California's FAIR Plan now covers 684,388 dwellings and commercial properties, up 152% since September 2022, with $750 billion in total exposure. Plenty of people with a policy in hand. What's in the policy is another matter.

The FAIR Plan is a named-peril policy. It covers fire, lightning, smoke, internal explosion. A standard homeowners policy works the opposite way: everything's covered unless it's specifically excluded. The FAIR Plan covers nothing unless it's specifically listed. Liability, water damage, theft, temporary housing if your place burns down, all absent unless you bought the endorsement. And it defaults to actual cash value, meaning depreciation is subtracted before you're paid. Your twenty-year-old roof is worth what a twenty-year-old roof is worth.

Most policyholders need a second Difference in Conditions policy to approximate real coverage. Combined cost runs roughly double a standard policy. For less protection.

A 29.1% average rate increase takes effect October 2026. And after the January 2025 LA fires generated roughly $4 billion in FAIR Plan losses, member insurers were assessed $1 billion, up to half of which can be passed to their own policyholders. You don't need a FAIR Plan policy to pay for FAIR Plan losses.

Florida's residual market, Citizens, shrank from 1.26 million policies to about 278,000 in under two years. Hurricanes didn't stop. The legislature reformed litigation rules and created mandatory transfer to private carriers. California has no equivalent mechanism, and nobody's building one. The word "covered" is doing a lot of work.