What it changes for boards and managers

There is now a named benchmark for documenting insurer delay. An association manager handling a large loss has always been able to point to the claims regulations. What is new is a live enforcement action in which the regulator has quantified what non-compliance looks like — 398 violations in 220 claims — and the Department's complaint channel is the route that produced the examination.

For a board whose master policy claim has stalled, that changes the calculus of complaining. A complaint is not merely a grievance; it is the mechanism that generated this exam.

Document the clocks from the first notice. The obligations run from dates: when notice of the claim was given, when the investigation began, when acceptance or denial came. An association that cannot evidence those dates cannot establish a breach of them. That means dated written notice, dated correspondence, and a record of each adjuster change.

“Adjuster roulette” is a documented pattern, not just a frustration. Repeated reassignment resets the institutional knowledge of a claim and is one of the practices the Department has charged. A simple log of who held the file and when it changed hands documents the pattern.

Smoke damage is the association-shaped loss. Nearly half the complaints in this exam concerned smoke. In a condominium, smoke intrusion into shared corridors, attics, elevator shafts and HVAC systems is the characteristic wildfire loss even where no unit burned — and it is the loss most likely to be denied or reclassified.

The smoke standards bill, and where it stands

AB 1795, the Smoke Damage Recovery Act, is on the Governor's desk. It was enrolled on September 4, 2026 after the Senate passed it 28–10 and the Assembly concurred 58–7 on August 31.²

The Department's announcement of the measure identifies a concrete duty: insurers must inspect a smoke-damaged property within 30 days of receiving notice of a claim or gaining access. It also assigns work to agencies — the Department and Cal OES to evaluate coverage gaps and recovery needs, and Cal/OSHA, through the Occupational Safety and Health Standards Board, to establish training and certification requirements for adjusters handling wildfire smoke damage claims. No completion dates are given for either.

It is not law. The Governor must act by September 30, 2026. If signed, a 30-day inspection clock would apply to master policy losses on condominium and multifamily buildings, and the certification requirement would change who is qualified to adjust them.

The Department's existing Bulletin 2025-7 already addresses smoke damage coverage and claims handling.

The other protection associations gained this year

Claims handling is one half of the picture. The other is whether the policy exists at renewal.

Insurance Code section 675.55, added by SB 547 effective January 1, 2026, extends the one-year post-wildfire non-renewal moratorium to commercial policies — and subdivision (d) names “Homeowners associations” and “Condominium associations” expressly, overriding the general carve-out for large commercial policies.

It has already run twice in 2026: Bulletin 2026-1 after the Gifford Fire, and Bulletin 2026-6, dated August 14, 2026, locking 22 ZIP codes for a year from the Gann Fire proclamation. The bulletin also requires insurers to offer to rescind wildfire-risk non-renewal notices issued on or after the proclamation date.

Managers in fire-affected counties should be reading those bulletins as an insurance renewal input, not only as disaster news.

What to watch next

The administrative hearing. An Accusation and Order to Show Cause begins a process before an administrative law judge, and the outcome — whatever it is — will be the first authoritative account of how these standards apply to a mass wildfire claim event in California.

Also on the desk: AB 1680, the FAIR Plan overhaul, enrolled September 4, 2026. The Department's announcement of it made no reference to associations or master policies, which leaves open whether the Plan's High Value Commercial Property program — the $20 million per building backstop many large associations now rely on — is addressed at all.