Kentucky's new FORTIFIED roof rider must be offered on houses — not on your condo master policy
Kentucky's new FORTIFIED roof rider must be offered on houses — not on your condo master policy
2026-09-10 · Kentucky · Regulation
What happened. Kentucky put wind and hail resilience into its insurance code. House Bill 527, signed by the Governor on 7 April 2026 as 2026 Ky. Acts ch. 45, does two separate things: it requires insurers to offer a roof-upgrade rider on certain homes, and it creates a state grant programme to pay for resilience work.1
The two halves do not cover the same buildings, and for a Kentucky condominium association the difference decides everything.
The rider: single-family dwellings only
Section 22 amends KRS 304.13-346. The duty it creates is narrow and the words are the reason:
“All insurance companies writing property insurance for personal risks that provides coverage of any single-family dwelling located in Kentucky that is a non-FORTIFIED dwelling shall offer an optional rider, endorsement, or supplemental policy provision that provides the insured a right to receive claim payments for the cost to upgrade the single-family dwelling for any claim that: (a) Is covered under the insurance policy or contract; and (b) Requires replacement of the covered dwelling's roof as defined by the insurance policy or contract.”
A “non-FORTIFIED dwelling” is one whose roof structure does not comply with the most recent FORTIFIED Home roof structure standards published by the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety. The “cost to upgrade” is the cost of bringing that roof up to those standards.
Two limits sit on the face of the text. The insurer must offer the rider — nothing requires the insured to buy it, and nothing sets its price. And it attaches to personal-risk property insurance on a single-family dwelling. A condominium master policy is neither.
The grant programme: multifamily is in
Section 5 of the Act rewrites KRS 304.2-450 to create the Strengthen Kentucky Homes Program, and its scope is wider:
“The Strengthen Kentucky Homes Program is hereby created for the purpose of providing financial grants to real property owners, SKH approved contractors, and nonprofit organizations to assist and promote the mitigation of insurable dwellings to resist losses due to catastrophic wind and hail events in accordance with FORTIFIED construction standards published by the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety or a successor entity.”
The defined term is what matters. An “insurable dwelling” means a dwelling on or affixed to residential real estate, and it expressly “includes a single-family or multifamily dwelling, including a modular home.” The regulations the Commissioner must write are to require compliance with “the most recent version of any applicable FORTIFIED Home or FORTIFIED Multifamily construction standards.”
The Act carries an emergency clause for Section 5, so the grant programme provision took effect on the Governor's approval on 7 April 2026.
What this means for a condominium association, precisely
Kentucky condominium associations have spent the last several renewal cycles absorbing wind and hail terms on master policies. It is tempting to read a headline about a state roof-upgrade law and assume relief has arrived. It has not arrived through the rider.
- Your master policy carrier owes you no offer. KRS 304.13-346 as amended binds insurers writing personal risks on single-family dwellings. A condominium association's master policy covering a building of stacked units is not that. Asking your broker to produce “the HB 527 rider” on a master policy is asking for something the statute does not require anyone to offer.
- Your unit owners' HO-6 policies are a different question, and mostly still outside it. The statute reaches personal-risk coverage of a single-family dwelling. A unit owner's policy covering interior finishes and personal property in a stacked condominium is not covering a single-family dwelling. Owners of detached or townhouse-style units insured on a dwelling form are the population where the question is genuinely worth putting to the carrier.
- The grant programme is where a condominium's route runs. “Insurable dwelling” includes multifamily, and the Commissioner is directed to build the standards around FORTIFIED Multifamily where applicable. That is the door open to an association.
The number to plan around, and the number not to
One figure in the Act is a hard cap and is easy to misread. Subsection (4)(d) provides that the Commissioner “shall not make financial grants under subsection (7) of this section that exceed, in aggregate, fifteen thousand dollars ($15,000).”
That cap attaches to grants made under subsection (7) — the provision operating before the Commissioner's regulations exist — not to the programme's whole future capacity. It is not a per-project entitlement for every applicant, and it is not the programme's permanent ceiling. An association budgeting a roof project should treat state grant money as unquantified until the regulations land, not as a line item.
The funding structure reinforces the point. The fund consists of legislative appropriations plus whatever the Commissioner obtains from federal or other sources, with a duty to use “best efforts” to seek them. Money not spent at year end carries forward rather than lapsing, and interest stays in the fund — a design for a programme meant to build up, not one already capitalised.
The condition boards will trip over
Any grant to mitigate an insurable dwelling is “contingent upon the real property owner securing all required permits and applicable inspections in accordance with local building” requirements. For an association that means the ordinary permitting path, on the association's own timeline, before the money is confirmed — and for a condominium it also means resolving who the “real property owner” is for a roof that is a common element over separately owned units. The statute does not answer that; the declaration does.
Contractors are also gated. Work must be done by an “SKH approved contractor” determined eligible by the Commissioner through an online portal and administrative regulation, with a stated preference for Kentucky contractors and evaluators. An association that has already bid a roof to a contractor outside that list may find the bid and the grant incompatible.
What to watch next
Everything operational here is deferred to administrative regulations the Commissioner must promulgate under KRS Chapter 13A. Until they are filed, there is no application form, no eligibility test, and no approved-contractor list. The Kentucky Administrative Register is the place that will show them first, and a filing this autumn is the realistic earliest.
Two specific questions the regulations should answer, and which an association cannot answer for itself in the meantime: whether a condominium association is an eligible “real property owner” for a common-element roof, and which FORTIFIED Multifamily designation the Department will require. Boards weighing a roof replacement this winter should ask their broker and counsel to flag both rather than assume either way.
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