Analysis · Legislation

SB 1301: Nonrenewal Protections Need Nonrenewal Data

Senator Allen's bill gives homeowners real protections against being dropped by their insurer. Whether those protections work will be hard to verify with today's public data: the state's nonrenewal statistics end in 2023, and its distressed-area list has not been revised since early 2025.

depopulatefairplan.com · Data through Mar 2026 · Companion to The Depopulation Promise

What the bill does

SB 1301 (Allen) requires property insurers to give six months' notice of nonrenewal, state the specific reasons, and offer a path to keep coverage through repairs and mitigation. It bars dropping a homeowner solely for roof age or a prior claim. As of July 2026 it has passed the Senate and awaits action in Assembly Appropriations.

The bill responds to the nonrenewal wave that pushed hundreds of thousands of households onto the FAIR Plan — the state's insurer of last resort — after the September 2023 regulatory deal with insurers.

What the data shows

Whether SB 1301's protections work will be a question about nonrenewal patterns. The Department of Insurance's count of new, renewed, and nonrenewed residential policies was last published for calendar 2023, before the fires and before the wave of nonrenewals the bill responds to. The distressed-area list that triggers moratoria and protections has also aged: applying the state's own qualifying test (10 CCR § 2644.4.8) to current enrollment, 90 ZIP codes qualify today but are missing from the official list, and 186 listed ZIPs no longer meet the fire-risk half of the test.

The incremental data asks

• Codify the nonrenewal series. Require CDI to publish residential new, renewed, and nonrenewed counts at state, county, and ZIP level on a fixed schedule (quarterly preferred, at least annual), in machine-readable form. The series already exists; the most recent public edition covers 2023.
• Reason-code reporting. Once insurers must state a reason for each nonrenewal, require aggregated reason-code statistics (roof age, prior claim, wildfire model score, etc.). Without them, the bill's prohibited-reasons provisions cannot be monitored by anyone outside the insurer.
• Re-run the distressed-area test on a schedule. The designation criteria are already in regulation (10 CCR § 2644.4.8); require CDI to reapply them to current enrollment on a defined cadence and republish the list, so protections attach where the distress actually is.