The Insurance Information Institute’s review of state dog-bite law found four states with no dog-bite statute on the books at all — Arkansas, Kansas, North Dakota, and Mississippi (Triple-I). That gets read the wrong way about half the time. It does not mean nothing happens if a dog bites somebody in Tishomingo County. It means there’s no statute doing the work, so these disputes get sorted out under general common-law principles instead. Whether any particular situation creates liability is a lawyer’s question and always has been. What we can talk about is the insurance side, which sits in the same place either way.
Where this lands on a homeowners policy
It lands in the liability section — the part of the policy nobody reads because it doesn’t have a dollar figure attached to their house.
Triple-I describes the general pattern this way: homeowners and renters policies typically respond to dog-bite liability, including legal expenses, up to the policy’s liability limits, which commonly run somewhere between $100,000 and $300,000. Above the limit, the dog’s owner is on the hook personally.
Policies vary on this considerably. Some carriers ask about breed at application and at renewal. Some don’t ask and don’t track it. Some decide case by case on whether a particular dog has been deemed dangerous, regardless of breed. And once a dog has actually bitten somebody, Triple-I notes that insurers may re-rate the policy, decline to renew it, or exclude that dog specifically going forward. Which of those a given company does is a company-by-company answer, not a statewide one.
The numbers, and the one that surprises people
Nationally, insurers paid $1.86 billion on dog-related injury claims in 2025 — up 18.6% from the year before — across 28,450 claims (Triple-I and State Farm). Claim count rose more than 25% in a single year.
Here’s the part that cuts the other direction: the average cost per claim fell 5.5%, to $65,450 from $69,272. The story in 2025 wasn’t that dog claims got worse. It’s that there were more of them. Over a decade the severity trend is genuinely ugly — up 97% — but the one-year headline is a frequency story, and anybody selling you fear off that $1.86 billion figure is skipping a line.
The two other things August brings up
Dogs are one of three yard questions that come up on a house around here, and the other two are seasonal.
Trampolines. Common in yards from Iuka to Belmont, and one of the more frequent reasons a carrier asks a follow-up question on an otherwise ordinary house. Whether a policy treats one as a rating question, an underwriting question, or not a question at all varies by company.
Above-ground pools. Same story, usually with more attention paid to whether there’s a fence or a removable ladder.
Neither is a reason to panic and neither is prohibited by anything. But both are things a carrier would rather learn about from the application than from a claim, and a policy written on an inaccurate application is a bad place to be standing.
The honest read
Most dogs in this county will never generate a claim of any kind. Most trampolines will never hurt anybody. This is low-probability, high-consequence territory — the category where liability limits matter precisely because the situation is rare enough that nobody plans for it.
We’re not going to name a number for anybody. Above whatever the base policy carries, this is a question of what a household can comfortably afford to protect, and folks around here land in very different places on that. Some of them look at an umbrella that sits on top of what’s already there. Some of them look at it and decide the base liability limit is where they’re comfortable. Both are real answers.
Reading your own
Find the liability limit on the declarations page — it’s usually stated per occurrence, not per person. Then look for anything in the policy or the endorsements that names an animal, a breed, or a specific dog. If there’s an exclusion, it will be written down. If there isn’t, don’t assume either way from silence, because the underwriting file and the policy form are two different documents.
The only thing that settles what a particular household has is that household’s policy. If you’d like somebody to find the liability section and read it with you, bring the whole thing to the Belmont office, or call or text 662-454-7831. Our home insurance page covers what else we look at.
This article is general information about how coverage typically works, not advice about your specific situation. Your policy is the contract, and it’s the only thing that says what you have. If you’d like someone to read it with you, that’s what we’re here for.
