Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara and the California Department of Insurance published a press release announcing major changes to the California FAIR Plan Association. This comes as part of an ongoing effort to combat the insurance crisis in California and stabilize the insurance market. 

 The FAIR plan will implement major changes within 30 days including:

• Creating a new commercial coverage option with limits of up to $20 million per building
• Creating a sound financial formula for extreme loss scenarios to protect policyholders
• Requiring increased public reporting on plan activity and customer service metrics

In 2019, Commissioner Lara ordered the FAIR plan to double the coverage limit for residential properties to $3 million. This was the first time the limits were raised in over two decades–a necessary increase to match increasing property values. The commissioner is now doing the same for commercial properties. The updated limit is $20 million per building, with a maximum limit of $100 million per location. This can address coverage gaps for some larger housing developments and businesses. These limits will sunset three years after the FAIR plan begins offering policies with these limits. After the sunset date no new business or renewal policy will incept, but existing policies will continue. Once that last High Value Commercial Policy expires, commercial limits will revert to $20 million per location.

Another change is how the FAIR plan will respond in an extreme worst-case scenario. Currently, when all FAIR plan reserve funds are exhausted, insurance companies can ask for approval to pass the cost of losses to consumers. With the changes, insurance companies will be required to pay half the costs of up to $2 billion while the other half can be collected from policyholders with approval from the commissioner.