Your home insurance was non-renewed. Here is exactly what to do.

First, what that letter actually is

A non-renewal means your insurance company decided not to offer a new policy term when your current one ends. It is not a cancellation. Your coverage continues, unchanged, until the expiration date in the notice.

You did not do anything wrong. In the last few years, carriers have non-renewed hundreds of thousands of California homes to reduce their wildfire exposure, including homes with no claims and long, clean histories.

The 75-day rule that protects you

California Insurance Code section 678 requires your insurer to deliver or mail a non-renewal notice at least 75 days before your policy expires. Check the dates: if the notice arrived later than that, your existing policy stays in effect, on the same terms, for 75 days from the day the notice was mailed. Insurers get this wrong. Look at the postmark, not just the letter's date.

75 days is enough time to do this right. It is not enough time to put it off for two months. The homeowners who end up rushed into the most expensive option are the ones who started with three weeks left.

The three paths from here

Path one: the standard market. Some non-renewed homes still qualify with another standard carrier. It depends on what drove the non-renewal: a carrier pulling back from your ZIP code is not the same as a carrier reacting to your roof's age. This is why the search has to start with standard carriers. We handle all of that for you.

Path two: the specialty surplus lines market. California has a large, regulated specialty market built for exactly the homes standard carriers are leaving. More than 300,000 California homes are now insured this way, up from about 50,000 in 2023. These are real policies from rated insurance markets, arranged through licensed surplus lines professionals. Most homeowners have never heard of this market because most websites cannot search it.

Path three: the state's last-resort fire insurance program, the one California runs for homes with no other market. It is real coverage, and for some homes it is genuinely the only option. But it covers less than most people assume, usually needs a second wrap policy to get you back to normal protection, and its average dwelling rate rises 29.1% on October 15, 2026. Treat it as the floor, not the default.

The week-by-week plan

This week: read the notice for the expiration date, the mailed date, and the stated reason. Confirm the 75-day math. Gather what any insurer will ask: roof age and material, year built, square footage, updates to plumbing, electrical, and heating, and your claims history.

Next week: search the market, all of it, at once. If quotes come back, compare the annual premium, the dwelling coverage amount, and the deductible, not just the bottom line.

Before your current policy ends: bind the replacement with no gap. A lapse, even a short one, makes you harder to insure, and if you have a mortgage it can trigger your lender to buy force-placed coverage on your behalf, which costs far more and protects the lender's interest, not yours.

If nothing binds in time: a licensed agent should be walking you through the remaining options, including the last-resort program done properly, with a companion wrap policy quoted alongside it. You are never actually out of options in California. You are only ever out of options you knew about.

If you have a mortgage

Your loan requires continuous coverage. Tell your servicer you are replacing the policy, and make sure the new policy lists your lender correctly (the mortgagee clause), or their paperwork will bounce and generate alarming letters. If your escrow account pays the premium, the new insurer bills the escrow: your part is picking the policy, not writing the check.

Common mistakes, so you can skip them

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  Waiting. Every week of delay narrows which markets can help before your expiration.

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  Calling one agent and stopping. An agent can only quote the markets they have access to. If they do not have specialty market access, their answer means nothing was found where they looked.

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  Taking the last-resort program without a companion wrap quote. The gap between what it covers and what your old policy covered is the part you will miss at the worst possible time.

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  Letting coverage lapse for a week or two. See force-placed coverage, above.

Common questions