State insurance regulators are undertaking the most comprehensive analysis of the nation’s battered property-insurance market to try to understand how climate change is affecting the price and availability of coverage.
Insurance companies are being ordered to turn over internal records showing claims and losses caused by wildfires, storms and other perils in each ZIP code where they sell policies.
The data collection is being overseen by a national organization of state insurance commissioners that has been reluctant to gather such precise information but now wants to understand the severity of the growing property insurance crisis.
“We literally don’t have a full and comprehensive system for monitoring insurance market data,” said Jordan Haedtler, climate-finance policy lead with the advocacy group Climate Cabinet. He said the implications of the data collection could be “profound.”
“There’s so much salience on this issue,” Haedtler added, “that [insurance] departments of various ideological leanings are at least finding data collection to be in their interests.”
The data collection comes as state insurance regulators face growing complaints about the rising cost and scarcity of property insurance, which is driven in part by climate change intensifying destructive events such as storms and wildfires. The collection also aims to plug data gaps resulting from the decentralized insurance system, which states regulate with little federal oversight.
Florida Insurance Commissioner Michael Yaworsky, who is leading the data collection for the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, said in a statement that the information will give regulators “more information, tools, and resources to not only speed resilience but also increase preparation before severe weather hits.”
Insurance departments vary widely in their ability to collect detailed market data, said former California insurance Commissioner Dave Jones, who directs the Climate Risk Initiative at the University of California, Berkeley. Insurance officials in some Republican-leaning states are leery of studying phenomena associated with climate change, he added.
The lack of ZIP-code-level data on how climate change is affecting U.S. insurance markets is “a big and ongoing problem,” Jones said. The new data will sharpen regulators’ understanding of insurance in their own states and empower the national insurance organization to detect national patterns.
The data collection by the NAIC builds on a smaller effort that the group undertook in 2024 with the Biden administration’s Treasury Department.
The new effort covers more states than the 2024 effort and includes more types of homeowners’ insurance — such as policies covering rentals, mobile homes and condominium units, which represent a significant share of the U.S. housing stock. It also covers smaller insurance companies than did the 2024 effort.
The new data call will capture “roughly 98 percent of the market in most states,” compared to 80 percent from the 2024 effort, NAIC President Scott White said in a March speech.
Will insurer data be public?
Yaworsky said at a March association meeting that having a “national, standardized” data trove “will be very helpful for regulators to compare where their markets are.” Regulators say they may collect this information annually.
Michael DeLong, a research and advocacy associate for the Consumer Federation of America, said his group and other consumer advocates pressured NAIC to expand its data collection to manufactured and mobile homes, rentals and condos, which insurance studies often overlook. He said the collection is “greatly expanded” from the 2024 effort.
Data can help officials discover fragile points in the insurance markets, Brad Gerling, chief data analytics officer with the Missouri Department of Insurance, said at the NAIC meeting in March.
After a tornado barreled through St. Louis in 2025, Missouri regulators found it hit ZIP codes where up to 70 percent of property owners lacked insurance. The insight came despite “quite limited” state data, said Gerling, whose department supports NAIC’s effort.
“We’ll be able to ask questions and find new relationships in the data that we’ve never been able to explore,” Gerling said.
But the collection sets up a future battle over the release of the data. Consumer and climate groups want maximum transparency — without violating insurer confidentiality — saying more eyes on the raw data will produce more insights to address the insurance crisis.
The NAIC will make the complete information available to state insurance offices. It has committed to releasing a public report in 2027 but made no other guarantees.
A March letter to NAIC signed by Public Citizen and 47 consumer, climate and housing groups urged regulators to “swiftly” publish the source data acquired in the call. The letter said the move would help the public “evaluate the full scale of the crisis” and ensure that “all relevant actors” including policymakers, researchers, investors and consumers can understand the risk in their area and act to mitigate it.
“Most of this material should be made public,” said Steven Rothstein, chief program officer with sustainability nonprofit Ceres.
Florida’s Yaworsky acknowledged NAIC has a “difficult balancing act” in deciding which data to release. Insurers have warned that even anonymous data, broken down by ZIP code, could reveal sensitive information about their business strategies.
Regulators want to produce a report that protects information they consider proprietary for the industry but still gives “clear and accurate data to the public about what is taking place within the various markets around the country,” Yaworsky said at the March NAIC meeting.
States are not required to turn over data. According to a list of the participating jurisdictions, Alabama and Tennessee have opted out.
In the 2024 data collection, eight states provided either partial data or none at all: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, Montana, North Dakota and Texas, according to Revolving Door Project, a watchdog group.
In March, participating insurance departments sent letters to insurers directing them to share 12 categories of data concerning their home insurance businesses for the years 2018 through 2025.
