Bundling isn't just convenient—in this market, it's one of your best defenses against rising costs

After a few brutal years, the market is catching its breath. Increases on home and auto have softened to their lowest rate in years. But rate increases slowing down isn't the same as rates actually coming down. Most households are still paying more than they were a few years ago, and the broader picture isn't helping: after cooling for a stretch, inflation ticked back up in 2026, with prices rising 4.2% over the year through May - the sharpest increase since 2023. As the price of everyday living goes up, it’s harder and harder to absorb  paying more for home and auto insurance. 

So it's worth getting practical about the levers a household actually controls. The trouble with most of them is the catch: trim the grocery budget and you eat worse, cut back on driving or travel and you feel it. Nearly every way to save money asks you to give something up.

Bundling is one of the rare exceptions. Done right, it lowers what you pay and makes your coverage simpler at the same time—one company, one bill, less to keep track of. That's not a tradeoff. That's spending less and getting more for it, which is exactly why bundling deserves more than a passing glance in a year like this.

The savings are real, and they're specific

Bundling saves you money—that part isn't news. Across the industry, it trims the average household's premium by about 15%, or somewhere between $550 and $870 a year. That's the benchmark. At Branch, we offer as high as a 30% bundle discount. If you’re paying $3,500 for your home and auto insurance, that’s about $1,200 a year in savings.

The 30% discount is not because we ran a better promotion. It's because the company was built around bundling in the first place.

For households that qualify, that's not rounding-error money. It's a car payment, a few months of groceries, a real dent in the cost of running a home.

So why doesn't everyone bundle?

Because for most of insurance history, bundling has been a hassle. And that's not an accident. It's a side effect of how the industry was built.

Go back far enough and home and auto were never sold together. Home and fire coverage in the U.S. predates the automobile by more than a century, so the two lines grew up in completely different eras. As today's biggest carriers took shape, they typically got good at selling one line first and bolted the other on years, sometimes decades, later. By then the two sides of the business ran on separate systems, separate processes, and sometimes separate offices and cultures entirely.

So when those carriers eventually realized customers could save by bundling, the best they could manage was stapling the two experiences together. You answer the questions twice. You repeat yourself to an agent. You get passed between departments and hope it's worth it by the end. The savings were technically there, but the friction quietly ate into whether anyone bothered, and made it genuinely hard to compare one bundle against another.

What it actually means to be built for bundling

Branch was built the other way around. We're the first insurance company designed specifically for bundling from day one, not a home division and an auto division learning to share a hallway.

What that looks like in practice: you're not filling out a mountain of forms or repeating your life story to an agent. Much of what's needed to price home and auto already lives in secure, established databases—the age of your house, where it sits relative to the nearest fire department, and your driving record. We built a system to automatically pull that together in seconds, so getting a real price feels more like ordering something online than working through a stack of paperwork. Bundling is our superpower because the company was engineered around it, not because we tacked a discount onto two unrelated products.

Where the savings actually come from

The bundle savings come from something simple: it costs us less to sell one household two policies than to go out and find two separate customers. Acquiring a customer is one of the biggest expenses in insurance, and bundling lets us spread that cost across both policies instead of stacking it onto each. Less waste in, lower price out.

Bundling lowers the cost. The model decides where the savings go.

The bottom line

In a year when every line item is getting a harder look, bundling is one of the few moves that's fully in your hands, and one of the few that pays off right away. The trick is finding it built into the product instead of bolted on after the fact.

Our cofounder and CEO Steve Lekas wrote more on why bundling got so broken, and how we rebuilt it, here.