State Farm Cuts Coverage for Thousands: Are You Affected?

Nine months after stating it would no longer be issuing new home policies in the state, State Farm announced this week that it will stop providing coverage for 72,000 homes and apartments in California beginning this summer.

State Farm's Policy Non-Renewals in California

According to a Thursday story by the Bay Area News Group, the Illinois-based firm, which is the largest insurer in California, will not be renewing the policies on 30,000 houses and 42,000 apartments due to rising prices, an increased risk of natural disasters like wildfires, and antiquated rules.

According to the news group, the action is being taken while California's elected insurance commissioner is revamping the state's home insurance laws for a year with the goal of stabilizing the collapsing market by granting insurers more freedom to raise rates in exchange for pledges to extend coverage in high-risk areas.

The California Department of Insurance said State Farm will be required to respond to inquiries from authorities on its choice to terminate coverage. It was unclear if the department would look into the matter.

June of last year saw State Farm announce that it would no longer be taking applications for any commercial or personal property and casualty insurance lines. The company gave the following reasons: inflation, a difficult reinsurance market, and "rapidly growing catastrophe exposure."

According to the firm, little more than 2% of its California insurance are affected by the recently disclosed cancellations. It didn't specify their location or the standards by which it decided not to renew them.

According to CoreLogic, over 1.2 million residences in California are either moderately or very vulnerable to wildfire destruction. The company projects that rebuilding these properties would need an expenditure of $760 billion.

Overhauling Insurance Laws in California

California is now working on updating its insurance laws, with intentions to implement changes by the end of December. The goal of the California Sustainable Insurance Strategy is to increase insurance accessibility and affordability, especially in high-risk fire regions.

Two amendments have already been recommended by the state: enhancing the management and supervision of insurance rate submissions and permitting forward-looking catastrophe modeling to aid in the prediction of climate disasters.

In order to encourage insurance firms to write new policies in high-risk locations, it will propose more changes later this year that would identify distressed areas. Additionally, it will revamp the FAIR Plan, a state-run insurance fund that homeowners resort to when they are unable to acquire insurance elsewhere.

The number of insurance under California's FAIR Plan climbed from around 154,000 in September 2019 to over 339,000 in December 2023.

The state's current rules let insurance firms to lawfully raise their rates, but they are limited in the types of policies they may offer.

As a result, last year in California, insurance companies-including State Farm and Allstate-were permitted to stop issuing new policies. According to State Farm's announcement on Wednesday, several businesses are also limiting the policies they issue to properties that are considered lower-risk or not renewing them.

According to Soller, seven out of the top 12 insurance organizations in California have limited their policy writing during the last year. In the state, 85% of the homeowners insurance market is made up of just seven businesses.

In addition to helping the state-operated insurer increase its financial reserves and keep it from going bankrupt in the case of an extraordinary calamity, the Department of Insurance hopes that its reforms would ease the transition for homes on the FAIR Plan back to commercial insurance.