TDI Told the Governor That Insurers Aren't Denying Claims in Writing

Commissioner Amanda Crawford's six-page response to Governor Abbott, dated September 14, 2026, carries a dozen legislative considerations.¹¹ The press release Abbott issued two days later names five of them as statutory options. The item left out of the summary is the one where the state's insurance regulator writes that "many insurers are not affirmatively accepting or rejecting claims, making determination of compliance and prompt payment penalties difficult."¹

Almost every account of the September 16 announcement was a rate story, anchored to the line Abbott had put in his August 24 directive: "the average annual homeowner's insurance premium in Texas has increased 79 percent in six years."¹⁰ TDI's own series, built from the Texas Statistical Plan for Residential Risks, puts the increase at 76.4 percent between 2020 and 2025, and average dwelling coverage over roughly the same stretch climbed from $242,900 in 2015 to about $408,000 in 2024, a rise of 68 percent.⁵ Abbott's figure runs through 2026, a year TDI has not published, and a real share of the growth is insuring more house, not charging more for it.

Crawford's document is careful about its own status. It "outlines possible TDI administrative actions and identifies legislative changes for consideration during the upcoming session," every legislative item is phrased as something "the Legislature could" do, and it closes by offering TDI "as a resource for policymakers as they consider the advantages and risks of these concepts."¹ None of it carries an endorsement. Read it as a regulator's inventory of the levers available when the Legislature convenes in January 2027.

What the press release left out

The Governor's release compresses the memo's legislative menu into a single sentence, listing potential statutory changes on rate reviews, renewal-price notices, advertising costs included in rates, claim deadlines, and standards for roofing contractors.² Three of those five are rate items. Claim acceptance or denial notice carries its own heading in the memo, sits beside the claim-deadline item the release did pick up, and is not among the five.¹

Under that heading Crawford states the compliance problem quoted above, then the fix: "To address this issue, the Legislature could clarify statute to require acceptance, rejection, or denial in writing for all claims."¹ The operative phrase is the last one.

One outlet did report it. Hannah Norton's September 16 story for Community Impact carried the acceptance-or-denial item as an eleven-word bullet, "Requiring that all claims be accepted, rejected or denied in writing," in a list of six drawn from the memo's dozen, under a headline about rate-filing delays, with the PDF linked.¹¹ So it was on the record that day. What has not happened is anyone setting that sentence against the statute it would amend.

TDI's ability to turn a mandate into working rules is fair to weigh alongside this. The appraisal rules SB 458 directed the department to adopt are still unadopted as of this month, and it is the same agency now floating new claim-handling statutes.

§ 542.056 has required this since 2005

Subsection (a) reads that an insurer "shall notify a claimant in writing of the acceptance or rejection of a claim not later than the 15th business day after the date the insurer receives all items, statements, and forms required by the insurer to secure final proof of loss." A rejection "must state the reasons for the rejection." If the insurer cannot decide inside the window, it must say why, and it then has 45 days.³ That language took effect April 1, 2005 (Acts 2003, 78th Leg., ch. 1274 § 2). On the administrative side, 28 Tex. Admin. Code § 21.203 has separately made it an unfair claim settlement practice to fail to affirm or deny coverage within a reasonable time, or to fail to give a reasonable explanation for a denial.⁹

So the written-decision duty is old law.

The defect sits one section upstream. Section 542.055(a)(3) makes the insurer the party that specifies which items, statements and forms it requires, and § 542.055(b) lets the insurer make additional requests during the investigation whenever it decides they are necessary. No outer limit appears in the text: no cap on the number of supplemental requests, no date by which the list has to close. Section 542.056's fifteen business days start only once the insurer has received everything on a list the insurer wrote. Section 542.058 gates the payment clock on the identical event, "after receiving all items, statements, and forms reasonably requested and required under Section 542.055," and § 542.059 adds fifteen days to the claim-handling deadlines in a commissioner-declared weather catastrophe.³ A file where nothing is ever declared complete is a file where, on the face of the statute, no deadline has yet been missed.

Texas plaintiff-side lawyers have called the result constructive denial for years. The carrier never says no, so there is nothing to appeal, nothing to date-stamp, and nothing for a regulator to count. What is new in September 2026 is the department saying the same thing in its own voice and tying it to money: the pattern, Crawford writes, makes determination of compliance and prompt payment penalties difficult. Chapter 542's penalty and attorney-fee exposure hangs off that trigger event, and Chapter 542A rewrote how the penalty is computed for weather claims in 2017, so the arithmetic now differs by claim type. None of it starts running until the trigger does.

For a working public adjuster, nothing in the memo changes a file opened today. What it changes is what the documentation is aimed at. The date of the carrier's most recent additional-items request, what it asked for, whether it re-requested something already produced, and the run of days since: the chronology of that sequence is precisely what the Texas regulator has now described in writing, in a document published on the Governor's website. Build it while the claim is open.

Closed without payment, and what the year-end study could show

The memo also commits TDI to a study of claim costs, to be published "in a concise, web-based format by the end of 2026," drawing on Market Conduct Annual Statements, company product and rate filings, and financial statements. One sentence in that section carries more weight than the rest: "TDI will also seek additional details on claims closed without payment to ensure companies are meeting their statutory responsibility to consumers."¹

Texas homeowners insurers closed 34.20 percent of claims without payment in the 2024 data year, up from 30.80 percent in 2023 and a shade under the 34.26 percent of 2021. The median across 50 reporting jurisdictions was 29.6 percent, and Texas ranked sixth highest. Florida excluding Citizens ran 40.26 percent, California 34.88, Louisiana 33.49. Oklahoma, next door and no stranger to hail, reported 23.34 percent; Colorado, 18.68. A separate ratio in the same filing shows 22.17 percent of Texas claims paid more than 60 days after they were reported.⁴

The statewide average hides the finding. 144 insurers reported Texas homeowners data for 2024, and their individual rates spread across nearly the whole range: three came in under 10 percent, 33 landed between 20 and 30 percent, and 52 of the 144 closed more than 40 percent of their Texas homeowners claims without paying anything. Eleven closed more than 60 percent.⁴

A regulator holding MCAS detail, rate filings and financial statements can see exactly which carrier sits where, and Crawford has now written that TDI will go looking. Colorado has already taken a version of that step by opening roof-claim data to public access, and Colorado is also the lowest number in the comparison above.

Closed without payment does not mean denied. The NAIC definition sweeps in claims closed below the deductible and claims closed after an investigation found no policy in force, and in a state where $2,500-and-up wind and hail deductibles are routine, a genuine share of that 34.20 percent is a hail claim that came in under the retention with nobody behaving badly. How large a share is not knowable from the public file. Which is why the decomposition has to come from the department rather than from anyone reading NAIC tables, and why a carrier-level breakout would beat another statewide percentage.

Set that against 2025. It was the strongest underwriting year of the published decade for Texas homeowners, a 78.2 combined ratio on a 45.6 loss ratio, in the same year average premium reached its record.⁵ Homeowners complaints to TDI went from 1,766 in 2019 to 4,867 in 2025, off a 5,478 peak the year before, with confirmed complaints up from 358 to 1,291 and the confirmed share rising from 20.3 percent to 26.5 percent.⁷ And a claimOS review of all 1,002 disciplinary orders TDI published from 2022 through August 26, 2026, full-text searched for citations to Tex. Ins. Code §§ 542.055 through 542.060, found 34 orders citing Subchapter B at all; residential-property prompt-pay orders against insurers numbered three in 2022, four in 2023, five in 2024, none in 2025, and two so far in 2026.⁶ Those counts are our analysis of TDI's published orders, not a TDI statistic.

Roofers: three states named, one Texas bill that already died

The roof-contractor item opens on verification. "Policymakers, consumers, and insurance companies have expressed concern about not having a way to verify the quality of contractors for roof repairs," Crawford writes, floating "a state license for roofing companies, or alternatively, a registration and certification program." Read the justification all the way through, though. Such a program "would give consumers reassurance in the contractor working on the claim," and it "would also give insurers more confidence in the quality of the data they receive in the claim submission."¹ The second half is a carrier-data argument, and any PA who has watched a supplement picked apart over the writer's credentials can see where that travels.

The memo names Florida, Louisiana and Alabama as states that license roofers. The three are not equivalent, and the differences matter if Texas copies one.¹²

Texas has no state roofing license. The open web will mislead you on this point: several high-ranking roofing-industry articles report that Texas created a TDLR reroofing contractor license effective September 1, 2025, under HB 3344 of the 89th Legislature. HB 3344 never passed.⁸ Its last recorded action was "committee report sent to Calendars" on May 8, 2025. The bill-version tree on capitol.texas.gov holds only an Introduced and a House Committee Report version, while Engrossed, Senate Committee Report and Enrolled all return 404; HB 2067 from that same session, which did pass, has all five. TDLR's own list of enacted 89R bills contains no occurrence of the word "roof." The memo itself presumes no license exists, and RCAT's certification program remains voluntary.

Read the memo for what it leaves out, too. Across six pages there is nothing about public adjusters: no fee cap, no Chapter 4102 licensing change, no assignment of benefits. The anti-PA package a "fraud task force" headline tends to imply is not in this document. What is there, on the administrative side rather than the legislative one, is a standard TDI says it will apply without any new statute: "any use of AI in making a consequential decision for policyholders must include a human review of the decision."¹ That language lands while regulators elsewhere are pulling adjuster AI documents into open investigations.

None of the memo's legislative considerations is a filed bill, and the Commissioner endorses none of them. The Legislature convenes in January 2027. Between now and then, the compliance finding sits on TDI letterhead above her signature, and a Texas PA does not need the statute to change to quote it.