Renters Insurance and Earthquakes in Los Angeles

A renters policy is four coverages, and the reason the first one matters is the simplest fact on this page. Your landlord does not provide insurance for your personal property. The building's policy is the owner's and it covers the owner's building.

Two of the four have nothing to do with your things. Personal liability covers a claim somebody makes against you, and medical payments covers somebody hurt where you live, which is why a landlord asking for proof of insurance is usually asking about those rather than about your furniture.

Two exclusions matter in Los Angeles and they are both in the Department of Insurance's own sentence above: earthquake and flood. Neither is a loophole or a small-print surprise, and neither is something an insurer chose. They are standard exclusions on a standard policy across the state.

Not everything an earthquake does is excluded, and the Department is careful about this rather than absolute. In some cases your homeowners or renters insurance may specifically cover direct loss due to explosion, theft, or breaking glass caused by an earthquake, even if you do not have earthquake insurance. Ask your insurance agent.

The exclusion runs the other way too, which closes a gap a reader opens by themselves. Earthquake insurance does not cover water damage from outside your home, such as sewer or drain back-up, flood, or tsunami. So a tsunami after an earthquake is not on either policy, and flood cover is its own thing again.

This is the one rule on this page that is a statute rather than a policy term, and it is the one most worth knowing. California law says that both homeowners and renters insurance must cover fire damage that is caused by or follows an earthquake. This means that the fire damage is covered, whether or not you have earthquake insurance.

It is on the policy you already have rather than on the one you are deciding about, and the Department explains why in the same guide. Earthquake insurance usually does not cover anything that your homeowners policy already covers. For example, your homeowners policy covers fire damage, even if an earthquake causes the fire. Therefore, your earthquake policy does not cover fire damage.

The practical shape of that: after an earthquake, report the damage to your own insurer even if you are sure you have no earthquake cover, and describe what happened rather than labeling it. Fire, and in some cases explosion, theft or broken glass, may be covered by the policy you have. The Department's own advice on that page is not to assume the damage is not covered.

No code section is cited here, and that is deliberate rather than an omission. What stands behind the sentence is the regulator stating what California law requires, on the guide it publishes for consumers, rather than a reading of the statute itself. A section number nobody here has opened would look more checked than it was.

The California Earthquake Authority is a state-created body and writes most of the residential earthquake insurance in California. For a renter its policy is narrow on purpose: it covers your belongings, the cost of living elsewhere, and emergency measures to stop further damage. It covers nothing about the building, because the building is not yours.

You cannot buy it from CEA. Contact your renters insurance agent to add a CEA earthquake renters policy. CEA does not offer stand-alone policies. This means that both the residential property policy (homeowners, condo, mobilehome or renters) and the CEA earthquake policy must be issued by the CEA partner insurance company. If your renters policy is with a company that is not a CEA participating insurer, getting CEA cover means moving the renters policy as well, which is a decision rather than a form.

You do not have to wait for a renewal date. You can purchase a CEA policy any time before an earthquake strikes, you do not have to wait until your residential property policy renews.

On price, CEA publishes its own figure and this site does not estimate one: CEA earthquake insurance for renters could cost as little as $35 per year. The cost of your policy depends on factors like where you live, and the coverages and deductibles you choose.

California's hazard disclosure rules attach to a sale, in the Department of Conservation's own words about the two Acts that draw these maps: "These Acts also require sellers of real property (and their agents) within a mapped hazard zone to disclose at the time of sale that the property lies within such a zone." A buyer gets a natural hazard disclosure statement. A tenant signing a lease gets nothing, from anybody, which is the gap the check at the top of this page closes.

California maps three kinds of earthquake ground failure, parcel by parcel, and calls each one a zone of required investigation. The name is the definition: a zone says what a city has to make somebody prove before it permits a new building for human occupancy there.

A fault zone is narrower than people expect. Wherever an active fault exists, if it has the potential for surface rupture, a structure for human occupancy cannot be placed over the fault and must be a minimum distance from the fault (generally fifty feet). The zones themselves are long and thin: the state's own description is that they can be miles long and average about a quarter of a mile wide, so one side of a street can be in one and the other side out. An active fault, for this purpose, is one that has ruptured in the last 11,000 years.

And the thing most readers get backwards is the state's own caveat rather than ours. Although strong ground shaking is responsible for most earthquake-related damage, these zones identify areas where earthquake hazards other than structural shaking, specifically ground failures during an earthquake, are more likely. Being outside every zone is not being outside the risk, because shaking is not zoned at all.

Three more of the Department of Conservation's notes on its own maps are worth reading before anybody treats a zone as a fact about a building: the maps may not show every fault or every susceptible area, one earthquake will not affect a zoned area uniformly, and a zone can include land where the hazard has already been engineered out to city standards.

Earthquake insurance is not. CEA says so in its own words: Earthquake insurance for renters is not required in California.

On the renters policy itself, nothing read for this page says a California law requires one either way, so this page does not claim that one does or that one does not. What the Department of Insurance writes is advice rather than a rule: To protect your belongings, you should consider purchasing renter's insurance, also known as “tenant's insurance.”

A lease is a separate question and is not a law. A landlord can make a policy a condition of renting, and plenty do, and what any particular lease requires is between you and whoever wrote it.

There is a market of last resort and a renter can use it. If you are unable to find an insurance company that will sell you a homeowners or renters policy because you do not meet their eligibility requirements, or if you cannot find certain coverage, such as fire or flood insurance, there are special insurance programs you should consider. The main one is the California FAIR Plan, which is an association of every property insurer licensed in California, and one of the occupancy types it writes is a renter: Personal property coverage for the tenant of an apartment or single or multi-unit dwelling.

It is much narrower than a renters policy and the narrowness is the point of knowing about it. It is a named-peril fire policy, which means it covers only what it lists, and what it lists is fire and lightning, internal explosion, smoke, with vandalism available at extra cost. No coverage is provided for liability or coverage for other perils such as burglary.

It is also meant to be temporary and you reach it through a broker rather than directly. Your broker will perform a diligent search for comprehensive coverage in the traditional insurance market. If coverage is not available with another company, your broker can help you determine if the California FAIR Plan is available as a temporary solution. If coverage is available in the traditional marketplace, the California FAIR Plan is not right for you.

Earthquake cover works the same way on a FAIR Plan policy as on any other, because the FAIR Plan is a CEA participating insurer. A stand-alone earthquake policy written by the California FAIR Plan is not available. You must have an in-force California FAIR Plan policy to qualify for CEA coverage through the California FAIR Plan.

Which Los Angeles you are moving into decides a long list of other things, from rent rules to who licenses a dog. The moving to Los Angeles guide is built around that question, and the state deadlines a new resident has are on their own page with the DMV page each one came from.