Your Claim Check Is Late. That Delay Earns Home Insurers $8.8 Million a Day.

If you filed a home insurance claim and you’re still waiting on the check, understand what the wait is worth to the other side. Every extra day the industry holds your money, it makes money.

$8.8 million a day. That’s what home insurers collectively pick up in interest and investment income for each day claim payments run late, according to an analysis Weiss Ratings ran for the Consumer Federation of America and released July 30. Stretch the delay to a week and it’s $61.6 million.

Weiss showed its work, and the math is plain. Insurers paid $94.2 billion in homeowners claims in 2024, and the invested assets behind that line returned 3.49% for the year. Hold a day’s worth of claim payments at that yield and you get $8.8 million. Across every property and casualty line, home, auto and business together, it’s $52.3 million per day of delay.

Warren Buffett has a name for this. He calls it the float, and in his 2008 letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders he described it as “money that doesn’t belong to us but that we hold and invest for our own benefit.” He added: “Charlie and I find this enjoyable.”

He isn’t hiding anything. That is the business model. Premiums come in years before claims go out, and the gap is where the profit lives.

The problem is what the gap does to you while you’re in it. Douglas Heller, insurance director at the Consumer Federation of America, named the asymmetry: “Insurance companies cancel us if we are late on a premium payment, but when they are late on a claim payment, they make money.”

And the delays aren’t rare anymore. Weiss found insurers in 15 disaster-prone states took 60 days or longer to pay 28.1% of claims in 2024, up from 25.6% in 2018. In Illinois, 21.7% of home claims took at least 60 days to settle. Late payment is now the single biggest complaint category at state insurance departments, 22% of roughly 65,000 complaints filed in 2025.

California’s insurance department sampled 220 State Farm claims from the January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires. In 27 of them, the company had already agreed to pay and then didn’t pay within 30 days.

The industry’s response, in a joint statement from the Illinois Insurance Association, the American Property Casualty Insurance Association and the National Association of Mutual Insurance Companies, is that the analysis “oversimplifies a complex claims handling process to score political points.” Read that again and notice what it doesn’t dispute.

Two moves, both this week if your claim is open.

Email your adjuster and ask, in writing, for payment of the undisputed portion now, with the argument over the rest continuing after. That’s the depreciated value of what you lost, and it is the part nobody is actually contesting. Heller wants a 30-day legal deadline on exactly that payment. You don’t need a law to ask.

Then, if you’re past the deadline your state sets, file a complaint with your state insurance department. In writing, with the claim number and every date. Delay is nearly a quarter of what those regulators already handle, so you’re describing a pattern they know by heart.

California is weighing SB 878, which would force insurers to pay interest when a residential property claim sits unpaid more than 30 days past certain claims-handling milestones. That’s the fix with teeth, because it turns the float from a reason to stall into a reason to hurry.

Until your state passes something like it, the only clock running on your claim is the one you start. Our mortgages hub covers what your lender and insurer expect of you, and what we rank is where to look when you shop the renewal.

Your insurer is earning on your money today. Send the email.

How Candid Yak makes money. Some of the products we write about pay us if you apply or sign up through our links. That never changes our verdict, our rankings, or the numbers in this article. We call a bad deal a bad deal whether it pays us or not. Some brands shown in our comparison tools are placeholder examples while we finalize partner agreements, and we label them as such.