Louisiana Property Study Guide

Louisiana property law is organised around a single problem — insuring the most hurricane- and flood-exposed coastline in the country — and almost every distinctive rule on this exam traces back to it. The state’s residual insurer is required by statute to be more expensive than the market it backstops. Its rate filings take effect by the Commissioner’s silence. And its catastrophe machinery has a shelf life you need to know about, because one of the most-quoted numbers on this page expires in 2027.

Rate regulation — thirty days of silence

Louisiana is a file-and-use state operating on a deemed-approved basis. Under R.S. 22:1451, a rate filing takes effect unless the Commissioner objects within 30 days.

Read that as an active window rather than a passive one: the Commissioner’s silence is the approval, and thirty days is the number to hold.

The substantive standard is constant: rates must not be excessive, inadequate, or unfairly discriminatory. Learn that triplet verbatim; items are routinely built by dropping one of the three.

Credit information — a list of forbidden characteristics

R.S. 22:1504 does not ban insurance credit scoring. It fences it, and the fence is a list.

An insurer may not use income, gender, ZIP code, ethnicity, religion, marital status or nationality.

That is a list of characteristics, not a prohibition on the practice. Exam distractors are built from the gap: “a Louisiana insurer may not use credit information” is false; “a Louisiana insurer may not use ZIP code” is true. A candidate who filed the rule away as a ban will pick the wrong one, reliably, because the ban sounds more protective and therefore more plausible.

Louisiana Citizens — designed to be expensive

When the voluntary market declines a property risk, the insurer of last resort is Louisiana Citizens Property Insurance Corporation (R.S. 22:2291 et seq.). Citizens absorbed both of the state’s older residual mechanisms and now runs the Coastal Plan and the FAIR Plan.

Now the rule that carries more marks than anything else on this exam.

R.S. 22:2303 — the 10% rule. Citizens’ rates “shall exceed by at least ten percent” the higher of (a) its actuarially justified rate or (b) the highest rates charged by the assessable insurers meeting the statutory market-share thresholds — and that comparison is made in each parish.

Three things to hold. At least ten per cent above. The higher of two benchmarks, not the average. And per parish — Louisiana uses parishes, not counties, and here the geography is operative rather than cosmetic.

Citizens describes itself in the same terms the statute imposes: it “is the insurance of last resort and is state-mandated to be more costly than private property insurance companies.” The design intent is the giveaway. Citizens is built to be unattractive, so that any voluntary carrier can undercut it and policies flow back out — which is the mechanism called depopulation, and which Citizens is statutorily directed to facilitate.

An item describing Citizens as competitively priced has the policy exactly backwards.

The number with an expiry date

R.S. 22:2303(D)(1) caps Citizens’ rates in markets the Commissioner determines to be noncompetitive — but only until 31 December 2027.

Flag that when you learn it. It is a temporary provision inside a permanent statute, and it will lapse inside the working life of most people reading this. If you are studying after 2027, check whether it was extended before you rely on it.

Insure Louisiana, and fortified roofs

Two programme names worth recognising.

The Insure Louisiana Incentive Program, created by Act 754 of the 2022 Regular Session and implemented through Regulation 125, offers matching capital grants to insurers willing to write Louisiana property risk and take policies out of Citizens. Its eligibility bar is capital-based — minimum capital and surplus, a minimum risk-based capital ratio, a rating floor.

And the Louisiana Fortify Homes Program funds FORTIFIED roof retrofits. The exam-relevant half is the consequence: insurers must give premium discounts for FORTIFIED designations. That links a construction standard directly to rating, which is unusual enough to be tested.

Surplus lines — the door above this one

Some property risk cannot be placed in the admitted market at all. Louisiana’s route to non-admitted carriers requires two credentials stacked: an existing Property & Casualty or Accident & Health licence, held for two years, plus a separate Surplus Lines authority.

And it imposes a duty before you may use it: a diligent effort to place the risk in the admitted market first. Surplus lines is what remains after the admitted market — including Citizens — has genuinely been tried.