The National Housing Trust has waived $585 million in peril insurance premiums for mortgagors in the parishes hit hardest by Hurricane Melissa, applying the credit to payments that would otherwise have fallen due under a special moratorium that ran from November 2025 to April 2026. The waiver sits on top of roughly $1.12 billion in interest charges the Trust had already absorbed as part of the same relief programme.
Around 36,000 NHT account holders qualified, concentrated across the western parishes that took the brunt of the Category 5 storm. Leighton Taylor, who manages the Trusts Loan Portfolio Management Unit, said the moratorium applied automatically to customers in the affected parishes rather than requiring an individual application, and that the insurance waiver would simply appear on affected accounts as a credit.
The relief has a clear end point, which is worth flagging for anyone who benefited from it. Peril insurance premiums for NHT mortgagors nationwide will return to their standard rate for the period running September 2026 to August 2027, with the Trust confirming that costs will hold steady despite last years hurricane and the higher construction costs that followed it. The Trust said it would not be sending individual notifications about the return to standard premiums, directing customers instead to check NHT Online for their account details.
Taken together, the two announcements tell a fairly complete story: an unusually large, automatic relief package during the worst of the crisis, followed by a return to normal terms once the acute damage period passed, funded in the interim by the Trust absorbing well over a billion and a half dollars in costs it did not pass on to affected homeowners.
Visit our YouTube Community ↗