Colorado § 10-4-405(1.2): The Roof Claims Exhibit You May Not See

Ask a Colorado carrier how its hail claims run on homes with a resilient roof against homes without one. After January 1, 2027, and only once the commissioner adopts rules, it has to tell the Division of Insurance. Whether it has to tell you is unsettled: the legislature put that exhibit in C.R.S. § 10-4-405, a section homeowners insurers are expressly excepted from by § 10-4-401(3)(b). Nobody amended the carve-out.

What the act actually does, and what it is called

Both names in circulation are slightly off. The bill title is "Increase Access Homeowner's Insurance Enterprise"; what it stands up is the Strengthen Colorado Homes Enterprise, a new Part 20 of Article 4, Title 10 at §§ 10-4-2001 through 10-4-2006, signed June 4, 2026 and effective August 12, 2026 as Chapter 373.¹

Most of the act is a retrofit grant program with a funding mechanism bolted on. Beginning in calendar year 2027 carriers pay a fee of one-half of one percent of the prior year's premium, and § 10-4-2003(4)(b) bars them from surcharging it to policyholders.¹ The enterprise may lower or stop the fee to hold five-year revenue under $100 million, the Proposition 117 threshold in § 24-77-108; the July 21, 2026 fiscal note projects $99.6 million.⁴ At least 85% goes out as homeowner grants under § 10-4-2004(8).¹

Consumer coverage stopped there. Section 2 amends the rate-filing article to add § 10-4-405(1.2):

No sooner than January 1, 2027, and upon the commissioner adopting rules, an insurer offering multiperil homeowner's insurance for property or risks located in the state shall submit an annual filing to the commissioner. The annual filing must include an exhibit reporting: (a) the number of policies in force; (b) the number of homes that have installed a resilient roof system; (c) the discount applied to homes due to the presence of a resilient roof system; and (d) the wind and hail claims frequency and severity for homes with and without a resilient roof system.

Subsection (d) is the one to read twice.¹ Frequency and severity, split by roof type, from every admitted homeowners writer, every year. Subsection (c) is quieter: Colorado mandates no resilient-roof discount anywhere in the act, so (c) makes each carrier report whatever discount it chose, next to its own loss experience.¹ "No sooner than January 1, 2027" sets a floor, and "upon the commissioner adopting rules" carries no rulemaking deadline anywhere in the statute, so nothing is compelled until the division moves first.¹

Homeowners is carved out of § 10-4-405. The exhibit landed there anyway.

Pull § 10-4-405(1): "With respect to type I kinds of insurance as defined in section 10-4-401 (3)(a), every insurer shall file with the commissioner..."² Type I is a closed list. Fire and casualty, which contains homeowners, sits in Type II, made "subject to all the provisions of this part 4 except for sections 10-4-405 and 10-4-406" by § 10-4-401(3)(b).³ That language was last amended in 2010 by HB 10-1220, sixteen years before anyone drafted a roof exhibit.

So a homeowners mandate now sits inside the section homeowners is excepted from.

Access is where that bites. § 10-4-405(3) provides that "a filing and any supporting information shall be open to public inspection at the division of insurance," unamended since 1979.² A carrier that wants the exhibit quiet has an obvious argument: excepted from 405 means excepted from 405(3).

The counter sits in the same subsection. § 10-4-401(3)(b) carries its own savings clause: "Nothing in this section shall be construed to limit the right of the public to inspect a rate filing and any supporting information pursuant to part 2 of article 72 of title 24, C.R.S." That is the Colorado Open Records Act, preserved by name for the filings Type II carriers make.³ The exception relieves Type II insurers of the prior-approval machinery in 405 and 406, not of public access.

The relevant CORA exemption is § 10-4-110.7(4), which requires insurers to file "underwriting methodologies" and declares those "are not public records and are exempted from article 72 of title 24."² Claims frequency and severity experience is not an underwriting methodology. It is loss data, and the exemption does not reach the roof exhibit on its face.

Regulation 5-1-29, the draft wildfire model and mitigation discount filing rule effective July 1, 2026, is the closest template. Section 5.A.3 puts the burden on the carrier: an insurer treating filed information as an underwriting methodology "must clearly identify this information as confidential, complete the proper confidentiality request, and segregate it from the rest of the filing," while models "shall be treated as trade secrets."⁹ Confidentiality there is claimed, not granted. Sections 5.A.1 and 5.A.2 require loss exhibits on mitigation's effect on actual and expected losses with no confidentiality declaration, the nearest cousin to the roof exhibit sitting unprotected.

None of this is settled law. It is a statutory reading assembled from three sections that have never been construed together, and it could cut either direction once someone briefs it. The § 10-4-405 text quoted above was verified against the Office of Legislative Legal Services edition of the Colorado Revised Statutes 2024, Title 10, at page 400; no official 2025 or 2026 OLLS edition has been published, so a later amendment to the public-inspection clause cannot be excluded. The division also has room to narrow access in rulemaking, by letting carriers designate the exhibit confidential under a generous reading of § 10-4-110.7(4), by aggregating the data statewide before it becomes a public document, or by treating it as supporting information for an informational filing.

If it does become obtainable, the exhibit runs per carrier, per year, split by roof type, a finer grain than the state-level numbers behind how a carrier handles claims relative to its peers.

Frequency fell harder than severity

The best evidence for what the exhibit will show comes out of Alabama. After Hurricane Sally, the Alabama Department of Insurance and the University of Alabama's Center for Risk and Insurance Research ran a data call across 40,195 coastal policies, 7,417 of them FORTIFIED, covering 8,628 claims and $181 million in paid losses. Published May 5, 2025.⁶

Conventional homes generated 0.26 claims per policy. FORTIFIED Roof homes, 0.12. FORTIFIED Gold, 0.08. Mean severity ran $21,058, $18,179 and $16,054, with loss ratios of 2.57, 1.15 and 0.98.⁶

The shape matters more than the headline: roof construction changes whether a claim happens far more than what the claim costs, frequency falling by half to three-quarters against severity by 14 to 24 percent. Roof type is evidence about claim incidence across a book of business, not about the scope or value of the loss in front of you. A carrier using it to argue down a scope is answering a severity question with frequency evidence.

The study also ran a counterfactual: had every affected home been built to FORTIFIED Gold, insurer payouts would have dropped $111.8 million, or 75%, and homeowner deductible exposure $34.6 million, or 65%; the figures here come from the study PDF, not the press releases.⁶

Louisiana went at it from the premium side. Regulation 136 sets mandatory benchmark FORTIFIED discounts on the hurricane portion of premium, effective no later than January 1, 2027: 16/27/29% for Roof, 20/35/43% for Silver, 24/42/49% for Gold, North to South zones.⁸ The Legislative Auditor measured what grantees got: median savings of $1,250 a year, 22%, from $5,625 to $4,375; 25.2% saved $2,000 or more, 3.3% saw premium rise. Statewide, 5,413 FORTIFIED certificates as of February 1, 2025, 1,838 program-funded.⁷

Neither state made carriers file claim experience by roof type annually. Colorado's § 10-4-405(1.2) appears to be the first recurring per-carrier obligation of its kind, landing where roof age already drives the fight over cosmetic-damage exclusions on hail claims.

"Repair, rather than replace"

The grant conditions are where this touches a claim file. § 10-4-2004(3)(f)(II) requires a grant homeowner to use a contractor who attests "that the contractor does not waive deductibles and agrees to repair, rather than replace, roofs when appropriate in accordance with rules adopted by the board," and (3)(f)(I) requires membership in a professional roofing association that the statute describes as promoting ethical behavior and sound industry practice.¹

The deductible-waiver half of that attestation carries no new law. C.R.S. § 6-22-105 has barred roofing contractors from advertising or promising to pay, waive or rebate a deductible statewide since SB 12-038 took effect June 6, 2012, and has never been amended; SB26-155 restates it as a grant condition.¹¹ While you are in that article, § 6-22-105(3) provides that a roofing contractor "shall not claim to be or act as a public insurance adjuster," and nothing in Article 22 restricts an adjuster licensed under § 10-2-417 from that work.¹¹

The genuinely new obligations, the repair-rather-than-replace attestation and the association membership, take their content from board rules that do not exist yet. § 10-4-2003(2)(b) seats seven voting members: the commissioner plus six gubernatorial appointees, two of them insurer representatives and one a consumer representative. No seat is reserved for a licensed public adjuster. Appointments are due by January 1, 2027, subject to Senate confirmation.¹ The board also decides what qualifies: § 10-4-2002(6) defines a resilient roof system as one carrying "a verified wind and hail certification from the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety 'FORTIFIED' program or a similar science-based, verifiable certification, as determined by the board by rule."¹

On the money, § 10-4-2004(6) bars grant funds from covering general roof maintenance but permits their use "in conjunction with repairs or reconstruction necessitated by damage from wind or hail."¹ Grant dollars and claim dollars land on the same roof, and the grant timeline has to be sequenced against the statutory clocks running on the underlying claim. § 10-4-2003(2)(h) subjects the board to the Colorado Sunshine Act of 1972 and makes its records public under CORA, so the rules get written in the open even if the exhibit does not.¹

No board, no rules, no docket

As of September 4, 2026, no rulemaking touching SB26-155, resilient roofs, Part 20 or § 10-4-405 has been noticed on the division's rulemaking hearings page; the most recent noticed hearing, September 2, 2026, concerns an unrelated health regulation.⁹ The Strengthen Colorado Homes program page still reads "Public Comment: Coming soon," board applications remain open on a rolling basis, and no appointments have been announced.¹⁰

Under four months to the statutory appointment deadline.

Comments go to DORA_INS_RulesandRecords@state.co.us.⁹ Keilani Fleming is the division's program contact for the enterprise.¹⁰ An effective letter asks for rule text, not sentiment. Ask that the exhibit be broken out by company rather than aggregated statewide: the top five writers already hold 48.53% of Colorado's Line 4 market, so a statewide aggregate would say almost nothing about the carrier on any given file.⁵ Ask that the division decline to extend § 10-4-110.7(4)'s confidentiality for underwriting methodologies to claims experience.² Ask that it be published, not merely open for inspection in Denver.

Colorado Line 04 direct written premium reached $5.76 billion in 2025, up 111.7% from 2019's $2.72 billion.⁵ Whatever it shows, the exhibit will be the first Colorado collection of wind and hail loss experience from every homeowners carrier on a repeating schedule. Whether anyone outside the division gets to read it is being decided now, in a proceeding with no docket number.

Questions a Colorado file will raise