Chubb pulled back from California homes. Your options did not go with it.

Chubb began reducing its California high-value homeowners business, sometimes called high-net-worth insurance, in 2022. That extended a reduction its chief executive, Evan Greenberg, had already flagged on an earnings call in 2021.

The company stopped writing new high-value homes with elevated wildfire risk, and began declining to renew existing wildfire-exposed policies. Its stated reason has stayed consistent. Greenberg has said the company will not write business where it cannot earn a fair return for the risk, pointing to California's rate regulation.

The January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires tested that position. On its January 29, 2025 earnings call, Chubb said it had cut its risk in the affected area.

The cut was more than 50%, Greenberg said on that January 2025 call. In results released January 28, 2025, Chubb had estimated its losses from the fires at about $1.5 billion before tax.

Its first-quarter 2025 results confirmed the size of the event: $1.47 billion in California wildfire losses. That was out of $1.64 billion in total catastrophe losses for January through March 2025.

The record since then is a partial reopening, on the company's terms. Trade press reported in 2025 that Chubb had reopened to new California high-value homeowners business, with stricter wildfire rules about which homes it will take.

Trade press also reported in 2025 that Chubb would move hundreds of existing policies to its specialty insurance business, which writes on non-admitted paper. The move was set to start in mid-October 2025. By the first quarter of 2026, Chubb's catastrophe losses had fallen to $500 million. Its first-quarter 2026 net income was up 74% from a year earlier.

An existing policy is serviced as usual until its term ends: billing, claims, and coverage all continue on the policy's terms. A pullback changes what happens at renewal, not what happens in the middle of a term. So the document that matters is the one that arrives ahead of your renewal. It deserves a close read, not the usual filing away.

California Insurance Code section 678 requires a non-renewal notice, delivered or mailed, at least 75 days (90 days beginning January 1, 2028) before your policy expires. It also has to state the reason. For a mailed notice, the law adds five calendar days to the notice period, or 10 if it was mailed from or to another state. If the notice went out late, your policy stays active, on the same terms, for 75 days (90 days beginning January 1, 2028) from its mailing date.

If it is a replacement offer instead, look at whose paper it is written on. Chubb was reported in 2025 to be moving some customers on standard policies to replacement coverage through its specialty insurance business. A specialty (or surplus lines) policy is real coverage, just under different rules.

You sign a short state-required disclosure before it starts.

Taxes and fees appear as their own line items. And the policy is not backed by California's state guaranty fund, which is why the insurer's financial strength rating matters more.

None of that makes the offer wrong. It makes it worth comparing before you accept it, because one offer is not the market.

It does not mean your home is uninsurable, and it does not mean the high-value market is closed. Chubb's reduction is one company managing its own wildfire risk, for reasons its chief executive stated plainly. Other insurers read the same home through different models, and take on different amounts of risk. That is why the same house genuinely gets different answers.

A non-renewal from Chubb is not a mark against you. The company's decisions in this period were about its own overall risk, not individual records. There is no shared list of turndowns that follows you to the next market.

And a move to specialty (surplus lines) paper is not a downgrade to something lesser. This is the regulated part of the industry built for the risks standard insurers step away from. It wrote more than 300,000 California home policies in 2025, up from about 50,000 in 2023, according to the Surplus Line Association of California. High-value and brush-exposed homes have been insured there for decades.

The order of the search does not change just because the home is high-value. Standard insurers come first.

How much risk they take differs, and a home one company stepped away from can still be written by another. If a standard insurer will take the home, filed rates and the state guaranty fund behind them are worth having. We handle all of that for you.

If the standard market says no, specialty insurers come next, and for larger homes that is often where the realistic answers are. These are real policies, arranged through licensed specialty insurance agents. You can ask who the insurer is, and its financial strength rating, any time, before anything is final.

The California FAIR Plan, the state's fallback fire insurance program, comes last. Its combined dwelling coverage currently caps at $3 million, which matters for higher-value homes. It is also a fire policy, not a full homeowners policy. It does not cover water damage from a burst pipe, theft, or someone getting hurt on your property. It exists for homes with no other option, and the way to find out whether yours is one is to search the others first.

Most of what protects you here comes down to order. Know your dates, get comparisons across the market, and judge the whole cost, not just one number.

If a broker manages your coverage, these are the questions to bring them. If not, a market search answers most of them in one pass.

• Find your renewal date. A non-renewal notice must be mailed or delivered at least 75 days (90 days beginning January 1, 2028) before that date.
• If a replacement offer arrives, check whose paper it is on, and whether it is standard or specialty. Both can be right answers. They are different products, and the difference belongs in your comparison.
• Compare whole packages: yearly price, rebuild amount, deductible, and settlement basis together, not the bottom line alone.
• See what other standard and specialty insurers would charge before you accept anything. An offer shaped by one company's own risk limits says nothing about what the next insurer would say.
• If your rebuild coverage runs past $3 million, the FAIR Plan cannot match it. That makes the first two paths the ones that matter for you.