Nearly half of all US property and casualty rate filings drew at least one formal objection from state regulators over the past year, adding a median 38 days to the approval process, according to a new report from ZestyAI.
The Approval Velocity 2026 report analyzed 20,183 approved homeowners, personal auto and commercial property filings across all 50 states and Washington, DC during the 12 months ending May 8, 2026, finding that state departments of insurance issued more than 35,000 individual objection letters against those filings.
The delay compounds sharply once a filing draws scrutiny. A homeowners filing without an objection cleared in a median 13 days but took 56 days once objected to, while personal auto filings faced the steepest penalty, moving from a 9-day median approval to 52 days once an objection was issued, nearly six times as long. Homeowners was the most contested line overall at a 53.2% objection rate, followed by personal auto at 50.7% and commercial property at 34.3%.
The report found that where a filing is submitted generally affects approval time more than which line of insurance it covers. Wisconsin cleared most filings in under a day across all three lines studied, while California and New York ranked among the three slowest jurisdictions across every line, with median approval times of 252 days and 220 days respectively for the slowest lines in each state. The California figure lines up with what state regulators have separately reported: rate filings without third-party intervention took an average of 256 days to review in 2024, and delays have stretched to nearly a year and a half when a consumer advocacy group intervened in the process.
Maryland and New Jersey also ranked among the slowest for specific lines, while South Dakota, Alabama, New Mexico and Arkansas were consistently among the fastest.
Bryan Rehor (pictured), ZestyAI's senior director of regulatory and government affairs, said much of the delay is avoidable because regulators tend to raise the same categories of questions repeatedly.
"The real story in this data is how avoidable the delays are. Many of the questions causing delay are not new; they recur from filing to filing," Rehor said, adding that carriers who anticipate those questions and submit supporting evidence upfront can often avoid the objection entirely.
The most common objection themes varied by line. Personal auto objections most often centered on generalized linear model and rating-factor construction, with regulators in more than 20 states asking carriers to justify variable selection and segmentation methodology. Commercial property objections concentrated heavily around Insurance Services Office and American Association of Insurance Services loss cost multiplier documentation, the single most consistent regulatory ask identified in the report, appearing in 16 states.
Meanwhile, homeowners objections varied more by state, with catastrophe-exposed states like Florida, South Carolina and Hawaii focused on hurricane and wildfire model documentation, while consumer-protection-oriented states like Georgia, Kansas and New York examined how rate changes affect individual policyholders.
The report also points to a consequence beyond individual filing delays. As admitted-market rate approvals slow, particularly in catastrophe-exposed personal lines markets, carriers increasingly shift business into the excess and surplus lines market, where filings aren't subject to the same department of insurance rate review. Insurance Business has separately reported that the E&S market has set a record share of the overall property and casualty market in each of the past three years, a trend regulators and industry groups have tied in part to slower admitted-market approvals in states like California.
California's own rate review delays have prompted repeated regulatory intervention. Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara has pursued several rounds of reform aimed at speeding up reviews, including a 2024 bulletin requiring the department to review complete filings within 60 days, though insurers and trade groups have continued to argue those reforms haven't moved quickly enough to address the backlog.
For carriers, the report's underlying message is that filing preparation quality, not just the substance of the rate request itself, has a measurable and often predictable effect on how quickly new rates reach the market.
For brokers and agents, particularly those placing business in states like California and New York where delays are most severe, the pattern helps explain why more clients in catastrophe-exposed markets are being routed toward surplus lines coverage, a shift that's less about carriers abandoning the admitted market outright and more about regulatory friction making it harder to price admitted products accurately and bring them to market on a competitive timeline.
