Wildfire is the whole story in California, but not in the way most people assume. The intuitive expectation is that California homeowners pay enormous premiums because of it. They mostly do not — the statewide average at a standard coverage level sits below the national average. What Californians face instead is something harder to price and harder to solve: their carrier may simply decline to keep insuring them, at any price.
That is the distinction that runs through this entire guide. California's home insurance crisis is an availability crisis first and a price crisis second — though the price side is now arriving fast, by deliberate policy design. If you read one thing here, make it section 1.
A note before you start: everything below is general information about how home insurance works in California, not personalized insurance, legal, or financial advice. Premiums, coverage terms, and — critically in California — availability vary enormously by carrier, by ZIP code, by wildfire risk score, and by the specific characteristics of your home. Nothing here is a quote, and this site takes no commissions and routes you to no carrier. For coverage specific to your property, talk to a licensed California agent; for a claim dispute, talk to an attorney licensed in California.
1. What home insurance actually costs in California
The headline number: about $1,829 a year for $300,000 of dwelling coverage. That is the average of two independent 2026 rate analyses that each state $300,000 explicitly — one at $1,653 (at $300,000 dwelling, $300,000 liability, a $1,000 deductible) and one at $2,004 at the same coverage level. A third source lands at $1,628 on a richer package ($350,000 dwelling, a $500 deductible) and still comes in below both, which supports a real $1,600-$2,000 band rather than something higher.
The national average at the same $300,000 level runs roughly $2,844 to $2,872.
California is cheaper than the national average. In the state with the worst wildfire losses in the country. That is not a typo, and it is the single most important thing to understand about this market.
Why it is that cheap, and what the cost shows up as instead
Proposition 103's prior-approval rate regime held admitted-market rates below actuarial need for years. Under Prop 103, California insurers must get rate changes approved by the Department of Insurance before using them, and for a long stretch the approved rates did not keep pace with what carriers believed wildfire risk actually cost. Rates were suppressed relative to modeled losses.
Insurers cannot charge a price they consider inadequate. But they can decline to write the policy at all. So the suppressed price did not make California risk cheap — it converted a price problem into an availability problem. The cost shows up as:
- Non-renewals. Homeowners in wildfire-exposed areas losing coverage they have carried for decades, through no fault of their own and with no claim on their record.
- Carrier withdrawals. Major insurers pausing or halting new homeowners business statewide, which removes options for everyone, not just high-risk homeowners.
- FAIR Plan growth. The residual market absorbing homeowners the private market will not take, growing more than fivefold since 2019 (section 6).
Say it plainly: in California, the relevant question is often not "what does it cost?" but "will anyone write it?" A $1,829 average premium is meaningless to a homeowner in a high-risk ZIP who has been non-renewed twice and is looking at a FAIR Plan policy plus a wraparound.
The important caveat on comparing $1,829 to your own bill
There is a real and reconcilable dissent worth understanding, because you will run into it. The same analyst that publishes a $2,004 figure at $300,000 separately puts California's statewide average at $2,455 for 2025, rising to a projected $2,843 by the end of 2026 — well above everything above.
Both are true, and the reconciliation is the point. That higher series prices each state at its own average dwelling coverage, and California's average dwelling coverage is far above $300,000 because California homes are expensive to rebuild.
So:
- $1,829 is what $300,000 of dwelling coverage costs in California. Use this to compare California to Texas or Ohio — it is like for like.
- Roughly $2,800 is closer to what a typical California homeowner actually pays, because they need far more than $300,000 of coverage.
If you are comparing this guide's number to your own renewal notice, that gap is why.
The trend is the number that matters here
California is modeled as the fastest-rising home insurance state in the country for 2026, at about +15.8% — from $2,455 in 2025 to a projected $2,843, an increase of roughly $388.
Unusually, the individual filings driving that projection are on the public record, which makes it the best-corroborated trend figure available:
- State Farm, California's largest homeowners writer, sought 21.8% and was approved for an interim 17% average homeowners increase effective June 1, 2026, which a March 2026 agreement left in place.
- The California FAIR Plan was approved for 29.1%, effective October 15, 2026.
What is driving it: a deliberate policy trade
This is not drift. It is policy.
The Insurance Commissioner's Sustainable Insurance Strategy, finalized in late 2024 and operative through 2025 and 2026, for the first time lets California insurers use forward-looking wildfire catastrophe models and the net cost of reinsurance in their rate filings. Both had been effectively barred under the prior interpretation of Prop 103, which required rates to be based on historical losses.
In exchange, participating insurers commit to writing at least 85% of their statewide market share in wildfire-distressed ZIP codes.
That is an explicit bargain: higher approved rates in return for restored availability. The state decided the availability crisis was the worse problem and agreed to pay for it in premium.
The 2026 increases are the price side of that bargain arriving first. The availability side — carriers actually returning to high-risk ZIP codes at the promised rate — is the part still being tested. If you are a California homeowner absorbing a 17% increase this year, that increase is the consideration you are paying for a commitment that is supposed to make your coverage renewable. Whether it works is the open question in this market.
2. The deductible that actually applies to your most likely claim
Here is a genuinely counterintuitive fact about the state with the worst catastrophe story in the country: California has no catastrophe deductible.
There is no hurricane deductible, no named-storm deductible, and no percentage wind/hail deductible convention. California is absent from the Insurance Information Institute's list of 19 states plus D.C. that use hurricane or windstorm deductibles, and there is no California analogue to Florida's statutory deductible menu.
A standard California homeowners policy carries one flat all-perils deductible — and wildfire, the state's defining peril, is a covered cause of loss under that ordinary deductible, not a separate percentage retention.
That is unambiguously good news, and it is worth stating clearly because it runs against expectation. A Floridian with a 2% hurricane deductible on a $425,000 home absorbs $8,500 before coverage starts. A Californian whose house burns down in a wildfire absorbs their standard deductible — typically $1,000 — and the insurer pays from there.
The typical deductible is $1,000, but the average is moving
$1,000 remains the most common standard all-perils deductible in California, matching the national mode — roughly 60% of U.S. homeowners policies carry $1,000, with most of the rest between $500 and $2,500. Both rate tables behind this guide's premium figure price California at a $1,000 deductible, so the premium and the deductible describe the same policy.
But there is a caveat worth reading carefully, because it describes where the market is going rather than where it has been. Stanford research reported in June 2026 found the average California homeowner deductible climbed from $1,813 at the end of 2020 to $2,553 by March 2026.
The most common value and the average are different statistics, and both are true: most policies still sit at $1,000 while a growing tail sits at $5,000 and above, dragging the average up. A California buyer shopping in 2026 should expect higher retentions to be pushed at them — often as the price of getting an offer at all.
Two things that look like exceptions and are not
1. Earthquake deductibles are on a different policy. Earthquake is excluded from every standard homeowners policy and is bought separately, most often through the California Earthquake Authority, where deductibles run 5% to 25% of the dwelling limit. On a $640,000 dwelling limit — roughly what it costs to rebuild a 2,000 square foot California home, see section 4 — that is $32,000 to $160,000 out of pocket. Those are enormous numbers, and they are the main reason CEA take-up is low relative to California's actual earthquake exposure. But that deductible belongs to a separate policy you have to affirmatively buy. It is not on your homeowners declarations page.
2. Standalone wildfire deductibles exist, but they are not the market convention — yet. They have begun appearing on some high-value and non-admitted policies. United Policyholders has documented cases including an AIG policy carrying a $621,000 wildfire deductible separate from its $100,000 standard deductible.
Those are real and genuinely alarming, and they are worth watching. But they are concentrated in the excess-and-surplus and high-net-worth segments and are nowhere near a market convention. Describing California as a percentage-deductible state on the strength of them would badly misdescribe what an ordinary California declarations page says today.
This is the field most worth rechecking in 2027. If wildfire deductibles migrate from the high-value segment into the ordinary admitted market, it will be the most consequential change in California home insurance since the FAIR Plan started growing — and it would happen quietly, on renewal, in a paragraph most people do not read. Check your declarations page for a separate wildfire deductible every year.
3. What a standard policy covers here — and the gaps
A California homeowners policy covers the structure of your home (Coverage A, dwelling), other structures like a detached garage (Coverage B), your belongings (Coverage C, personal property), your cost of living elsewhere while the home is uninhabitable (Coverage D, loss of use or additional living expense), and your liability if someone is injured on your property (Coverage E).
Wildfire is a covered peril under the fire coverage on a standard policy, and so is the smoke damage that comes with it. That is the central thing a California policy does, and it does it under the ordinary deductible.
Two coverages deserve special attention in a wildfire state, because they behave differently here:
- Loss of use / additional living expense. After a major wildfire, rebuilding does not take months, it takes years — permitting, debris removal, contractor scarcity, and utility restoration all queue up at once across thousands of destroyed homes simultaneously. Standard ALE coverage is often limited to a percentage of Coverage A and, more importantly, to a time limit (commonly 12 or 24 months). California law has extended minimum ALE periods following declared disasters, but the practical lesson from the 2017-2025 fire cycle is that the time limit binds before the dollar limit does. Ask what yours is, in months.
- Debris removal and code upgrade costs. Clearing a burned lot is expensive, and rebuilding to current California code — which now includes substantial wildland-urban-interface construction requirements — costs more than the original house did. See ordinance-or-law coverage in section 4.
Here is what a standard policy does not do.
Flood is never covered. Not here, not anywhere.
No homeowners policy in the United States covers flood. This is universal, and Californians tend to underestimate it because the state's flooding is episodic rather than seasonal.
Flood coverage is a separate policy from the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) or a private flood insurer. Two California-specific angles:
- Post-fire debris flow is the one most people miss. After a wildfire strips vegetation from a hillside, the first heavy rain can send mud and debris down the slope with enormous destructive force. Whether a given event is treated as a covered fire-related loss or an excluded flood/landslide loss depends on causation language and has been genuinely contested. If you are downslope of a recent burn scar, this is a specific question to ask your agent by name.
- Atmospheric river flooding in Central Valley and coastal communities is a real and recurring flood exposure, and much of it happens outside designated high-risk zones — where NFIP coverage is also dramatically cheaper.
NFIP policies generally carry a 30-day waiting period. You cannot buy it when the storm is in the forecast.
Earthquake is excluded from every standard policy
Not limited — excluded. If you want it, you buy it separately, usually through the California Earthquake Authority or a private carrier, with the 5%-25% deductible described in section 2.
This is a genuine coverage decision, not a formality, and it is the second-largest uninsured exposure in the state after flood. The honest framing: CEA coverage is expensive and carries a very large deductible, which means it is designed to prevent total financial ruin rather than to make you whole after moderate damage. Whether that trade is worth it depends on your equity, your reserves, and your soil — but the decision should be made deliberately rather than by default.
Other gaps worth knowing about
- Landslide, mudflow, and earth movement are generally excluded, which matters on California hillsides and interacts with the post-fire debris flow problem above.
- Wear and tear and gradual damage. Insurance covers sudden and accidental events, not maintenance.
- Mold is typically capped at a modest sublimit.
- Underinsurance on the dwelling limit itself is arguably California's biggest coverage gap, and it is the subject of the next section. After every major California fire, a substantial share of total-loss homeowners discover their Coverage A limit will not rebuild the house.
4. Making sure you have enough coverage
In California this is not one item on a checklist. After a total loss it is the thing that determines whether you rebuild.
Dwelling coverage is rebuild cost, not market value, not your mortgage
Your Coverage A dwelling limit should equal what it would cost to rebuild your home from the foundation up at current local construction prices. It is not:
- What you paid. In California this error is catastrophic in the other direction — see below.
- What it would sell for today. Market value is dominated by land and location. Construction cost is lumber, labor, and code.
- Your mortgage balance. Your lender requires enough to protect its loan. That is the lender's interest, not yours.
In California, market value and rebuild cost diverge more than anywhere else in the country, because so much of a California home's price is the dirt underneath it. California's median home price is $904,640. The cost to rebuild a typical home is a fraction of that. A homeowner who insures to the purchase price wildly overpays for coverage they can never collect; a homeowner who insures to a lender-driven minimum can be short by hundreds of thousands.
Working a real California number
Rebuild cost in California runs around $320 per square foot, the midpoint of a published $215-$430 range. It covers materials, labor, and general contractor overhead and profit, and excludes land.
For a 2,000 square foot home:
- 2,000 x $320 = $640,000 at the midpoint
- Low end of the band: 2,000 x $215 = $430,000
- High end: 2,000 x $430 = $860,000
That $430,000 spread is the widest in this dataset except one, and the width is the point. California carries a genuinely distinct cost band, but coastal metros sit near the top of that range and inland counties near the bottom, so a single statewide number is unusually lossy here. A Bay Area rebuild and a Bakersfield rebuild are not the same project. Use $640,000 as a starting point and adjust hard for your actual market.
Two California-specific adjustments on top:
- Ordinance or law coverage. If your 1970s home is substantially destroyed, you rebuild to current California code — which for homes in the wildland-urban interface now includes ember-resistant vents, Class A fire-rated roofing, ignition-resistant siding and decking, and multi-pane tempered glazing, plus current energy and seismic requirements. The rebuilt house is required to be substantially better than the one that burned, and someone has to pay that difference. Standard policies often include ordinance-or-law coverage only at a modest percentage of Coverage A. In California this is one of the most valuable endorsements available and it is routinely underbought.
- Extended replacement cost. An endorsement paying a defined percentage above your dwelling limit, commonly 25% or 50%. After a major fire, thousands of homes compete for the same contractors in the same county at the same time, and construction costs in that county spike well above the annual average. In a state where losses arrive as mass simultaneous events, this is closer to essential than optional.
The 80% coinsurance rule, and what a shortfall does to a partial claim
Most homeowners policies contain a coinsurance provision requiring dwelling coverage of at least 80% of full replacement cost to be paid replacement cost on a partial loss. Below that threshold, your partial claim is cut proportionally.
Work it on the 2,000 square foot home:
- Full replacement cost: $640,000
- 80% threshold: $512,000
- You actually carry: $450,000
- Coinsurance ratio: $450,000 / $512,000 = 87.9%
Now a fire does $100,000 of damage — smoke, a partially burned wing, not a total loss. You are far below your $450,000 limit, so you expect $100,000 less your deductible.
Instead:
- $100,000 x 87.9% = $87,891
- Minus your $1,000 deductible
- You receive $86,891. You are out $13,109 instead of the $1,000 you budgeted.
And on a total loss, underinsurance is worse still and simpler: you receive your limit, and the gap between your limit and the actual rebuild cost is yours to fund. That is exactly what happened to large numbers of California homeowners after the major fires of the last decade, and it is the most predictable, most preventable financial disaster in this market.
Re-check your dwelling limit against current construction costs every single year. In a period of construction-cost inflation, a limit that was adequate three years ago can slip below the coinsurance threshold with you doing nothing at all.
5. Your roof, and why it matters differently in California
An honest note first: this dataset records no California-specific roof settlement convention, unlike Florida, Texas, and Oklahoma, where roof-age settlement rules are documented statewide market practice. That absence is itself informative. In hail and hurricane states, the roof is the thing that gets destroyed most often, so carriers built elaborate roof-specific settlement machinery around it. In California, the roof matters for a different reason.
The settlement basics still apply, per policy
Two ways an insurer can pay for damaged property:
- Replacement cost value (RCV) pays what it costs to replace the property with new material of like kind and quality, with no reduction for age.
- Actual cash value (ACV) pays replacement cost minus depreciation — what the property had actually lost in value by the time it was destroyed.
California does not fix a statewide standard, so the answer is in your specific policy. Read the loss settlement provision and look for any language that applies a different basis, or a depreciation schedule, to the roof specifically. An aging roof can still push a carrier toward ACV settlement, a higher premium, or a declination, and those decisions are made carrier by carrier.
There is a national development worth knowing: in 2026, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac relaxed lending standards to accept ACV roof coverage rather than requiring replacement cost in all cases. Mortgage requirements had been quietly propping up RCV roof coverage across a very large number of loans. That constraint has loosened, which means nobody is checking this on your behalf anymore.
What the roof actually does in California: it decides whether you are insurable
Here the roof is primarily a wildfire hardening variable, not a hail-durability one. Embers landing on a combustible roof are one of the principal ways houses ignite during a wildfire — often well ahead of the flame front, and often when the fire itself never reaches the property.
That makes Class A fire-rated roofing — the highest fire-resistance classification — a material input into whether a carrier will write you at all in a wildfire-exposed ZIP code, and into what you pay if they do. California's building code has required Class A roofing in high fire hazard severity zones for years, so newer construction in those areas generally already complies. Older homes with wood shake or untreated shingle roofs in fire-prone areas are the hardest risks to place in the state.
The Commissioner's regulations require insurers to recognize wildfire mitigation in their pricing, and roofing sits alongside the other hardening measures in that framework:
- Class A fire-rated roof
- Ember-resistant vents — one of the highest-value, lowest-cost items on the list
- Enclosed eaves and ignition-resistant soffits
- Noncombustible materials in the first five feet around the structure, including the deck attached to the house
- Multi-pane or tempered glazing
- Cleared gutters and roof surfaces — a roof full of pine needles defeats a Class A rating
- Defensible space maintained to the state's zone requirements, and community-level mitigation such as Firewise USA recognition
If you are in a wildfire-exposed area, this list is the most useful page in this guide. Not because it will cut your premium the way a wind mitigation report does in Florida — the discounts are real but generally smaller — but because it changes the answer to whether a carrier will write you, which in California is the question that actually matters. Document every measure you complete, with photographs and dates, and give the documentation to your agent proactively. A carrier cannot credit mitigation it does not know about.
6. If no carrier will write you
California has a backstop, it is the most consequential institution in this market, and you should understand exactly how thin it is.
The California FAIR Plan
The California FAIR Plan Association, created in 1968, is the state's insurer of last resort. It is not a state agency and not taxpayer-funded — it is a pool of the licensed insurers doing business in California, which share its losses.
Its growth is the single most consequential fact about the California market:
- About 124,000 residential policies in 2019
- 668,609 at December 31, 2025 — and roughly 663,000 to 675,000 through 2026, the highest in its history
- Total loss exposure of about $768 billion as of June 2026, 94% of it residential
That is more than a fivefold increase in six years. Every one of those policies represents a household the private market declined to keep.
It is deliberately a thin product
This is the part people get wrong, and getting it wrong is expensive.
The FAIR Plan covers basic fire, lightning, and smoke. That is close to all it does. It is capped at $3 million of residential dwelling coverage, and it carries:
- No liability coverage — nothing if someone is injured on your property
- No water damage coverage — a burst pipe is on you
- No theft coverage
- No coverage for falling trees
A FAIR Plan policy alone is not a homeowners policy. Buyers typically pair it with a "difference in conditions" (DIC) policy from a private carrier, which fills in liability, theft, water damage, and the rest — reassembling something resembling a normal homeowners package out of two policies from two entities, with two premiums and two claim processes.
Budget for the DIC policy when you budget for the FAIR Plan. Comparing a FAIR Plan premium to your old homeowners premium is not a like-for-like comparison, and homeowners who make that comparison are frequently blindsided when the DIC quote arrives.
The January 2025 fires, and what they cost
The Eaton and Palisades fires in January 2025 cost the FAIR Plan an estimated $4 billion and forced a $1 billion assessment on its member insurers — the mechanism by which the pool's losses get spread across the industry.
Regulators then allowed carriers to pass through half of that assessment to policyholders, working out to about $28 for a median homeowner.
That is worth pausing on. Every insured homeowner in California, including those nowhere near a fire zone, paid a share of the FAIR Plan's 2025 losses. The FAIR Plan is not a separate compartment. Its finances are connected to your premium whether you are a customer or not.
The 29.1% rate increase
The FAIR Plan requested a 35.8% average residential rate increase. The Department of Insurance approved 29.1%, effective October 15, 2026 — the largest in its history, affecting more than 675,000 customers.
And the average understates the pain: high-wildfire-risk areas are seeing far more than the average, with some wildfire premium components roughly doubling.
The honest assessment
The FAIR Plan works, in the sense that it means a California property is insurable. It is also the most expensive, narrowest coverage in the state, it is growing because the private market is failing, and it is now raising rates by nearly a third.
If you are in it or heading toward it:
- Treat it as temporary. Harden the house (section 5), document everything, and re-shop the admitted market annually — especially given the Sustainable Insurance Strategy's 85% commitment, which is supposed to be pulling carriers back into exactly the ZIP codes that pushed people to the FAIR Plan.
- Do not skip the DIC policy. A dwelling with no liability coverage is a serious personal financial exposure entirely separate from wildfire.
- Watch the $3 million cap if you have a high-value home. Above it, you are in the surplus-lines market, which is where the standalone wildfire deductibles discussed in section 2 live.
7. How to actually lower your premium in California
In California, most of this list is really about staying insurable. The premium savings are secondary, and worth being honest about.
1. Harden the home, and document it. The full list is in section 5: Class A roof, ember-resistant vents, enclosed eaves, noncombustible materials in the first five feet, tempered glazing. Insurers are required to recognize wildfire mitigation in their pricing, so these do produce discounts — but the larger payoff is eligibility. Photograph every measure, date it, keep receipts, and hand the package to your agent unprompted.
2. Maintain defensible space to the state's zone standards, every year. Vegetation clearance around the structure is the most-checked and most-inspected item in California underwriting, and it is one of the few that a carrier can verify from aerial imagery without ever visiting. A property that looks non-compliant from the air can be non-renewed without a conversation.
3. Get your community into a recognized mitigation program. Community-level wildfire mitigation — Firewise USA recognition and equivalent programs — is credited by carriers in some ratings, and it addresses the fact that in a wildfire your neighbor's fuel load is your risk too. This is slow, collective work, and it is one of the few levers that genuinely changes a whole ZIP code's insurability rather than one house's.
4. Re-shop annually, with an independent broker who writes with multiple carriers. The Sustainable Insurance Strategy's 85% market-share commitment is specifically designed to bring carriers back into wildfire-distressed ZIP codes. If you were non-renewed in 2023 and have not looked since, the answer may have changed — and the only way to find out is to ask. This is the single most likely way a California homeowner gets off the FAIR Plan.
5. Raise your deductible deliberately, not by default. California's flat all-perils deductible is genuinely favorable compared to percentage-deductible states, and moving from $1,000 to $2,500 or $5,000 will reduce your premium. The market is already pushing this direction — the average has climbed from $1,813 to $2,553 in five years. Just make the choice knowingly, and hold the amount in reserve.
6. Bundle home and auto. Multi-policy discounts typically run in the 5-25% range and are among the most reliable available. In California they also carry a second benefit: a bundled customer is sometimes a customer a carrier is more reluctant to non-renew.
7. Do not file small claims. Claims history is a primary underwriting variable, and in California a claim can affect not just your price but whether you are renewed at all. In a market where availability is the scarce resource, a small claim can cost you your policy. Between a $1,000-plus deductible and that risk, most small California losses are better absorbed.
8. Ask about every discount by name. Monitored security and fire alarms, water leak detection devices, newer-home and new-construction credits, gated community, claims-free, paid-in-full, automatic payment, and loyalty discounts all exist and are frequently unapplied unless requested.
9. Verify your Coverage A limit is right — in both directions. Given how far California market values sit above rebuild costs, a limit anchored to your purchase price is money spent on coverage you can never collect. A limit anchored to your loan balance may be dangerously short. Section 4 has the arithmetic.
10. Understand what you are being offered before you take the cheapest quote. In a market this stressed, an unusually cheap quote may be a surplus-lines (non-admitted) policy. Non-admitted carriers are not backed by the California Insurance Guarantee Association, the state fund that pays claims when an admitted insurer becomes insolvent — and, as section 2 covered, the standalone wildfire deductibles now appearing in the market are concentrated in exactly that segment. Ask whether a quote is admitted or non-admitted, and read the deductible section before you sign.
What to do next
If you want these California figures applied to your actual house rather than a statewide average, our California home insurance premium calculator estimates a realistic annual premium from your dwelling limit, deductible, and home characteristics, and shows what is driving the number.
The more urgent tool for most Californians is the replacement cost calculator. It uses California's $320 per square foot construction cost to estimate what it would actually take to rebuild your home — which in a state where the median home price is $904,640 and rebuild costs are a fraction of that, is the number almost everyone gets wrong. It is also the number the 80% coinsurance rule tests you against, and the one that decides whether a total loss leaves you whole or short.
And if you are weighing a higher deductible against a lower premium, the deductible calculator works the trade in real dollars. California's flat all-perils deductible is one of the genuinely homeowner-friendly features of this market — worth understanding before you trade it away for a discount.
All of these show every number they use and where it came from — see our methodology page for the full sourcing behind every figure in this guide.
This guide is general information about homeowners insurance in California, based on publicly available figures current as of August 2026. It is not an insurance quote, a policy, a coverage recommendation, or legal advice, and it does not reflect your specific property, carrier, policy language, wildfire risk score, or claims history. Coverage terms, availability, and rate filings in California are changing rapidly. For coverage specific to your home, speak with a licensed California insurance agent or broker; for a claim dispute, speak with an attorney licensed in California.