Analysis · Legislation
AB 69 & AB 1680: Depopulation You Can Count
Assemblymember Calderon's package is the first legislation to treat moving households off the FAIR Plan as something to measure, not just something to promise. A handful of reporting details will decide whether the public can actually count it.
depopulatefairplan.com · Data through Mar 2026 · Companion to The Depopulation Promise
What the bills do
AB 69 (Calderon) builds out the FAIR Plan clearinghouse — the mechanism for moving policyholders back to the private market. It requires clear notices to policyholders about their options, broker education, and, beginning May 2027, quarterly reporting by participating insurers of the policies they issue to FAIR Plan policyholders, with aggregated public reporting by the association. AB 1680 (the "Make It FAIR Act") strengthens Department of Insurance oversight of the FAIR Plan itself: corrective-action authority with penalties, examination powers, and staffing requirements. As of July 2026 both bills have passed the Assembly and await action in Senate Appropriations.
What the data shows
320,572 → 655,204
FAIR Plan policies in force since the September 2023 insurer deal — and in 534 of the 574 ZIP codes the state designated as distressed, enrollment went up, not down.
Today, progress is reported as insurer commitments and rate approvals: policies a carrier plans to write. We could find no public dataset that counts households actually leaving the FAIR Plan. The reporting AB 69 creates is the first real chance to change that. Whether it does comes down to the details below.
The incremental data asks
AB 69 — make take-out reporting mean something
- County and ZIP grain. Publish the aggregated quarterly clearinghouse report at county and ZIP level, matching the FAIR Plan's existing quarterly releases — one statewide number cannot show where depopulation is and isn't happening.
- Count both directions. Report policies leaving the FAIR Plan alongside policies entering it in the same period. A count of departures alone could look like progress even while the Plan keeps growing.
- Retention. A 12-month follow-up count: how many taken-out policies are still in the voluntary market a year later.
- Start sooner. Begin aggregate reporting the first quarter after enactment. A May 2027 start leaves a two-year measurement blackout in the middle of the crisis.
- Machine-readable. Publish as CSV with a data dictionary rather than PDF. Today, anyone who wants to analyze these figures re-keys the same tables from PDFs by hand.
AB 1680 — put data duties inside FAIR Plan oversight
- Codify the quarterly geographic releases (county and ZIP policy, premium, and insured-value figures) as a statutory duty subject to the bill's corrective-action provisions, with a consistent distressed-area flag. In 2025, the FAIR Plan's own quarterly releases switched between an internal set of roughly 1,009 ZIP codes and the official 663-ZIP list, without a published definition for either.
- Financial-health disclosure. Quarterly reporting of total insured value against reserves and reinsurance, plus any assessment activity. These are the numbers that determine when every insured Californian helps pay for FAIR Plan losses, as happened with the $1 billion assessment after the 2025 fires.
- Cost-of-coverage reporting. Average premium per policy by county. Our analysis of the FAIR Plan's own releases found a roughly twelve-fold spread across counties, from about $621 to $7,234 per policy per year, a figure not available in any official publication.
None of this requires new data collection. The FAIR Plan already produces quarterly county and ZIP data. AB 69 already creates the reporting channel. The 2023 Sustainable Insurance Strategy already committed the FAIR Plan to expanded reporting on reducing its policyholder count. These asks are about detail, completeness, timing, and format.