The order
Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara issued Bulletin 2026-6 on August 14, 2026, imposing a mandatory one-year moratorium on insurance non-renewals and cancellations covering more than 64,000 policyholders in Calaveras, San Joaquin, Amador, Tuolumne and Stanislaus counties.
The moratorium was triggered by the Gann Fire and runs for one year from Governor Newsom's emergency declaration for Calaveras County dated August 6, 2026 — so through approximately August 6, 2027. It covers 22 ZIP codes within or adjoining the fire perimeter and applies to every policyholder in those areas regardless of whether they suffered a loss.
The legal authority is California Insurance Code section 675.1, enacted as Senate Bill 824 in 2018 and authored by Lara when he served in the state Senate. That provision is what converts a governor's emergency declaration into an automatic, mandatory freeze rather than a request to insurers.
Why the commercial extension is new
Previous California wildfire moratoriums protected residential policies. This order extends for the first time to certain commercial property policies, including those covering homeowners associations, apartment complexes and senior living facilities.
That expansion was made possible by Senate Bill 547, the Business Insurance Protection Act, authored by Senators Susan Rubio and Sasha Renée Pérez and sponsored by the commissioner.
Analysis: the gap this closes is a practical one for renters. A residential-only moratorium protects the owner of a single-family home while leaving the insurer of a 200-unit apartment building free to non-renew after a nearby fire — a loss of coverage whose cost typically reaches tenants through rents or, in an HOA, through assessments. Including multifamily and association policies extends the protection to households who do not hold the policy themselves.
What a moratorium does and does not do
A moratorium prevents an insurer from dropping an existing policyholder for one year. It does not require insurers to write new policies in the area, and it does not cap what they may charge at renewal.
That leaves the underlying problem in place. California's wildfire insurance difficulty is a pricing and availability problem across whole regions, and a twelve-month freeze after each declared emergency is a stabiliser for affected households rather than a solution to the market.
The order forms part of the commissioner's Sustainable Insurance Strategy, which the department describes as involving 11 insurance groups including seven of the state's largest home insurers.
Open questions
The department's release does not address what happens when the year ends, which is when the non-renewal decisions deferred by the order become available to insurers again.
Industry groups have previously argued in other rulemakings that constraints on non-renewal reduce insurers' willingness to write new policies in high-risk areas at all, a trade-off the bulletin does not address.
For property owners in the five counties, the immediate effect is certainty of coverage through August 2027. For the state's wider insurance availability problem, this order changes nothing.