Your Connecticut Renewal Bill Has to Admit the Premium Went Up. The Explanation Only Comes If You Ask.

If your car or home policy renews in Connecticut, the bill that lands after New Year’s has a new job. It has to say, at the top and in twelve-point bold type, that your premium went up. Then it has to tell you where to ask why.

Ask, and your insurer has twenty business days to explain it in words a normal person can follow.

That’s Section 7 of Public Act 26-69, and it starts January 1. It covers personal risk insurance, which in Connecticut means homeowners, tenants, private passenger non-fleet auto, and mobile manufactured homes, on any policy whose annual premium came in under $50,000 last period. So, yours.

On September 17 the Insurance Department published Bulletin PC-94-26, revised five days later, with the mechanics. Insurers have to take your request by mail, phone, and email. They may add an online form. They may not require it. And a phone answer has to address the specific components of your increase, documented and tagged in their system as a premium increase inquiry.

Somebody at that department has dealt with a carrier before.

Carriers are asked to file the revised notices through SERFF before December 1. The notices start reaching mailboxes January 1, 2027.

Now the part that isn’t in the announcement. None of this stops the increase.

Connecticut’s own numbers show that most increases arrive without anyone signing off on them. The department reviewed 76 personal auto rate filings in 2025. Eight were flex filings, and state law says an overall aggregate change between negative 6% and positive 6% needs no prior approval. All eight landed inside the band. Property damage liability and physical damage coverages are file and use, so approval was never required there either.

Statewide, personal auto came in at 4.1% for 2025: liability up 7.8%, physical damage down 1.1%. Better than the 8.9% average of 2024. Still an increase.

And the department’s own annual report says exactly why an explanation is worth having: “All rate filings are becoming more complicated as companies increase the use of General Linear Models (GLMs) and big data which include significantly more data variables.”

Translation: the thing setting your price gets harder to read every year, and until January nobody has to read it back to you.

Good law. Small law.

You can do this before January, because nothing has ever stopped you from asking. Call or email your carrier now and make them name a component: the base rate, your territory, the vehicle, your claim history, the tier they put you in. The statute does not invent the question. It puts a clock on the answer.

Two things to do when the January notices land.

First, check whether the explanation names anything. The act defines a reasonable explanation as enough information, in terms an average policyholder understands, to determine the basic nature of the increase. “Costs are rising across the industry” is not that. If your letter doesn’t clear the bar, say so in writing and cite the section.

Second, shop it anyway. Your premium billing notice has to reach you at least 30 days before renewal. That’s not a courtesy, that’s your shopping window. Pull three quotes inside it. Our auto insurance estimator gives you a number to argue from, our picks are the starting list, and the hub covers what each coverage buys.

An explanation you can follow is still an increase.

One more line from the same act, effective on passage. Section 8 swapped the National Automobile Dealers Association used car guide for J.D. Power’s in the formula a Connecticut insurer uses to value a totaled car, averaged against a second approved source. If a total loss offer looks light, ask which two sources produced it, then read up on the appraisal clause.

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