This one comes down to your personal risk tolerance, and reasonable people land in different places. Standard homeowners policies exclude earthquake damage, and California requires insurers to offer separate earthquake coverage each year, so adding it is straightforward. The tradeoff is cost versus catastrophe. A policy might run on the order of a thousand-plus dollars a year with a high deductible, often tens of thousands (figures illustrative, confirm with your insurer), while a severe quake could cause damage costing hundreds of thousands to rebuild. Past quakes showed how uneven the damage can be, one house destroyed and the neighbor's untouched. The case for buying coverage: if a total loss would be financially devastating and you plan to own for a long time, the premium can be cheap protection against a low-probability, high-cost event. The case for skipping it: some owners reason that a quake bad enough to level the house would strain insurers anyway, and choose to carry the risk themselves. Price a policy, look hard at the deductible, and decide based on how much of that downside you could afford to absorb. Either answer is defensible if you've run the numbers honestly.