Farmers Just Widened Its California Bundling Discount to 22%. Your Renewal After September 15 Decides If You Get It.

If Farmers insures your California home, the renewal notice that lands after September 15 carries two numbers. A rate increase, and a bigger discount than the one you have now. Nobody is going to call and tell you which side of that you landed on.

The statewide average change is 1.5%. The home and auto package discount goes from 15% to 22%.

Read those two numbers next to each other and you see the whole plan.

Farmers filed for 6.99% back in November. The California Department of Insurance approved 1.5%. The new rating plan takes effect September 15 on Smart Plan Home and Next Generation Home policies, and it reaches nearly 915,000 homeowners at their next renewal. Farmers is the ninth major insurer group approved under Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara’s Sustainable Insurance Strategy, and Lara called it a significant step forward under that framework.

Now the part worth sitting with. A company does not raise its largest discount by seven points and land at plus 1.5% overall by accident. Farmers says customers who bundle home and auto “will generally experience decreasing rates.” That money comes from somewhere. If your neighbor with two Farmers policies and a cleared defensible space is going down, the single-policy homeowner in a rated wildfire zone is not going up by 1.5%.

Coverage of the approval says it in flatter language: some policyholders could see larger increases while others may pay less, depending on discounts and wildfire mitigation.

Here’s the math on an example $2,400 annual premium. The 1.5% average is $36. The move from a 15% package discount to 22% is worth $168 on that same premium. The discount is nearly five times the size of the increase. Which column you sit in is decided by two checkboxes, not by the rate filing.

So check the boxes.

Pull last year’s declaration page before the renewal arrives and find the discount lines. When the new one comes, compare it to the old one line by line, not total to total. Then call your agent and ask two specific questions: is the 22% package discount applied to this policy, and is the wildfire mitigation discount applied. Farmers built savings into this plan for homeowners who put in mitigation measures, but a discount you never claimed is a discount you never got.

Before you bundle, get a standalone auto quote from two other carriers. A 22% home discount funded by an auto premium $300 over market is a transfer, not a saving. Run both totals. Then pick.

One more thing most people miss. If your homeowners premium is escrowed, this does not stop at the insurance bill. Your servicer recalculates the escrow account and your monthly mortgage payment moves with it, usually a couple of months late and always without a phone call. Put the new premium into our mortgage calculator so the payment change does not arrive as a surprise.

And if you are on the FAIR Plan facing a 29.1% increase on October 15, this is your cue to ask a private carrier for a quote. The mortgages hub has the rest of what moved this year.

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