State insurance regulators are working on the most comprehensive analysis of the nation’s blighted real estate insurance market to understand how climate change is affecting the price and availability of coverage.
Insurers are ordered to submit internal records showing claims and losses caused by wildfires, storms and other perils in each ZIP code in which they sell insurance.
Data collection is overseen by a national organization of state insurance commissioners, which has been reluctant to collect such precise information in the past, but now wants to understand the severity of the growing property and casualty insurance crisis.
“We literally do not have a complete and comprehensive system for monitoring insurance market data,” said Jordan Hudtler, director of climate finance policy at the advocacy group Climate Cabinet. He said the impact of data collection could be “severe.”
“There are so many points of interest on this issue. The (insurance) sector of various ideological leanings believes that at least data collection is in their interest,” Hedtler added.
The data collection comes as state insurance regulators face growing complaints about rising costs and shortages of property and casualty insurance, caused in part by climate change, which intensifies destructive events such as storms and wildfires. The collection is also aimed at filling data gaps created by a decentralized insurance system regulated by states with little federal oversight.
Florida Insurance Commissioner Michael Jaworski, who is leading the data collection for the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, said in a statement that this information will give regulators “more information, tools and resources to not only accelerate resiliency but better prepare before severe weather events hit.”
Dave Jones, former California Insurance Commissioner who directs the Climate Risk Initiative at the University of California, Berkeley, said the ability to collect detailed market data varies widely by insurance sector. Health officials in some Republican-leaning states have been reluctant to study phenomena related to climate change, he added.
Jones said the lack of zip code-level data on how climate change is impacting the U.S. insurance market is “a huge ongoing problem.” The new data will help regulators better understand insurance in each state and help national insurance organizations detect national patterns.
The data collection by NAIC builds on a smaller effort the group conducted in 2024 with the Biden administration’s Treasury Department.
The new initiative covers more states than the 2024 initiative and includes more types of homeowners insurance, including insurance that covers rental, mobile home, and condominium units, which make up a larger share of the U.S. housing stock. Smaller insurance companies will also be eligible for the 2024 initiative.
NAIC President Scott White said in a March speech that the new data survey would capture “about 98% of the market in most states,” compared to 80% for the 2024 effort.
Will insurance company data be made public?
Jaworski said at the association’s March meeting that having a trove of “nationally standardized” data “will be very helpful for regulators to compare where their markets are.” Regulators say they may collect this information annually.
Michael DeLong, director of research and advocacy for the Consumer Federation of America, said his organization and other consumer advocacy groups pressured the NAIC to expand data collection to manufactured homes, mobile homes, rental homes and condominiums, which are often overlooked in insurance surveys. He said the collection will be “significantly expanded” starting with the 2024 effort.
Brad Girling, chief data analyst for the Missouri Department of Insurance, said at the NAIC meeting in March that the data will help officials spot weaknesses in the insurance market.
After tornadoes hit St. Louis in 2025, Missouri regulators found that tornadoes occurred in ZIP codes where up to 70% of property owners were uninsured. Girling, whose department supports the NAIC effort, said this insight came even though state data was “pretty limited.”
“We’ll be able to ask questions and discover new relationships in the data that we couldn’t explore before,” Girling said.
But the collection could become a source of future battles over the release of the data. Consumer groups and climate groups are calling for maximum transparency without compromising insurers’ confidentiality, arguing that more attention to raw data will yield more insights to address the insurance crisis.
NAIC provides complete information to state insurance offices. It has promised to release a public report in 2027, but has made no other guarantees.
A March letter to the NAIC signed by Public Citizen and 47 consumer, climate, and housing organizations called on regulators to “quickly” release source data obtained on the conference call. The letter said the measures would help the public “assess the full scope of the crisis” and enable “all stakeholders,” including policymakers, researchers, investors and consumers, to understand the risks in their area and take action to reduce them.
“Most of this material should be made public,” says Steven Rothstein, chief program officer at the sustainability nonprofit Ceres.
Florida’s Jaworski acknowledged that the NAIC has to strike a “difficult balance” in deciding what data to release. Insurers have warned that even anonymous data categorized by postal code can reveal sensitive information about business strategy.
Jaworski said at the NAIC meeting in March that regulators want to produce reports that provide the public with “clear, accurate data about what’s going on in different markets around the country,” while protecting what it considers industry proprietary information.
States are not required to hand over data. Alabama and Tennessee declined to participate, according to a list of participating jurisdictions.
Eight states provided partial or no data during the 2024 data collection: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, Montana, North Dakota and Texas, according to the Revolving Door Project, a watchdog group.
In March, participating insurance departments sent a letter to insurers instructing them to share data on 12 categories of home insurance business from 2018 to 2025.
