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Home Insurance Rates in America Are Wildly Distorted. Here’s Why.
Source: Keys and Mulder, National Bureau of Economic Research (2024)
Note: State average is shown in counties with few or no observations.
Enid, Okla., surrounded by farms about 90 minutes north of Oklahoma City, has an unwelcome distinction: Home insurance is more expensive, relative to home values, than almost anywhere else in the country.
Enid is hardly the American community that is most vulnerable to damaging weather. Yet as a share of home prices, insurance costs more in parts of Enid than in New Orleans, much of which is below sea level. More than in Paradise, Calif., which was destroyed by the Camp fire in 2018. More than in the Florida Keys, which are frequently wracked by hurricanes. Even more than in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, where houses have begun slipping into the rising sea.
Enid’s plight reveals an odd distortion in America’s system of pricing home insurance. As a warming planet delivers increasingly damaging weather, the cost of home insurance has jumped drastically. But companies are charging some people, especially in the middle of the country and parts of the southeast, far more than other homeowners with similar levels of risk, an examination by The New York Times has shown.
Explore home insurance costs in your area with our interactive map.
Industry experts offer several reasons for the disparities, including the fact rural states have fewer homeowners to share risk, and states have varying rates of insurance fraud, which can drive up premiums.
But new research points to a striking pattern: Higher premiums are being charged in states where regulators apply less scrutiny to requests for rate increases, compared with states where officials question the justifications offered by companies and try to keep rates low, the data show.
The analysis is based on new data that make it possible for the first time to see what households pay for home insurance by county and ZIP code, across the United States. The average premium jumped 33 percent between 2020 and 2023, far more than the rate of inflation, the data show. But in some places, homeowners are paying more than twice as much for insurance, as a share of home value, than people who live elsewhere and face similar exposure to severe weather.
Sources: Keys and Mulder, National Bureau of Economic Research (2024); Zillow; FEMA; First Street Foundation.
Note: “Average premium as a share of home value” compares median home insurance premium in 2023 to Zillow’s typical home value estimate in each county. State average shown in counties with few or no observations.
As a result, America’s home insurance market is increasingly distorted, said Ishita Sen, a professor of finance at Harvard Business School who studies why insurance rates diverge from risk.
In communities where insurance rates exceed the actual risk, home ownership can be unaffordable. And in places where insurance prices are too low, it encourages people to move into homes in areas likely to be hit by wildfires or other disasters that could deliver financial ruin, Dr. Sen said.
The market is “incentivizing all sorts of crazy behavior,” she said.
Getting a detailed look at the cost of insurance in different parts of the United States has been almost impossible until now because private insurers don’t publicly disclose what they charge. But two researchers, Benjamin Keys, a professor of real estate at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and Philip Mulder, a professor at the University of Wisconsin School of Business, found a workaround.
Homeowners often pay their insurance premiums together with their mortgage and property tax, through an escrow account. They make a single payment every month to a mortgage service company, which then pays the mortgage lender, the local government and the insurance company. The system is designed to ensure homeowners never miss a payment.
Working with CoreLogic, a property information and analytics company that collects data from mortgage servicers, the researchers obtained data for about 12.4 million of the nation’s roughly 80 million owner-occupied households. That data showed how much those households paid in escrow annually from 2014 through 2023. After deducting payments for mortgages, property tax and other fees, they could estimate what each household paid for property insurance.
Source: Keys and Mulder, National Bureau of Economic Research (2024) Note: Inflation-adjusted. Each line depicts the median of all loan observations within a risk group.
There is certainly a relationship between climate risk and what insurance companies charge for coverage in case of damage from extreme weather. But all kinds of other factors get in the way, causing a misalignment between risk and premiums.
In McCurtain County, Okla., for example, the typical homeowner paid an average of $2,837 for insurance. But in the same area with the same weather just across the state line, the average homeowner in Little River County, Ark., paid $1,673.
The cost of insurance is often higher for large, expensive homes because they cost more to replace. To get more accurate comparisons, Dr. Keys and Dr. Mulder looked at insurance costs as a share of the typical local home value.
Across the more than 9,000 ZIP codes for which data was available, the typical American household last year paid about $500 in home insurance premiums for every $100,000 of home value, or 0.5 percent, the professors found.
But in California, which suffered through more than 7,000 wildfires last year, the typical homeowner in many ZIP codes paid premiums as low as .05 percent of home value. By contrast, in parts of Alabama, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Texas, the average homeowner faced home insurance premiums greater than 2 percent of the value of local homes.
“Families with the same level of risk exposure pay wildly different amounts to protect themselves from harm,” Dr. Keys said. “Different prices for the same risk feels unfair.”
A visitor to Enid, population 50,000, would not recognize it as the riskiest spot in America to own a house. At the center of town is the Garfield County Courthouse, a handsome Art Deco structure built during the Great Depression, surrounded by a wide and inviting lawn. The square is ringed by storefronts offering cannabis, legal services and $500 cowboy boots.
The federal government designates Garfield County, which includes Enid and sometimes suffers hail storms and tornadoes, as having a “relatively low” level of risk. Yet the typical Enid homeowner spent $2,113 on home insurance last year, according to the researchers. That was 3.5 percent of the average home value of about $60,000 — more than six times the national average.
That high cost is taking its toll.
In 2019, Kelsey Keyworth bought her first house, a handsome pale-gray bungalow with a wood deck and white trim. She hoped to stay in the house until her son, who is now 13, finished high school. But despite never filing an insurance claim, her premiums jumped by 42 percent over three years. Ms. Keyworth, the membership director at Enid’s YMCA, decided to sell and move with her son into a rental home.
“It’s kind of heartbreaking,” Ms. Keyworth said on a recent afternoon at a coffee shop in Enid. “You’re like, gosh, I tried so hard to get here.”
Torrie Vann, the real estate agent who sold Ms. Keyworth’s house, said that since February, other clients had sold their homes because of rising insurance premiums. “They’re having to sell and buy something smaller,” she said.
Kelsey Keyworth in Champlin Park in Enid. Megann Johnson, agent and owner of Great Plains Insurance.
Home buyers, meanwhile, are reacting to rising premiums in Enid by settling for smaller houses than they planned, according to Jeff Shaffer, another Realtor in town. “People are having to buy down,” he said. “There’s a lot of sticker shock.”
Oklahoma is the sixth-most expensive state for home insurance. (The top five are Florida, New York, Louisiana, Colorado and Hawaii.) But measured as a share of home value, Oklahoma ranks third, behind Louisiana and Mississippi.
Along the edges of Oklahoma, the premium paid by the typical household last year was as much as 70 percent higher than in adjacent counties in Texas, Arkansas and Kansas — despite those counties having similar levels of exposure to disasters, according to federal data.
Megann Johnson is an insurance agent in Enid whose own home insurance premiums almost doubled, to $4,860 this year from $2,570 in 2021. She says her aunts, who sell insurance in nearby Kansas, tease her about what they call Oklahoma’s “stupid” high rates. “Our risk is the same, right?” Ms. Johnson said. “We’re 50 miles from the state line.”
Glen W. Mulready, Oklahoma’s elected insurance commissioner, has never exercised his power to deny a rate increase requested by an insurance company for home insurance. He said he believed that competition, not regulation, was the best way to hold down prices.
But that could be one important reason why Oklahoma homeowners with relatively low risk are paying high premiums, according to Dr. Sen.
In states where officials tightly control what insurance companies can charge, premiums tend to be priced below what they would be if they reflected the true likelihood of damage from storms, fires or other catastrophes, she and her co-authors found.
Source: Keys and Mulder, National Bureau of Economic Research (2024)
Note: “High regulation” and “lower regulation” categories from Oh, Sen and Tenekedjieva, Harvard Business School working paper (2022).
And Dr. Sen and her colleagues discovered something else.
After big losses in those tightly regulated states, such as California, national insurers tend to raise rates in more loosely regulated states. In other words, homeowners in states with weaker rules may be overpaying for insurance, effectively subsidizing homeowners in states with tougher rules, she said.
If California makes it especially hard for insurers to increase premiums, Oklahoma makes it much easier.
Mr. Mulready defended his approach, saying it’s not his role to stop private insurance companies from raising rates in Oklahoma.
“We allow the competitive free market to work,” he said in an interview. If national companies raised rates in Oklahoma to make up losses in states like California, they would lose business to local insurers, Mr. Mulready said.
But Dr. Sen said her research suggests the home insurance market is far less competitive than it might seem. After choosing an insurer, people often stick with that same company, even if their premiums go up, she said.
Three insurers — State Farm, Farmers, and Allstate — collectively wrote more than half of all home insurance in Oklahoma last year. A spokesman for Allstate, Michael Passman, said in a statement that “we do not raise rates in one state to offset losses in another.” State Farm and Farmers did not respond to questions. Allstate is publicly traded; State Farm and Farmers are not. (Farmers’ parent company, Zurich Insurance Group, is traded on the Swiss exchange.)
Allstate and State Farm reported a profit in their life insurance divisions last year but losses in property and casualty insurance left them in the red companywide, according to AM Best, a company that rates the financial strength of insurers. Farmers also lost money in its property and casualty insurance operations, which include home insurance, but it’s not clear if its overall business turned a profit.
Homes in Enid. Oklahoma’s current insurance commissioner has never blocked an insurers’ rate increase.
There are some other possible explanations for why insurance companies charge wildly different rates in places facing similar threats.
Insurance can be more expensive in smaller, more rural states, where there are fewer households to share the risk, said Karen Collins, a vice president at the American Property Casualty Insurance Association, which represents insurance companies. Some states require higher minimum levels of coverage, which makes policies more expensive. And fraudulent claims, which end up increasing premium costs, can be more prevalent in some locations than others, she said.
Reinsurance is another reason. The price of reinsurance (effectively, insurance purchased by insurance companies to make sure they can cover losses) has spiked in recent years. Companies buy different amounts in different parts of the country and pass those costs onto homeowners.
A fourth factor is whether a state has a government-mandated, high-risk pool of insurance designed for homeowners who cannot find private coverage. Research suggests those pools, which are available in about two-thirds of states, can lower private insurance premiums. Oklahoma has no such risk pool, though creating one would “certainly pull down rates,” Mr. Mulready said. The question for lawmakers, he added, is “whether that’s the role of government.”
Explaining the distortions in the insurance market is perhaps easier than fixing them.
United Policyholders, a nonprofit group that advocates for consumers, said the fact that some households pay more for insurance than others, despite having the same level of risk, underlined the need for regulators to demand more transparency about how insurers set rates.
That discrepancy in rates “is certainly not fair,” said Emily Rogan, a senior program officer at United Policyholders. She said customers need to know what data insurers collect on them, so that they have the opportunity to contest information that may be inaccurate.
Forrest Bennett is an insurance agent in Oklahoma City and a Democratic state lawmaker. He said the challenge his state faced was how to protect the average homeowner from high premiums without causing insurers to flee because they can’t turn a profit, as has happened in California.
Mr. Bennett praised a new state program that gives homeowners money to install hail-resistant roofs, which he hopes will lower premiums. But he said enacting broader reforms to address the cost of disasters “requires people to accept that climate change is real.”
The rising cost of home insurance is “where climate change meets the average American’s pocketbook,” Mr. Bennett said. “We are trending toward a place where it’s not sustainable.”
Covington, Okla., just south of Enid. Oklahoma is one of the most expensive states for home insurance.
Last fall, the Senate Budget Committee began investigating rising insurance rates and how underwriters are responding to the growing dangers of extreme weather.
“Climate havoc” is pushing up insurance costs and risks upending “housing markets, mortgage markets, and local property tax bases, and spilling out into the broader economy,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island and the committee’s chairman, said at a hearing on the issue in June. He warned that climate change threatens the stability of the insurance market and, by extension, the economy, in a way that “sounds eerily reminiscent of the run-up to the mortgage meltdown of 2008.”
And even in places where insurance costs remain relatively flat, the disconnect between premiums and actual risk is cause for concern, Dr. Keys said. As climate change gets worse, those insurance costs will eventually rise, and possibly quickly, he said — hurting home values, shocking some homeowners and destabilizing real estate.
“I personally think we’re in a lot of trouble,” Dr. Keys said. “This should be ringing alarm bells for housing markets all over the country.”
Edited by Lyndsey Layton and Douglas Alteen Additional visual editing: Claire O’Neill and Matt McCann
Methodology
Home insurance cost map: Keys and Mulder calculated annual homeowners insurance costs by separating mortgage and tax payments from loan-level escrow data obtained from CoreLogic. Households whose payments were captured by CoreLogic were not necessarily present in all years of data from 2014 to 2023.
Climate risk map vs. insurance costs as a share of home value map: Risk percentiles are based on a combination of FEMA’s National Risk Index expected annual loss rates per dollar of building value for hail, heat and cold waves, ice storms, lightning, strong winds, tornadoes, volcanic activity and winter weather. Wildfire and hurricane risk data came from First Street Foundation, which separates flood risk out of their hurricane risk score. Flooding is typically covered by the National Flood Insurance Program and less likely to be reflected in the escrow-based data.
State regulation charts: Risk scores use the composite FEMA and First Street Foundation risk scores. Categorization of “high regulation” and “low regulation” states come from analysis of requested and approved rate filings from Oh, Sen and Tenekedjieva (2022), where “lower regulation” includes both low and medium friction states. Regulation analysis was conducted on rate filing requests from 2009 to 2019. The charts use a loess regression to visualize the overall trend. “High regulation” states include California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Missouri, North Carolina, North Dakota, New Jersey, Nevada, Ohio, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Wisconsin and Wyoming.
World
Iran continues firing missiles, drones at neighboring states, with multiple interceptions reported
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Iran launched a new wave of attacks on Thursday, with explosions reported in the region and Tehran threatening that the U.S. would “bitterly regret” sinking an Iranian warship.
Iran’s strikes on Thursday targeted Israel, American bases and countries in the region. Israel announced multiple incoming missile attacks as air raid sirens blared in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
Azerbaijan’s Ministry of Defense on Thursday said Iran used unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in an attack on Nakhchivan International Airport and other civilian infrastructure. The ministry said the details of the attack and the capabilities of the UAVs were being investigated.
“The Ministry of Defense of the Republic of Azerbaijan strongly condemns the attacks carried out by the armed forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran against civilian infrastructure on the territory of Azerbaijan in the absence of any military necessity. The Islamic Republic of Iran bears the entire responsibility for the incident,” the ministry’s statement read.
Explosions seen and heard in Azerbaijan as Iran launches retaliatory attacks across the Middle East. (East2West)
Iran has not acknowledged targeting Azerbaijan, despite the country’s ministry of defense pointing the finger at Tehran.
Qatar evacuated residents near the U.S. Embassy in Doha on Thursday, with its Ministry of Defense confirming that the country was “subjected to a missile attack” and that its air defense systems were able to intercept it. The ministry urged the public to remain calm and avoid unofficial information.
Abu Dhabi announced that its authorities were responding to an incident involving falling debris in ICAD 2, which is part of the Industrial City of Abu Dhabi. Six people, identified by Abu Dhabi as Pakistani and Nepali nationals, suffered minor to moderate injuries.
A plume of smoke rises over buildings in Doha, Qatar, on March 5, 2026. (Mahmud Hams/AFP via Getty Images)
FORMER TOPGUN PILOT DECLARES IRAN MILITARY ‘OVER WITH’ AMID US AIR SUPERIORITY, BUT WARNS OF ANOTHER DANGER
Iran has carried out retaliatory strikes since the launch of Operation Epic Fury, with the latest wave coming one day after the U.S. sunk an Iranian warship, killing at least 87 Iranian sailors. Sri Lankan navy spokesman Cmdr. Buddhika Sampath said 32 people were rescued from the wreck and were admitted to a hospital.
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth defended the move during a news briefing at the Pentagon.
“An American submarine sunk an Iranian warship that thought it was safe in international waters. Instead, it was sunk by a torpedo — Quiet Death. The first sinking of an enemy ship by a torpedo since World War II. Like in that war, back when we were still the War Department, we are fighting to win,” Hegseth said.
Missile interceptions are seen in the sky on March 5, 2026, in Central Israel. (Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images)
ISRAEL’S MILITARY RELEASES VIDEO SHOWING OBLITERATION OF IRAN’S MISSILE LAUNCHERS, DEFENSE SYSTEMS
Iranian leaders condemned the attack, with Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi accusing the U.S. Navy of committing “an atrocity at sea.” Meanwhile, Ayatollah Abdollah Javadi Amoli appeared on state television and called for the shedding of Israeli and “Trump’s blood.”
“Fight the oppressive America, his blood is on my shoulders,” he said in a rare call for violence from an ayatollah, one of the highest ranks within the clergy of Shiite Islam.
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The U.S. and Israel launched the war on Saturday with strikes targeting Iran’s leadership, including the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed. Iran’s missile arsenal and nuclear facilities were also hit.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Related Article
Iran has launched operations targeting Iranian and Iraqi Kurdish groups in the semi-autonomous Kurdish region in neighbouring Iraq as the regional war ignited by the United States and Israel entered its sixth day, with more than 1,000 people killed across the country.
State television, Press TV, reported early on Thursday that Tehran was striking “anti-Iran separatist forces”, referring to Iranian and Iraqi Kurdish groups believed to be based in mountainous, hard-to-reach areas near the Iran-Iraq border.
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Iranian missiles hit Sulaimaniyah city in the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region, according to local reports.
“We targeted the headquarters of Kurdish groups opposed to the revolution in Iraqi Kurdistan with three missiles,” Iran’s official IRNA news agency reported on Thursday, quoting a military statement. The Iranian military said earlier on Tuesday it used “30 drones” on Kurdish positions.
The attack comes just days after multiple publications reported that US President Donald Trump was in active talks with Iranian and Iraqi Kurdish groups, and that Washington hopes to use them to spur a popular uprising.
Various Iranian Kurdish groups, which share close ties with Iraqi Kurds, have long opposed Tehran from their bases in northern Iraq and along the Iraq-Iran border. These groups reportedly have thousands of fighters between them.
Here’s what we know so far:
Why are Kurdish groups cooperating with the US?
US officials said the aim is to stretch Iranian forces and take out the remains of the military-dominated Iranian government, according to reporting by CNN.
There is also speculation that the groups could be supported to take control of northern Iran to create a ground buffer for Israeli forces, possibly streaming in from Iraq.
US-Israeli bombings have heavily targeted areas along the Iraq-Iran border since the start of the war on Saturday, possibly to degrade Iranian defences and allow Kurdish opposition groups to cross fully into Iran, according to a briefing by US-based think tank, the Soufan Center.
The US has not ruled out sending ground forces, although analysts told Al Jazeera Iran’s rugged territory would make that very difficult.
If the US does support these groups against Tehran, it would mean that Washington is treating them like armed “players on a board,” Winthrop Rodgers, associate fellow at the UK think tank, Chatham House, told Al Jazeera.
Which Kurdish groups are there?
Neither the US nor Kurdish groups had confirmed any agreements by Thursday.
However, it is known that Trump has spoken to the leaders of two Kurdish groups in Iraq: Masoud Barzani, leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, and Bafel Talabani, leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), according to US publication, Axios. Talabani confirmed the call on Wednesday.
Trump also spoke to Mustafa Hijri, head of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (KDPI), on Tuesday, CNN reported, quoting a Kurdish official.
Meanwhile, Iranian Kurdish rebel groups, which have thousands of fighters along the Iraq-Iran border, formed the Coalition of Political Forces of Iranian Kurdistan (CPFIK) alliance one week before the war broke out.
The group issued statements at the start of the conflict, signalling imminent intervention and urging Iranian military members to defect. According to Israel’s I24News, thousands of its fighters were in Iran by Wednesday.
Here are the different groups:
Kurdistan Democratic Party: The ruling party in the semi-autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). The party controls the capital city of Erbil as well as Duhok. It has historical ties with Iranian Kurdish groups.
However, the KRG is not eager to be seen as supporting attacks on Iran, even as Iranian drones have hit US assets in Erbil. On Wednesday, Kurdistan region President Nechirvan Barzani spoke with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and told him his region “will not be part of conflicts” targeting Tehran.
In 2023, the two countries signed a security deal that saw Iraq promise to disarm and relocate Iranian opposition groups on its territory, although it appears many groups are still based there, reflecting the limited influence the government wields over them.
Iraqi Kurds, who have close ties with both the US and Iran, are in a “difficult position”, said Rodgers.
“They are under tremendous pressure from a wide range of forces, including (pro-Iran) Iraqi militias. They will try to stay out of the conflict as much as they can, but that will likely prove impossible,” he said.
Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK): The PUK is the official opposition in the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region and also nationally relevant as Iraqi President Abdul Latif Rashid is a member. In a statement on Sunday, Rashid urged dialogue and an end to the war. Iraq declared three days of mourning following the killing of Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in US-Israeli strikes on Tehran on Saturday.
Coalition of Political Forces of Iranian Kurdistan (CPFIK): Formed on February 22, 2026, the group includes six Iranian Kurdish opposition groups seeking an independent state.
Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI) – Based in the Kurdistan region, the group has about 1,200 members and is proscribed as a “terror” group by Iran.
Kurdistan Freedom Party (PAK) – Also based in Kurdistan, it has an estimated 1,000 members.
Kurdistan Free Life Party (PJAK) – A close ally of the Turkish opposition armed group, Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), PJAK is proscribed as a “terror” group by Ankara. PJAK’s armed wing, the Eastern Kurdistan Units (YRK), is believed to have between 1,000 and 3,000 members, many of them women. It is based in the rugged Qandil Mountains near the Iran-Iraq border and in the semiautonomous Kurdistan region. It has launched numerous attacks on Iranian forces in the past decade. A recent Iranian strike reportedly killed one fighter.
Organisation of Iranian Kurdistan Struggle (Khabat) – It has an unknown number of fighters.
Komala of the Toilers of Kurdistan – Based in Iraq’s KRG, it has an unknown number of fighters.
Komala Party of Iranian Kurdistan (KPIK) – Also headquartered in the Kurdistan region, it has an estimated 1,000 fighters in 2017.
What is the history of US involvement with Kurdish resistance groups in the Middle East?
Kurds are an ethnic minority spread across the Middle East with a shared language and culture. They do not have a state of their own and have historically been marginalised across countries – mainly Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkiye.
For decades, several armed Kurdish groups have sought self-governance in Turkiye, Syria and Iran.
In Iraq, Kurdish nationalist groups gained some success during the 1991 Gulf War by working with the US, which helped establish the self-governing Kurdistan region of Iraq. The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) also trained and armed its army, known as the Peshmerga, after the US invaded Iraq in 2003. In 2005, the semiautonomous region was officially recognised in Iraq’s constitution.
Since 2017, Washington has also armed and trained the People’s Protection Units (YPG), a Syrian Kurdish militia that Turkiye lists as a “terror” group because of its links with the proscribed PKK. The group, which successfully resisted ISIL (ISIS), now forms the main component of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). It controlled Raqqa and other ISIL strongholds.
However, when it began military clashes with Syrian forces under the President Ahmed al-Sharaa-led government last August, Washington turned away from the group and backed Damascus instead. In January this year, the SDF signed an agreement with the Syrian government to integrate into the government forces. In return, the Syrian government recognised Kurdish rights.
In Turkiye, meanwhile, the PKK, whose presence in northern Iraq has long been a source of tension with Ankara, declared a ceasefire in March 2025, after a call from its imprisoned leader, Abdullah Ocalan, to disarm.
How does Kurdish resistance in Iran compare with others?
Iranian Kurds opposed the Iranian government even before the formation of the Islamic Republic in 1979, Rodgers said, and Tehran’s current weakness provides an opportunity for them to advance their political aims in the country.
However, the new coalition of multiple diverse groups is unprecedented, the analyst added, and their internal dynamics will be a key decisive factor in what role Kurdish groups will play in this war.
“Support from the US is helpful, especially in terms of targeting security forces’ infrastructure with air strikes, but they will likely be cautious about relying too much on Washington, especially from an administration as capricious and disorganised as Trump’s,” Rodgers said, noting how Washington abandoned the Kurds in Syria.
Unlike the split Iranian movements, Iraqi Kurds have long united to form a devolved government enshrined in the Iraqi constitution, built an advanced economy, and secured substantive relations with a wide range of foreign countries. That’s something Kurdish groups will also be hoping to establish in a democratic Iran, he said.
“I think it is unlikely that the Trump administration has made any commitments to the Iranian Kurds about supporting their political goals,” Rodgers said, adding that the US’s plan “does not look fully thought through at all”.
World
Netflix, After Walking Away From Warner Bros. Deal, Will ‘Move Forward’ With ‘$2.8 Billion in Our Pocket That We Didn’t Have a Few Weeks Ago,’ CFO Says
Netflix is no longer contemplating a future that includes Warner Bros., having ceded the heated M&A battle to Paramount Skydance. Netflix CFO Spence Neumann, speaking Wednesday at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference, reiterated the company’s position that it bailed out of the bidding for Warner Bros. because Paramount increased its offer price.
“The short answer is, it was all about price,” Neumann said. “We said all along this opportunity was a nice-to-have at the right price, not a must-have at any price,” he added, echoing Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos’ previous statement.
Netflix, when it struck the deal to buy WB’s studios and streaming business in December, was playing “offense, not defense,” Neumann said. According to the CFO, Netflix has a “unique view” into how to value the WBD assets. “We went into it with a point of view on price,” he said. “When it became clear it didn’t make sense for us financially anymore,” the company bowed out.
“Now we move forward, and we move forward with $2.8 billion in our pocket that we didn’t have a few weeks ago,” said Neumann, referring to the breakup fee it received from Paramount Skydance.
On Feb. 26, Netflix abandoned its deal to buy Warner Bros.’s studios and streaming business after David Ellison’s Paramount upped its hostile bid for WBD in its entirety to $31/share — leaving Paramount the winner of a debt-fueled takeover of the media conglomerate. Paramount Skydance paid Netflix the $2.8 billion breakup fee once Warner Bros. Discovery terminated its agreement with Netflix in favor of Paramount’s “superior” offer.
Asked if the Warner Bros. bidding war changed Netflix’s M&A strategy, Neumann replied, “I know it sounds boring, but it’s really no change.” The company will “continue to stay focused on what are those opportunities” to accelerate the growth of the business, he said.
Neumann said Netflix, by the end of the bidding process for Warner Bros., had “a stronger belief” that “we would have been great stewards” for those assets. And, he insisted, Netflix had high confidence that it had a “clear path” to regulatory approval.
“At the end of the day, we were going to be disciplined” on the price it was willing to pay for Warner Bros., Neumann said.
In 2026, Netflix plans to boost its total cash content spending to around $20 billion, up 10% from last year. It is forecasting revenue of $50.7 billion-$51.7 billion, which would be an increase of 12%-14% year over year, and projects hitting 31.5% operating margin in 2026. The streaming heavyweight reported more than 325 million subscribers worldwide as of the end of 2025, up from 301.2 million a year prior.
The expected 10% increase in Netflix’s content spending this year is in line with its expected revenue growth, Neumann said. “It’s really no change in our approach,” he said. “We really want to be that starting point and destination for professionally produced content for creators around the world.”
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