The Right to Appraisal Is Guaranteed. Access to It Is Not.

Texas made appraisal mandatory in personal auto policies as of January 1 of this year. Illinois just passed its own version. Three hail files I have direct visibility into ran into the same carrier this year, and what happened in them says more about the limits of that right than any statute summary will.

What the law actually did

Senate Bill 458 passed the Texas Legislature in 2025 and created Chapter 1813 of the Texas Insurance Code. Every personal automobile and residential property policy delivered, issued for delivery, or renewed in Texas on or after January 1, 2026 has to contain an appraisal provision. Either the policyholder or the insurer can demand appraisal unilaterally. Appraisal resolves the amount of loss only, not whether something is covered, and the resulting award is binding except in narrow circumstances such as fraud or material mistake. Commercial policies and TWIA are excluded.

This matters because the clause had been disappearing. One of the largest personal auto carriers in the state successfully filed to remove appraisal from its Texas auto policies for partial vehicle loss in 2015, and without a statutory requirement, regulators had no authority to put it back. SB 458 was the product of years of work by the Auto Body Association of Texas, public adjuster Robert McDorman, and Texas Watch.

The Texas Department of Insurance has not finished the implementing rules. TDI proposed new sections at 28 TAC 5.9800 through 5.9806 under Docket 2862, filed with the Secretary of State on April 27, held a public hearing on June 2, and closed written comments on June 8. As of this writing the rules have not been adopted. The proposal sets September 1, 2026 as the compliance deadline for insurers, which means carriers have to file amended policy forms for review before then and the adoption has to land first. A separate TDI proposal would add notice of the appraisal right to the Auto Bill of Rights that every Texas insurer hands policyholders, with a proposed date of November 1, 2026.

So the statute has been live since January while the rules governing how it actually operates are still being written. Every claim filed this year, including the three below, is running in that gap.

Illinois is roughly eighteen months behind. HB 4160 passed the House 73 to 38 on April 14 in amended form, cleared the Senate 56 to 2 on May 28 after a further rewrite, and the House concurred 115 to 0 on May 31. It was sent to Governor Pritzker on June 26. As of this writing he has not acted on it, and under Illinois procedure that decision lands in late August. Under the version that passed, either party can submit a written demand, each side names an appraiser within seven calendar days, and the appraisers select an umpire if they cannot agree. If it becomes law, Illinois joins Texas and Washington, both of which enacted right-to-appraisal laws in 2025. Similar bills have been introduced in Ohio, Minnesota, and Louisiana.

One caution, and it is not a small one. The Texas rules are not final yet, and published summaries of the deadlines currently disagree with each other. Do not take a demand window off a blog post, including this one. Read the appraisal provision in the actual policy, check the TDI rules as adopted, and do it early in the claim rather than in month three.

Three files

Three shops. Three separate markets. One carrier. Same year.

I have direct visibility into all three. Details are generalized on purpose, and the numbers are rounded. Two of these are in active appraisal.

File one. Estimate around 22,000 dollars. The shop reduced it slightly, on purpose, to keep the vehicle under the total loss threshold and off a salvage bid, because the owner wanted to keep the car. The carrier paid under 5,000.

File two. Carrier appraisal came in at roughly 2,000. Documented damage north of 8,000.

File three. Carrier appraisal roughly 2,000. Shop's number 10,000.

In all three, the vehicle was inspected by a third party appraiser rather than a staff adjuster.

In two of them, that appraiser met the shop at the vehicle, walked it, and agreed with the shop's numbers at the car. The figure that came back after the file went up the chain bore no relationship to what was agreed.

In the third, the appraiser never looked at the vehicle with the shop at all. That inspection happened at the customer's house, in rain and overcast sky, and the shop was not present for it. There was no agreement to depart from because there was never a joint inspection.

When the shops pushed, the carrier's position was that it trusts its appraisers, will not send them back out, and will not modify what it is willing to pay. In one file the policyholder reported being told they could get a lawyer if they wanted, and that no additional money would be paid.

One shop, two months in, invoiced storage. No response to that either.

Complaints have been filed with the Texas Department of Insurance on all three, by the shops and by the vehicle owners.

Two things that cannot both be true

The stated position is that the carrier trusts its appraiser and therefore will not re-inspect.

On the two files where a joint inspection happened, the amount being paid is not the appraiser's number. It was changed after the file left the appraiser's hands, by someone who never saw the vehicle.

Those two statements do not survive each other. If the appraiser's judgment is authoritative, pay what the appraiser agreed to at the car. If it is not authoritative, then trusting the appraiser cannot be the reason for refusing to look again.

I want to be careful here, because none of this requires anyone in the chain to have acted in bad faith. Look at the structure instead.

The appraiser cannot commit to anything. A third party appraiser is not the payer. They cannot issue a binding written agreement to a shop at the vehicle, so an agreement reached at the car leaves no record and creates no obligation. Everyone shakes hands and the handshake has no legal weight.

A second trip is usually an unpaid trip. Independent appraisal firms are commonly compensated on a flat fee per assignment. One file, one fee, regardless of how many times someone drives out to the vehicle. That arrangement is not hidden and it is not unusual, but follow it through. If the fee is identical whether the appraiser inspects once or five times, every return visit is worked at a loss. The person best positioned to correct a bad first inspection is the one person in the chain who is paid nothing to do it.

Note what that does to the stated reason. The carrier says it will not send the appraiser back because it trusts the appraiser. That is a statement about confidence. The actual constraint may have nothing to do with confidence and may not even sit with the carrier. It may sit in a vendor fee schedule that neither the policyholder nor the shop will ever see.

The desk never saw the vehicle. The person setting the payment has no way to know whether the inspection happened under a light in a bay or in a rainstorm in a driveway. The file does not usually say. Nothing in the process forces it to say.

Every individual link in that chain is defensible on its own terms. The output is a fifth of what the car needs.

That is worse than misconduct, not better. Misconduct is an exception and exceptions get corrected. A structure produces the same result every time without anybody having to decide to do it, and nobody in it is ever personally wrong.

This is not a valuation dispute

Appraisal, by statute, resolves disputes about the amount of loss. The framing everyone accepts is that the carrier has a number, the shop has a number, and reasonable professionals differ.

On these files that framing is wrong, and shops keep conceding it.

The carrier does not have a low number. It has the output of an inspection method that cannot produce a number at all. Hail damage is visible when a dent distorts a defined reflected line on the panel. In rain, or under flat overcast, there is no defined line on the panel. There is nothing present for a dent to bend.

Rain is worse than overcast, and it was a factor here. Water sitting on a panel does three things at once. It fills the shallow dents, which are the majority on most hail cars. It throws its own scattered highlights across the surface, so the panel is covered in bright points that have nothing to do with the metal underneath. And it destroys whatever clean reflection the paint had to begin with. You are not looking at a compromised panel. You are looking at water.

I have stood next to an appraiser at a vehicle, put my finger on a dent, and been told they could not see it.

Sometimes that is true. In bad enough conditions a person genuinely cannot see what you are pointing at, and that is not their fault, it is the fault of where the inspection is happening. But I am not going to pretend that is always what is going on. "I do not see it" is not a claim that can be checked, it costs the person saying it nothing, and it happens a great deal more often on the panels that are expensive than on the ones that are not.

The distinction matters less than it seems, because the remedy is identical either way. If they truly cannot see it, the conditions are the problem and the answer is to look again somewhere with light. If they can see it and are declining to say so, the conditions are the cover and the answer is still to look again somewhere with light. Either way, the request is the same request, and a refusal to re-inspect removes the only way to tell the two apart.

That is why the refusal matters more than the count. Anyone can be wrong at a vehicle once. Refusing to go back is what converts a bad inspection into a final number. I have written before about how the same car produces a different document depending on where it was scoped, and the gap runs into the thousands.

So the argument is not that their count is low. The argument is that no count was established, and that the request to establish one under adequate conditions has been refused.

That is a different claim, it is provable, it does not require impugning anyone, and it is the argument the repair side is uniquely equipped to make. An appraiser can dispute your count. Nobody can dispute that a reflection requires a light source.

The part the legislature looked at and left alone

Here is where the third file matters more than the two that went to appraisal.

That policyholder did not demand appraisal. Not because they were satisfied and not because nobody explained the right to them. They were unwilling to pay for their own appraiser, and the shop cannot pay it for them.

Under both the Texas framework and the Illinois bill, each side pays for its own appraiser and the umpire cost is split. So the policyholder who has already gone two months without a usable settlement, who is driving a damaged car, who has a deductible sitting in front of them, is now told the way to fix it is to write another check today with no guarantee of what comes back.

On a spreadsheet that decision is easy. A gap of six or eight thousand dollars against an appraiser costing some hundreds is obvious. In an actual household after ten weeks of being ignored, it is not obvious at all, and a meaningful number of people will take the check and go.

^† Illinois considered and removed it. House Floor Amendment No. 1, adopted April 14, 2026, struck the provision requiring the insurer to pay all appraisal and umpire fees when the award came back 10 percent or more favorable to the policyholder.

Illinois legislators saw this. The introduced version of HB 4160 would have shifted all appraisal and umpire fees to the insurer when the final award came in at least 10 percent more favorable to the policyholder than the insurer's last written offer prior to appraisal. That is a precise fix for exactly this problem, and it puts the risk on the party whose number was wrong.

It was removed by House Floor Amendment No. 1, adopted April 14. That is not an inference from press coverage. The General Assembly's own synopsis of the amendment states plainly that it removes the provision requiring the insurer to pay all appraisal and umpire fees when the award is 10 percent or more favorable to the policyholder. The same amendment stripped the appraisal standards advisory board and third-party claims, and replaced specified civil penalties with administrative penalties imposed by the Department of Insurance.

The bill went to the governor on June 26 and has not been acted on. Whatever he does, the cost provision is already gone.

So the remedy exists in both states and it is unevenly available in both, in the same direction, in favor of whoever can most easily absorb a few hundred dollars and more waiting.

I am not going to pretend to know what any individual carrier intends. I will say what the incentive structure produces. If underpaying is free and contesting costs the policyholder money up front, then the smaller the underpayment the safer it is. A carrier does not need a policy of underpaying to end up paying a quarter of documented need with regularity. It just needs a process where nobody is ever penalized for it.

What to do when you hit this

None of this is legal advice and I am not a lawyer. This is what shops in the middle of it can actually do.

Document the inspection, not the agreement

You cannot get a written agreement from an IA appraiser before the file goes up. Stop trying. Document the conditions instead, the same day, in an email to the carrier rather than the IA firm.

• Date and time of inspection.
• Who performed it, the IA firm, and the adjuster's Texas license number, which they have and which belongs in your file.
• Where the vehicle was inspected and what lighting was present or absent.
• Weather at that time and place, screenshotted, because that is timestamped third party data and it costs you nothing.
• Your number as of that date.
• A request for re-inspection in a controlled environment, stated as a methodology issue rather than a disagreement about the count.

You will probably not get a reply. It does not matter. The email exists, it went out the day of, and every refusal after it is a refusal of a specific documented request rather than a refusal of a complaint.

Ask for the appraiser's report

It should state where and under what conditions the vehicle was inspected. If it does not say, note the absence.

Your photos are the strongest thing you control

A well built photo package documents the vehicle without anyone standing next to it arguing the other direction, and it is frequently the difference between a supplement that gets paid and one that does not. That is worth treating as a skill rather than a chore, and it is worth training everyone in the building on it rather than leaving it to whoever is closest to the car.

Understand who owns the right

Appraisal belongs to the policyholder, not the shop. You cannot invoke it. What you can do is make sure the customer knows it exists, knows roughly what it costs, and knows the clock is running. Do that in writing early, not at month three when they are already exhausted.

Know that appraisal is not the only lever, and it has its own clock

Chapter 542 of the Texas Insurance Code governs prompt handling of claims and carries its own deadlines and its own remedies, separate from anything appraisal does. A TDI complaint is a third track. These run in parallel. Most shops only know about one of them.

Write the file so a stranger can follow it

Appraisal is decided by two people who were not at the vehicle and possibly an umpire who has never spoken to anyone involved. They get paper. An estimate that makes sense to the person who wrote it is not the same document as an estimate that makes sense to a neutral third party reading it cold. Line note every operation. State why, not just what. If a line would make a stranger ask a question, answer the question on the line.

What I actually think

The law is a real improvement and the people who spent years getting it passed deserve the credit. Before SB 458 a carrier could simply file the clause out of the policy, and one of them did.

But a right you cannot afford to exercise functions as a suggestion. The three files above are not a story about a bad carrier. They are a demonstration that the current design lets a carrier pay a fraction of documented need and be structurally safe on the smaller files, because the cure prices itself out first at the bottom, which is exactly where most hail claims live.

Illinois had the fix drafted. It came out on the floor in April. If it comes up again in Texas, in Ohio, in Minnesota, in Louisiana, that provision is the one worth showing up for. Everything else in these bills is process. Cost shifting is the part that decides whether the process is available to the person who needs it.

Until then, the only piece of this any of us controls is the file. Write it so it survives someone reading it cold.

Frequently asked questions

This article describes general industry practice and the author's own observations. It is not legal advice. Policy terms, statutory deadlines, and administrative rules vary and change. Anyone dealing with a specific claim should review their own policy and consult a qualified attorney.