AB 2061 adds Section 10095.9 to the Insurance Code and requires the California Department of Insurance to update its public website so that key insurance market information is more accessible. The department must regularly post a set of specified datasets about the home insurance market, admitted and nonadmitted carriers, profitability metrics, and the department’s own processing and intervention activity, and provide guidance for brokers locating surplus line insurers.
The requirement includes searchable, user-friendly display and a downloadable spreadsheet format. For insurers, surplus line brokers, regulators, researchers and brokers, the bill centralizes data that today is dispersed, often technically inaccessible, or not published at the level of granularity AB 2061 mandates.
At a Glance
What It Does
The bill directs the Department of Insurance to redesign its website and regularly publish specified datasets in a searchable, user-friendly format with a downloadable spreadsheet. Required datasets cover seven areas: home insurance market metrics, admitted market statistics, California FAIR Plan activity, nonadmitted/surplus line counts, insurer profitability, department filing and intervention metrics, and broker contact instructions.
Who It Affects
Primary targets are homeowners insurers (admitted and nonadmitted), surplus line brokers and approved surplus line insurers, the California FAIR Plan Association, insurance agents and brokers, the Department of Insurance itself, and analysts who monitor market trends. Consumers and legislators who rely on public data will also be affected indirectly.
Why It Matters
The bill converts fragmented or opaque regulatory and market information into standardized, downloadable datasets, enabling quicker market oversight, competitive analysis, and easier broker matching to surplus line carriers. That transparency can change how market entrants, underwriters, and intermediaries evaluate risk and availability at the county level.
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What This Bill Actually Does
AB 2061 creates a statutory requirement that the California Department of Insurance (DOI) upgrade its public-facing website so core home-insurance market data and DOI performance metrics are easily found, searched, and downloaded. Rather than a vague transparency directive, the statute lists seven specific categories of information the department must publish and requires the data be available in a machine-friendly spreadsheet format in addition to on-screen displays.
The bill spells out what data elements the DOI must include: counts of homeowners policies by insurer type, written premium and exposure totals, average premiums by year and county, new and renewed policies broken out by insurer type and county; admitted-market company counts, market share and nonrenewal/cancellation tallies (with initiator and county); FAIR Plan cancellation/nonrenewal counts and the number of difference-in-condition policies; counts of state-licensed surplus line brokers and approved surplus line insurers by home jurisdiction; insurer-level profitability fields such as written and earned premium, loss incurred and loss ratio; and DOI operational metrics such as filings received by insurer and amount requested, processing times measured in days, and number and length of interventions.In addition to those data points, the statute requires the DOI to provide clear, actionable instructions for producers (agents and brokers) on how to look up and contact the licensed surplus line brokers listed on the department’s List of Approved Surplus Line Insurers. The combination of carrier-level profitability figures and granular county-by-year premium and exposure data is designed to let stakeholders — from brokerages to policy analysts — trace underwriting capacity shifts, identify pockets of high cancellation or nonrenewal activity, and evaluate regulatory responsiveness using processing-time metrics.The bill leaves the mechanics of 'regularly posting' and the technical standards to DOI implementation, but by prescribing a downloadable spreadsheet and searchable format it effectively requires structured data exports and a public indexing approach.
The statute does not specify frequency, schemas, or whether any data will be aggregated to protect commercially sensitive information; those choices will determine how usable the published datasets are for rigorous analysis.
The Five Things You Need to Know
AB 2061 adds Insurance Code Section 10095.9, mandating DOI to publish seven categories of insurance data online in a searchable, downloadable spreadsheet.
Required home-insurance fields include counts of homeowner policies by insurer type, total written premium and exposure, average premium by year and county, and new vs. renewed policies by year, insurer type, and county.
The bill requires admitted-market statistics (company counts, market share) and nonrenewal/cancellation counts broken out by year, county, and initiator, and the same cancellation breakdown for the California FAIR Plan.
DOI must publish insurer-level profitability metrics—written and earned premium, loss incurred, market share, and loss ratio—by year and insurer.
The department must post operational performance data: filings by year and insurer with amount requested, each filing’s processing time in days, and the number and length of the department’s interventions, plus broker lookup instructions for surplus lines.
Section-by-Section Breakdown
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Website redesign and accessibility mandate
Subsection (a) requires the Department of Insurance to update its internet website to be more user-friendly and accessible and to present core market and performance information in searchable form. Practically, this compels the DOI to adopt modern UX standards for navigation and search, and to support exporting data — not merely posting PDF reports. The provision creates a baseline obligation but leaves technical implementation (UX design, search engine, accessibility standards) to DOI discretion.
Home insurance market metrics
Paragraph (1) lists the home-insurance metrics DOI must post: number of homeowners policies by insurer type, total written premium, total written exposure, average written premium by year and county, and the number of new and renewed policies by year, insurer type, and county. Those line items require DOI to combine policy counts with geographic and temporal breakdowns, which in turn will force DOI to consolidate filings or carrier reports at the county level — a change from higher-level aggregates commonly published today.
Admitted market and California FAIR Plan reporting
Paragraph (2) compels DOI to publish admitted-market data including company counts, market share, and nonrenewal/cancellation counts by initiator and county. Paragraph (3) imposes similar reporting for the California FAIR Plan, including nonrenewal/cancellation details and counts of difference-in-condition policies. Together, these items are intended to surface where coverage is failing in the admitted market and the extent to which the FAIR Plan is being used as backstop capacity.
Nonadmitted (surplus line) and profitability data
Paragraph (4) requires counts of state-licensed surplus line brokers by year and counts of approved surplus line insurers by home jurisdiction. Paragraph (5) requires insurer-level profitability datapoints — written premium, earned premium, loss incurred, market share, and loss ratio. Publishing these fields side-by-side allows users to correlate surplus line capacity and insurer profitability with county-level premium and exposure trends.
DOI performance metrics and broker lookup instructions
Paragraph (6) asks DOI to publish administrative performance metrics: filings received by year and insurer, amounts requested, filing status with processing time measured in days, and number and length of interventions. Paragraph (7) directs DOI to publish clear instructions for brokers and agents to look up and contact the licensed surplus line brokers shown on the List of Approved Surplus Line Insurers. These operational disclosures aim to make regulatory responsiveness and surplus line matchmaking visible to market participants.
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Every bill creates winners and losers. Here's who stands to gain and who bears the cost.
Who Benefits
- Insurance brokers and agents — they gain searchable, county-level data and explicit instructions to locate and contact surplus line brokers, which eases placement in hard-to-serve areas.
- Researchers, consumer advocates and market analysts — standardized, downloadable datasets enable independent analysis of premium trends, cancellations, and insurer profitability at a granularity not routinely available.
- State policymakers and legislative staff — accessible DOI performance metrics and filing-processing times provide empirical inputs for oversight and potential policy changes.
- Some insurers with strong metrics — carriers that can demonstrate low loss ratios and growing market share may benefit from positive visibility in public data.
Who Bears the Cost
- California Department of Insurance — DOI must build, maintain, and curate the new website features and datasets, and handle data validation and ongoing publication (staffing and IT costs).
- Insurers and surplus line brokers — carriers and brokers may face expanded reporting or data-extraction burdens to supply the granular county- and insurer-level figures the statute expects.
- Smaller insurers and MGAs — preparing, validating, and possibly aggregating data to comply or respond to public disclosures could impose disproportionate compliance costs on smaller market participants.
- Surplus line brokers and approved nonadmitted insurers — public exposure of their counts and home jurisdictions may increase marketing inquiries and administrative load, and could expose competitive information.
Key Issues
The Core Tension
The central tension is between public-market transparency — which helps consumers, brokers, researchers, and policymakers spot coverage gaps and regulator performance problems — and the commercial and administrative realities of protecting proprietary insurer data and funding a credible, machine-readable publication program; achieving both full transparency and protection of competitive information will require tight implementation choices that the bill itself does not make.
AB 2061 prescribes a substantial set of data points but leaves key implementation questions open. The statute requires 'regularly posting' and a downloadable spreadsheet but does not define cadence (weekly, monthly, quarterly), file format standards (CSV, XLSX), or field-level definitions and validation rules.
Those omissions matter: usability for analysts depends on consistent identifiers, schema documentation, and agreed definitions for terms like 'written exposure' and 'initiator' of cancellation.
The bill also raises confidentiality and proprietary-competition concerns. Publishing insurer-level profitability and granular county premium-exposure splits can reveal commercially sensitive information.
California law and insurer filings sometimes treat parts of rate and underwriting materials as confidential; the statute does not create an exception mechanism or a process for redaction, nor does it reconcile this transparency directive with existing trade-secret protections. Finally, the bill imposes new operational demands on DOI without specifying funding or staffing increases, creating a risk that data will be published in incomplete or minimally usable forms unless allocated resources follow the mandate.
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