North Dakota now bars a reopened property claim after one year
North Dakota now bars a reopened property claim after one year
2026-09-15 · North Dakota · Regulation
A North Dakota association that closes out a hail claim, discovers more damage the following spring and goes back to the carrier may now be too late by statute rather than by policy language. Senate Bill 2374 created N.D.C.C. § 26.1-39-30, effective August 1, 2025, and it puts two hard deadlines on property claims that did not previously exist in North Dakota law.1
The two clocks
The statute defines both terms before it bars them:
“'Reopened claim' means a claim an insurer closed and reopened upon an insured's request for additional reimbursement of damage arising out of the original occurrence, and not previously identified or disclosed to the insurer. 'Supplemental claim' means a claim for additional loss or costs from the same occurrence the insurer previously compensated the insured.”
Then it bars them:
“A reopened claim under an insurance policy that provides property insurance, including a policy issued by an eligible surplus lines insurer, for loss or damage is barred unless notice of the claim was given to the insurer within one year after the date of loss. A supplemental claim is barred unless notice of the supplemental claim was given to the insurer of the policy within twelve months after the date of the last payment issued by the insurer for that element of the loss.”
The two clocks run from different events. A reopened claim runs from the date of loss — the storm. A supplemental claim runs from the insurer's last payment for that element of the loss, which can be much later. Getting the category wrong gets the deadline wrong.
Why this lands on associations specifically
North Dakota is a severe convective storm state, and the claims most likely to be reopened are exactly the ones associations file: roofs, siding and windows across multiple buildings, where the full extent of hail bruising is often not established at the first adjuster visit. The statute expressly reaches surplus lines policies, which is where a good deal of North Dakota association property coverage sits.
What breaks under a one-year rule
The second-season discovery. Hail damage that does not leak until the following thaw is the classic reopened claim, and a June storm plus a following-spring discovery is comfortably past twelve months from the date of loss. Under § 26.1-39-30 that claim is barred, whatever the policy's own proof-of-loss provisions say.
The multi-building association. Where an adjuster inspects a sample of roofs and the association later finds the untouched buildings took the same hail, the additional buildings are damage “not previously identified or disclosed to the insurer” arising out of the original occurrence — a reopened claim, on the one-year clock from the storm date.
The contractor who finds more during the tear-off. Whether that is a reopened claim or a supplemental one turns on whether the insurer already compensated the association for that element of the loss. If it did, the twelve-month supplemental clock from the last payment applies and the association likely has room. If it did not, the one-year clock from the storm applies and the association may not.
What this changes in a board's practice
Date-stamp every loss the day it happens. The controlling date for the harsher of the two bars is the date of loss, not the date of discovery, not the date of the claim. An association that cannot say which storm caused which damage cannot tell whether it is inside the bar.
Inspect the whole community, not a sample, inside the first year. This is the single most consequential operational change the statute forces. A full roof-by-roof inspection is expensive; it is cheaper than a barred claim on eight buildings.
Give notice early and in writing, even when the number is unknown. The statute bars a claim unless notice was given inside the window. It does not require the claim to be quantified, documented or agreed within it. Notice is the cheap act that preserves the right.
Track the date of the insurer's last payment per element. The supplemental clock runs “for that element of the loss,” so a single loss can carry several different supplemental deadlines — roof, siding, interior water. One spreadsheet line per element, with the payment date on it.
Tell your manager and your public adjuster the rule changed. Anyone working from pre-2025 North Dakota practice is working from a state with no statutory reopening deadline at all.
The wider package this came in
Section 26.1-39-30 is one piece of SB 2374, which also rewrote how a policyholder can fight a denial. The same Act created a precondition on bad-faith actions and a framework for arbitration endorsements and managed repair programs — together they change both when an association can come back to its carrier and what it can do when the carrier says no. Our North Dakota insurance requirements page covers what the master policy has to carry in the first place.
What to watch next
Watch whether North Dakota carriers begin declining reopened claims on the statute rather than on policy terms — the statutory bar is cleaner for an insurer to assert and harder for an association to argue around. Watch, too, for the first dispute over whether a particular claim was “reopened” or “supplemental,” because the two definitions overlap at the edges and the answer decides which clock ran.
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