South Carolina's property-insurance bill cleared the House and stalled two weeks short — and it was never a condo bill
South Carolina's property-insurance bill cleared the House and stalled two weeks short — and it was never a condo bill
2026-09-19 · South Carolina · Legislation · Did not pass
The only insurance bill of the session with real momentum reached the Senate calendar and stopped there, two weeks before adjournment.1
H. 4817, the Insurance Rate Reduction and Policyholder Protection Act, carried twenty-three House sponsors. It was prefiled December 16, 2025, introduced January 13, 2026, reported favourably with amendment from House Labor, Commerce and Industry on March 5, amended and read a second time on April 1 by a roll call of 96-17, read a third time April 2, and sent to the Senate.
The Senate Committee on Banking and Insurance reported it favourably with amendment on April 30, 2026. That is the final line of its history. It never received a second reading, and the session ended May 14.
What was in it
- Mandatory actuarially justified mitigation discounts, credits and deductible adjustments for fortified-home and windstorm retrofits.
- Expansion of the SC Safe Home retrofit grant programme.
- An Insurance Fraud Division at the Department of Insurance.
- A bar on contractors paying policyholder deductibles.
- A disaster-preparedness sales-tax holiday.
An accuracy point worth stating plainly
H. 4817 contains no condominium-specific and no association-specific provisions. It is a general residential property-insurance bill.
Its relevance to condominium and association owners is real but indirect: mitigation credits and retrofit grants affect what a master policy and a unit owner's policy cost. Describing it as a condominium insurance bill overstates it.
Why mitigation credits matter to an association anyway
The mechanism the bill would have made mandatory is the one lever a coastal building can pull that is not simply paying more. A fortified roof, improved openings, or windstorm retrofits reduce modelled loss, and a credit converts that into premium.
Under current law those credits exist as a matter of each carrier's filed rating plan rather than as a statutory entitlement, so whether a retrofit produces a premium reduction depends on the carrier.
SC Safe Home, the state's retrofit grant programme, continues to operate — the Department reopened its grant portal on July 13, 2026 — but at its existing scale rather than the expanded one the bill proposed.
The market context the bill was responding to
The Department of Insurance's 2025 coastal report, submitted January 31, 2026, attributes coastal premium pressure to repair-cost inflation, surging reinsurance rates, and higher property values driving higher limits. It also records the Wind Pool's approved rate increase of 7.5% for dwelling policies, effective February 1, 2026.
At the same time the report describes a residual market that has lost more than two-thirds of its policies since 2011, and condominium associations leaving the Wind Pool for better terms in the admitted market — with wooden oceanfront buildings over fifty years old named as the exception still struggling to find affordable coverage.
That is the population a mandatory mitigation-credit regime would have reached most directly, and it is the population still without one.
What did not change
- No statutory insurance requirement applies to South Carolina community associations. What an association carries comes from its declaration and from lender requirements.
- No statutory allocation of deductibles between an association and unit owners. The master deed governs, and where it is silent the question is contested rather than answered.
- No mandatory mitigation credit. Carrier filings govern.
- No loss-assessment requirement on unit owner policies.
Across the whole 2025-2026 appellate window there is also no South Carolina decision on insurance or deductible allocation between an association and its unit owners — so neither the legislature nor the courts moved the question this year.
One federal change that did move
The per-occurrence, per-unit deductible that Fannie Mae will accept on a master policy doubled from $25,000 to $50,000, effective July 1, 2026, with unit owners expected to carry HO-6 coverage where the master policy leaves interior gaps or a per-unit deductible applies. For a wind-exposed South Carolina building, deductible level is the primary lever for keeping a master policy affordable, so that change reaches the same problem H. 4817 aimed at — from the financing side rather than the rating side.
Everything filed this term must be refiled from first reading in 2027. See South Carolina insurance requirements for associations.
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