Nationwide Admitted It Read the Wrong Aerial Report. Seventeen States Have Now Written Rules About the Photo That Can End a Policy.

Tracy Gartenmann had been a Travelers customer for more than ten years when the letter came. The company was not going to renew her Austin homeowners policy. The reason was trees. Aerial images showed branches too close to the roof.

She paid about $3,000 to have them cut back. The policy renewed two days before it would have expired. Her verdict on the process, given to KUT reporter Audrey McGlinchy: It felt like an infringement on my rights.

She is one of several named homeowners in reporting published on May 13, 2025, and the useful thing about that set of cases is that they are not all the same case. A San Antonio homeowner was non-renewed by Nationwide over a roof rated in poor condition that had been replaced five or six years earlier. A homeowner near Galveston was told by State Farm to replace a roof that turned out to need cleaning, and was renewed once the state got involved. A Houston homeowner was told by American Mercury to replace a roof after an aerial assessment.

And then there is the one that produced a written admission. An Austin homeowner with a one year old roof was told it was in poor condition. After a state investigation, Nationwide said this: After further review, it was determined that our underwriting associate had initially reviewed the wrong aerial report.

Start with what the picture actually is

The word attached to this story almost everywhere is drone. The record is less tidy than that.

The vendors named in the Texas reporting are CAPE Analytics and Nearmap, imagery and analytics houses whose product is wide area capture and machine scoring, not a quadcopter over one address. The California Department of Insurance, in a March 28, 2025 release, describes insurers using imprecise drone or satellite photos to assess roof conditions, resulting in policies being incorrectly dropped due to erroneous data. So a regulator does use the word. But no document we loaded shows a drone flying over a named homeowner’s house, and none of the state rules turn on which craft took the photograph.

Which is the point. The homeowner is not told what took the picture, when it was taken, or what the software concluded from it. That is the gap every one of these state measures is trying to fill.

CAPE Analytics has conceded the underlying limitation in its own manual, quoted in the Texas reporting: roof conditions derived from drive-by or on-site inspections...can typically return more detailed analysis than aerial photos.

Pennsylvania went first and used the word prudent

On May 25, 2024, the Pennsylvania Insurance Department published Notice No. 2024-06 in the Pennsylvania Bulletin. Commissioner Michael Humphreys had a specific worry, and the notice names it: aerial images alone showing discoloration, streaking or other cosmetic damage should not be used as the sole evidence to support cancellation or nonrenewal actions.

What should an insurer do instead. The notice says that in the absence of unequivocal and material damage shown, it would be prudent for an insurer to conduct a physical inspection to validate the specific type of damage that the aerial image purports to evidence.

It cites the Unfair Insurance Practices Act at 40 P.S. 1171.1 through 1171.15, and in particular section 1171.5(a)(9), which allows a cancellation or non-renewal only where there has been a substantial change or increase in hazard in the risk. That is real law. The verbs in the notice are should and prudent.

Massachusetts, and the sentence about cosmetic damage

The Massachusetts Division of Insurance issued Bulletin 2025-02 on April 30, 2025, addressed to property and casualty insurers. It permits aerial imagery and then fences it. Insurers must ensure the clarity and accuracy of the images. And: Cosmetic damage that does not fundamentally reflect the structural quality of the property or its propensity for loss should not be the sole basis for a nonrenewal, cancellation, or declination. Where imagery does not clearly show degradation, insurers are expected to conduct additional underwriting reviews, possibly including physical inspections.

A note on how we read that one. The mass.gov copies of both the bulletin and its consumer advisory refuse automated readers, so the language above comes from a compliance alert that reproduces it, published on May 2, 2025. The state’s own URL is in the ledger as the document’s home.

Colorado wrote the most complete rule and admitted it binds nobody

On March 16, 2026 the Colorado Division of Insurance issued New Bulletin No. B-5.57, titled Division Position Concerning Use of Aerial Imagery by Insurers in Decision Making. We read all of it.

It is the best drafted document in this story. It applies to imagery whether the insurer built the tool or bought it from a vendor. It defines adverse actions to include nonrenewals, cancellations, and claim denials or reductions. It sets an age limit: for general underwriting and rating, imagery should be no more than twelve (12) months old. It tells insurers to weigh spatial resolution, orthorectification quality, elevation modeling and capture date, and warns that imagery that requires significant enlargement, extrapolation, or inference may warrant additional verification including physical inspection. It says visible conditions should not be relied upon as the sole basis for adverse actions and that insurers should distinguish cosmetic conditions from conditions that reflect material degradation. It says imagery does not unequivocally establish the existence or severity of a condition. And it says policyholders should be given a meaningful opportunity to dispute the accuracy of aerial imagery, correct errors, provide updated information, and submit proof of completed repairs or remediation.

Every requirement a homeowner would want is in there. So is this, in section I, before any of it: Bulletins are the Division’s interpretation of existing insurance law or general statements of Division policy. Bulletins themselves establish neither binding norms nor finally determine issues or rights.

The state that wrote the strongest rule wrote the disclaimer itself. Colorado has form on this. Our file on the state’s wildfire risk score disclosure law found a statutory right that arrived 92 days before the regulation that makes insurers actually mail the number.

Seventeen states, and who is counting them

Nearmap, one of the imagery vendors named in the Texas reporting, publishes a state by state tracker of the rules written about its own product. Read on August 17, 2026, it lists seventeen states with an adopted measure.

Three of them moved before anyone was paying much attention: Connecticut with a notice on March 19, 2024, Pennsylvania on May 25, 2024, and Louisiana with an act on May 22, 2024.

Then 2025 turned into a queue. New Hampshire on February 19, Maine on March 19, West Virginia with Bulletin IB25-02 on April 16, Massachusetts with Bulletin 2025-02 on April 30, Michigan with Bulletin 2025-12-INS on June 6, Alabama with Bulletin 2025-03 and Maryland with Bulletin 25-10 both on June 17, North Carolina with Bulletin 25-B-09 on August 11, Rhode Island with Bulletin 2025-3 on August 18, and Tennessee with Bulletin 25-03 on October 14, later updated on April 2 of this year.

Four more have landed in 2026, and two of those are statutes rather than guidance. Indiana passed House Bill 1260 on March 4 and Georgia passed House Bill 1344 on May 12, while Kentucky issued Bulletin 2026-01 on March 11 and Colorado issued B-5.57 on March 16.

We verified three of those seventeen against the regulator that issued them. Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Colorado are quoted above from the documents. The other fourteen are the vendor’s count and we are not asserting the contents of bulletins we did not read.

That split is the one to hold on to. Georgia, Indiana and Louisiana legislated, and a statute binds an insurer whether it likes the rule or not. The other fourteen are bulletins and notices, which tell an insurer what a regulator expects and leave the homeowner holding an expectation rather than a right when the letter lands in the mailbox.

California wrote the right and then lost the bill

Assembly Member Lisa Calderon introduced AB 75 in December 2024. It would have added section 2035 to the Insurance Code and given homeowners four concrete things: notice before aerial images are taken, a ban on terminating coverage over an image more than 180 days old, the image itself on request, and the chance to dispute its accuracy and show repairs before the decision took effect. The operative date written into the bill was July 1, 2026.

Commissioner Ricardo Lara backed it on March 28, 2025. No homeowner should be unaware that their property is being photographed or have no way to access the images insurers use to make coverage decisions, he said.

The bill cleared the Senate Insurance Committee 13 to 0 on July 16, 2025 and the Judiciary Committee 7 to 0 on July 10, 2025. On August 18, 2025 it went to the Senate Appropriations suspense file on a 7 to 0 vote. On August 29, 2025 it was held under submission in committee. That is where the official history stops. We pulled the status page on August 17, 2026 and there is no action after that date.

This matters because a run of secondary write-ups still repeat the July 1, 2026 operative date as if the right exists. It does not. That date is text from a bill that died on a suspense file.

Calderon refiled. AB 1559 was announced on January 9, 2026 with the same core rights and an operative date of July 1, 2027. As of this writing it is a bill, not a law.

What a homeowner can actually do today

Ask for the image. In most states nothing compels the insurer to hand it over, but the Nationwide case in Texas turned on somebody looking at the report and finding it was the wrong report. Nobody finds that without asking.

Ask when the picture was taken. Colorado has settled on twelve months as the outer edge for underwriting, and the vendor tracker shows other states landing between twelve and twenty four. A roof replaced after the capture date is an argument that wins on paper.

Complain to the state. All six Texas complaint files reviewed in the reporting exist because a homeowner filed. Two of those homeowners kept their coverage after the department got involved.

Separate cosmetic from structural in writing. Every rule quoted here draws that line, and it is the line insurers are being told not to cross on a photograph alone. Streaking on shingles is discoloration. Get a roofer to say so on letterhead.

And know the clock you are actually on. Non-renewal notice periods run by state, and the whole fight above happens inside that window. Our county map of where home insurance got dropped shows how much of the country is now living in it.