Sponsors (2)
The bill preserves homeowners’ ability to keep preferred NFIP status by treating private flood policies as continuous—reducing disputes and penalties—but raises risks of coverage gaps and shifts verification and administrative costs onto insurers, lenders, and FEMA.
Homeowners and renters: private flood insurance periods will count as continuous with NFIP coverage, preserving eligibility for preferred NFIP rates and avoiding surcharges, waiting periods, or lapse penalties when returning to the NFIP.
Homeowners, financial institutions, and FEMA: establishes a clear rule to accept private-market insurance history, reducing administrative disputes and uncertainty when proving continuous coverage.
Homeowners and renters: counting private policies as equivalent to NFIP coverage may leave households exposed to coverage gaps if private policies differ in scope or limits, despite maintaining ‘continuous’ status.
Financial institutions and insurers (and indirectly homeowners): increased complexity and documentation burdens to verify private policy histories could delay transactions and raise administrative costs.
FEMA and federal employees: will face an administrative burden to update guidance, systems, and training to implement acceptance of private-market records.
Based on analysis of 2 sections of legislative text.
Requires FEMA to treat uninterrupted private flood insurance the same as NFIP coverage for continuous-coverage determinations under flood-insurance law.
Introduced December 11, 2025 by Kathy Castor · Last progress December 11, 2025
Treats continuous private flood insurance the same as continuous coverage under the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) for purposes of flood-insurance continuity rules. FEMA must count any uninterrupted period a property was covered by either an NFIP policy or a private flood insurance policy as continuous coverage when applying statutory, regulatory, or administrative continuous-coverage requirements tied to mandatory flood insurance rules. This change affects property owners in flood-prone areas, mortgage lenders, insurers, and FEMA procedures by allowing private-market policies to satisfy continuity tests that previously relied on NFIP-only coverage records.