Tracking the Growth of Residential Exposure in California’s FAIR Plan
June 2025 Numbers Update
The California FAIR Plan has released new data this summer. To follow up on our May post, we updated our FAIR Plan maps and tables with the latest June 2025 numbers from the FAIR Plan. These FAIR Plan exposure maps are also available on our team’s webpage.
Sustained FAIR Plan Residential Growth
Between September 2024 and June 2025, residential exposure to the FAIR Plan in California has continued to grow. The Map below illustrates this change in FAIR Plan residential exposure across different ZIP codes. Notably, exposure to the FAIR Plan has increased by $100 million or more in approximately 26% of California ZIP codes, with at least a quarter of the ZIP codes shaded in red to indicate this increase.
Table 1 displays the 20 ZIP codes with the largest growth in FAIR Plan exposure between September 2024 and June 2025. These include Los Angeles communities such as Brentwood, Beverly Hills, and Hidden Hills, which are near communities affected by the January 2025 wildfires in Eaton and Palisades. Several ZIP codes in these areas have seen increases in residential exposure of more than $1 billion each in this period.
Table 2 presents the 20 ZIP codes with the largest growth in FAIR Plan exposure over a longer period, from September 2020 to June 2025.
Table 3 shows the total statewide growth of FAIR Plan residential exposure between 2020 and 2025. Between September 2020 and June 2025, FAIR residential exposure grew 424%, reaching $603 billion as of June 2025.
Additional FAIR Plan exposure maps are available on our team’s webpage.
Efforts to Depopulate the California FAIR Plan
The continued growth of the FAIR Plan has raised concerns about its capacity to serve policyholders and incentives it creates for private insurers to scale back underwriting in order to limit assessment exposure. As part of the Sustainable Insurance Strategy, the California Department of Insurance (CDI) aims to depopulate the FAIR Plan by transitioning policyholders to the private market. To support this shift, insurance companies are now allowed to use CDI-approved wildfire catastrophe models when setting rates. In exchange, the state requires them to underwrite more policies in wildfire distressed areas.1
In July 2025, the CDI approved catastrophe models developed by Verisk and Moody’s. Yet, a critical question remains: how much of the modeled risk will regulators allow to be reflected in premiums? Insurers’ willingness to write more policies will largely hinge on whether approved rate increases are sufficient to cover the risks these models capture. An equally important question is whether the approved models themselves adequately measure wildfire risk. If they do not, the state risks returning to the root problem of California’s insurance crisis: the mispricing of climate risk.
Map
Table 1
Table 2
Table 3
Nam Nguyen joined the Climate and Energy Policy Program as a Stanford Postdoctoral Scholar in June 2024. As an economist, his work focuses on wildfire policy challenges in California and the western US that inform interventions that support improved availability of homeowner insurance.
Avery Bick joined the Climate and Energy Policy Program as the Sustainable and Humane Food Systems Research Fellow in January 2025. He is a socio-environmental geospatial analyst working at the intersection of air and water pollution, natural disasters, and public health in California.