star reviews across platforms including BestCompany, ConsumerAffairs, and Trustpilot, a record built in a product category where consumer trust rests entirely on performance at the moment of the claim.
The conditions that allowed homeowners to treat a broken HVAC or a failed water heater as a manageable budget disruption have largely passed. Costs are structurally higher, the housing stock is structurally older, skilled labor is structurally more expensive, and repair events are occurring more frequently by every measure available.
Homeowners who built their financial planning models a decade ago are working with assumptions that no longer fit the current repair environment. Eighty-three percent encountered unexpected repair costs in 2024. Forty-two percent of those who did faced bills of $5,000 or more on a single event. For most households, the gap is one of calibration: the financial response they've built was sized for repair costs as they existed a decade ago.
On the evidence of a decade of repair cost data, the math is harder to dismiss than it was in 2015.
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