California Orders Insurers to Pay More for Wildfire Victims’ Lost Items

Families who lose everything in future wildfires in California will now be able to collect the bulk of their insurance payout without cataloging every item burned in the blaze under a new state law. The legislation, signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom on Friday, is meant to ease one of the most punishing parts of recovery — when survivors are forced to itemize the ashes of their lives.

Starting in 2026, insurers must pay at least 60 percent of a homeowner’s personal-property coverage — up to $350,000 — without requiring a detailed inventory of every lost item. Previously, insurers were required to advance only 30 percent of the dwelling’s value with the payout capped at $250,000. The new legislation applies when a house is declared a total loss.

The law stops short of what its author and consumer advocates had sought. The original proposal — nicknamed the Eliminate the List Act — would have required insurers to pay 100 percent of the contents limit automatically without an itemized list of destroyed belongings. After receiving heavy pushback from the insurance industry, lawmakers cut the guarantee nearly in half.

“I was disappointed that it got knocked down, but it’s still a very significant step in the right direction — very significant,” said State Senator Ben Allen, a Democrat whose district includes Los Angeles’s Pacific Palisades neighborhood, and who wrote the bill.

Under most homeowner policies, families must submit exhaustive inventories — sometimes thousands of items long — before insurers will reimburse the cost of lost belongings. Adjusters frequently demand receipts or photos to prove ownership.

Survivors of past wildfires, as well as those struggling to build their list after the January blazes that tore through Altadena and the Pacific Palisades, have described the process as its own form of trauma. One Colorado couple whose home was erased by the Marshall fire in 2021 shared a spreadsheet that stretched over 50 pages — cataloging every item down to the $3 ribbon on a gift wrapping station.

In Altadena, in the weeks after fire swallowed her home, Ashley Bryn Carter, 43, described how a circle of friends had taken over making the list for her because the process of trying to remember every destroyed item was too difficult. Her story, Mr. Allen said, helped inspire the legislation.

Industry representatives warned that guaranteeing 100 percent of contents coverage would drive premiums higher. Lawmakers sympathetic to that argument pared the bill back to 60 percent during committee negotiations — a compromise Mr. Allen called “frustrating but necessary.”

Consumer advocates argue that the insurance industry is selling a false promise: Homeowners pay for contents coverage up to a clearly defined amount — an amount written into the policy itself. But then they must prove their belongings were worth what the contract already guaranteed at the outset.

“We’ve brought survivor witnesses to the State Capitol with blown up images of pages from their inventories to illustrate for lawmakers how cruel it is to make people labor over remembering and detailing what was in their medicine cabinets and kitchen drawers and revisit the pain of their losses over and over,” wrote Amy Bach, executive director of United Policyholders, a San Francisco-based group that has fought for decades to remove the itemization requirement.

The law takes effect in January and is not retroactive, meaning it may not help families who lost their homes in this year’s fires. Mr. Allen said he has had conversations with carriers and hopes they will choose “to comply with the law voluntarily” and extend the higher payouts to victims of the recent catastrophe.

Ms. Carter is among the people who received an offer of a 60 percent payout from her insurer, but because the cost of rebuilding is so steep, she needs the remaining 40 percent.

Ms. Carter, a lifelong thrifter and a costume designer for TV shows and films, had amassed a collection of vintage clothes — items that are difficult to appraise, even as they’re imbued with meaning for her. By summer, she had finished itemizing the living room, the kitchen and two of the three bedrooms of the home that she had lost. But she’d left the hardest, her walk-in closet, for last. Her treasures included a collection of vintage Levi jeans and an array of secondhand Gucci and Chanel purses.

She tried to work on the list every week but had to take a break in June after it nearly put her over the edge: “I just kind of had a breakdown,” she said.