Short answer: yes, ask for it. A seller-paid one-year home warranty typically runs the seller $300–$600 (as of June 2026) — pocket change relative to the rest of a real estate transaction — and it's one of the lowest-friction concessions you can request in an offer. Just don't confuse "ask for it" with "count on it." The home warranty industry has a genuinely rough track record on paying out claims, and if you go into it expecting insurance-grade reliability, you're setting yourself up to be annoyed at exactly the wrong moment — like when your AC dies in July.

Here's the honest version of what a home warranty is, what it actually covers, what it costs, why the companies that sell them get so many complaints, and when asking for one is worth the ten seconds it takes to type it into your offer.

What a home warranty actually is (and isn't)

A home warranty is not homeowners insurance. Insurance covers sudden, catastrophic damage — fire, storms, a tree through the roof. A home warranty is a service contract: you (or the seller, on your behalf) pay an annual fee, and in exchange the company promises to repair or replace major home systems and appliances that fail from normal wear and tear during the coverage period, usually one year.

Typical coverage includes:

  • HVAC systems (heating and air conditioning)
  • Water heaters
  • Plumbing and electrical systems
  • Kitchen appliances — oven/range, dishwasher, built-in microwave
  • Washer and dryer (often an add-on, not standard)

What it typically does not cover:

  • Pre-existing conditions or anything the company decides was a known issue before the policy started
  • Cosmetic damage
  • Code violations, improper prior installation, or "mismatched" system components
  • Structural issues (roof, foundation) — some companies sell roof coverage as a pricey add-on, most don't include it standard
  • Damage from lack of maintenance — and "you didn't maintain this" is one of the most common reasons claims get denied, according to Consumer Reports' longstanding critique of the industry, a critique that current complaint data (below) suggests hasn't gone stale

Every plan also has per-item payout caps — typically $2,000–$3,000 per covered item — and requires a service call fee (usually $65–$150, as of 2026) every time you call, whether or not the tech actually fixes anything.

What it actually costs

There are two separate things people mean by "home warranty" in a home sale, and it's worth keeping them straight:

A seller-paid warranty at closing: the seller buys a one-year policy that transfers to you as the new owner. This typically costs the seller $300–$600 for a standalone policy (as of June 2026). Some companies will even throw in free coverage for the seller while the home is listed if the seller agrees to buy the buyer's policy at closing — which is part of why sellers tend to say yes to this ask without much of a fight. It's a cheap way to make an offer feel safer without touching the sale price.

An ongoing home warranty you buy for yourself after that first year (or if you skip the seller-paid route entirely): this runs closer to $57–$73 a month — $684–$876 a year (as of 2026), on top of the per-visit service fee. That's a real annual expense, and it's the point where you should actually stop and do the math on whether it beats just self-insuring (more on that below).

The honest track record

This is the part a lot of real estate content glosses over, and it shouldn't be glossed over, because it changes how much weight to put on that "free" seller-paid year.

Complaint volume is high relative to the industry's size. American Home Shield, one of the largest players, has a B rating with the Better Business Bureau and 14,896 complaints filed in the last three years (4,549 in the last 12 months alone), per BBB's own complaint tracker [as of August 2026]. The largest complaint category by far is service and repair quality — delayed visits, incomplete repairs, and techs who leave things worse than they found them. NBC News reported on a Las Vegas customer whose AC was damaged mid-repair and left his family in a 100°F+ house for six weeks while the company sent multiple technicians, one of whom blamed "foreign debris" rather than fix the unit. To be fair to the other side of that same story: AHS also reportedly paid out more than $56 million on over 319,000 service requests in that same metro area between January 2022 and September 2024 — so the company isn't a total non-payer, it's an inconsistent one, which is arguably worse to plan around than a company that's uniformly bad.

State regulators have taken action. Arizona's Attorney General announced an $11.8 million settlement with Choice Home Warranty in February 2026, alleging the company misrepresented what its plans covered — including failing to replace air conditioning units it had advertised as covered — and that sales reps concealed exclusions, disproportionately targeting veterans, seniors, and people on fixed incomes. Over 1,500 Arizona customers had complained since 2013. Choice Home Warranty didn't admit wrongdoing, but the size of that settlement tells you the pattern of complaints was not a fluke.

Denials and low satisfaction are common enough to be the norm, not the exception. A 2024 YouGov survey (2,584 adults, cited by reviews.com, published November 2025) found only 49% of people who filed a claim were satisfied with the outcome. Separately, a Forbes survey of 1,800 home warranty holders found 13% reported an outright claim denial, and 49% said their plan wasn't good value — even though 81% of that same group planned to renew anyway, which says something about inertia and sunk cost more than it says the product is secretly great. Forbes' own sentiment analysis of 146,000+ customer interactions found wild swings between providers — 2-10 Home Buyers Warranty scored 97% negative sentiment on coverage clarity and just 2% positive on cost/value, while Liberty Home Guard scored meaningfully better across most categories. Translation: "home warranty" isn't one product with one reputation, it's a category where the specific company matters a lot, and even the better ones aren't beloved.

None of this means home warranties are a scam across the board — plenty of people file a claim, get a reasonably quick fix, and move on with their day. It means the reasonable baseline expectation should be "this will probably work for straightforward stuff, and there's a real chance it frustrates you on the expensive stuff," not "this is insurance and I'm covered."

When it's actually worth asking for

Given all that, why bother asking at all? Because of the specific economics of this ask, not the product itself:

  • It's cheap for the seller to say yes to. $300–$600 is small next to a repair credit, a price cut, or a closing-cost concession. Sellers and their agents will often approve it reflexively as a goodwill gesture, especially in a competitive listing where they want the deal to feel safe and move fast.
  • It costs you nothing to ask. Unlike asking for a price reduction (which can spook a seller into thinking you're not serious) or a big repair credit (which can slow down or complicate closing), a home warranty request is a standard, low-drama line item that real estate agents see constantly.
  • It has some real value in year one specifically, when you have zero repair history with the house and the systems are an unknown quantity to you — even if the seller disclosed everything honestly, "the water heater is 9 years old and worked fine when we left" is not the same as knowing how it'll behave under your use.
  • It's a genuinely reasonable ask on older homes where HVAC, water heater, or major appliances are aging out but not yet failed — the exact zone where "will this die in the next 12 months" is a real coin flip.

When it's not worth much

  • On a newly built or recently renovated home, most major systems are still under manufacturer warranty anyway — a home warranty is redundant coverage for the first several years.
  • If the seller's disclosure already flags an aging or marginal system, a home warranty won't help — pre-existing and known-issue exclusions are exactly the loophole most denials cite, per Consumer Reports and the complaint patterns above. In that situation, ask for a repair, a credit, or a price adjustment instead — something that actually forces resolution before closing rather than punting it to a claims process you don't control.
  • The payout caps are genuinely low relative to real repair costs. A full HVAC replacement runs $7,000–$20,000 for an average-sized home as of May 2026, against a typical per-item cap of $2,000–$3,000. A home warranty might get you a meaningfully discounted replacement or a partial cash-out — it is not going to make you whole on the big-ticket item that's most likely to actually break.
  • It's a one-year policy. If nothing breaks in year one — which, statistically, is plausible for most systems that aren't already near end-of-life — you've gotten a nice-to-have with no payout, and you're back to deciding whether to renew it yourself at full retail price.

How to actually ask for it

Put it in the offer, not as a late-stage renegotiation after inspection (unless the inspection turns up something specific it might help with, in which case ask for it alongside — not instead of — a resolution on that item). Something as simple as "Seller to provide a one-year home warranty at closing, buyer to select provider" in the purchase contract is standard language your agent has almost certainly written before. If the seller balks even at that, it's a small but real data point about how flexible they'll be on everything else.

Bottom line

Ask for the seller-paid home warranty. It's a cheap, low-risk request that a seller will usually grant without a fight, and it gives you a real (if imperfect) backstop during the highest-uncertainty year of owning the place. Just read the actual contract for exclusions and payout caps before you count on it, keep your own maintenance records from day one so you're not the one getting denied over a documentation technicality, and don't let a free first year talk you into renewing it forever without checking whether self-insuring — just keeping that $700-ish a year in a savings account for repairs — would leave you better off. For most systems, most years, it probably would.

Sources

Note: home warranty pricing and coverage terms vary meaningfully by state, provider, and plan tier — the figures above are national averages/ranges as of the dates noted and should be checked against actual quotes for your specific market and property.