Four Clocks Run on an Eaton or Palisades Claim. Two Stop in January.

The 24-month ones run from the fire itself; the replacement-cost clock starts on the day your first check is issued.

On September 9 the Los Angeles County Counsel opened an investigation into how Farmers Insurance has handled claims from the January 2025 Eaton and Palisades fires. If yours is one of the claims still open, the useful thing to know about that announcement is what it isn’t: it is the county’s case, not yours, and it does not add a day to any deadline on your policy. Four clocks are running on your file. Two of them stop on the same morning, January 7, 2027.

You’re wondering whether that can really be your deadline when nobody at the company has mentioned it. It can, because these dates are set by the Insurance Code and the claims regulations rather than by an adjuster’s calendar. Below is each clock, the section that sets it, and the day it runs out.

Clock one: 24 months to sue

California writes the standard form fire policy itself, and Insurance Code section 2071 prints the suit limitation inside it: no action on the policy is sustainable unless it is commenced within 12 months after inception of the loss. The same section then doubles that. Where the loss relates to a state of emergency as defined in Government Code section 8558, the time limit to bring suit is extended to 24 months after inception of the loss.

Both fires started on January 7, 2025 — the Palisades Fire at 10:30 a.m. and the Eaton Fire at 6:18 p.m., according to CAL FIRE’s own incident records (Palisades, Eaton) — and Governor Gavin Newsom proclaimed a state of emergency in Los Angeles and Ventura counties that day. Twenty-four months from the inception of the loss is January 7, 2027.

Two things sit on that date, and the second one is the reason to get advice rather than to do this arithmetic yourself. The statute sets a floor beneath the policy, so your own policy is worth reading for the clause that repeats it. And the period does not run continuously: in Prudential-LMI Commercial Insurance v. Superior Court, 51 Cal.3d 674 (1990), the California Supreme Court held that the limitation is tolled from the time an insured gives notice of the damage under the policy’s notice provisions until coverage is denied. A claim that has been sitting undenied since 2025 and a claim denied in March do not stand in the same place on the calendar. Which place yours stands in is a lawyer’s question, and January 7, 2027 is the date to ask it well before.

Clock two: 24 months of living expenses, and the sentence for a house still standing

Section 2060 sets the floor under the money that pays for somewhere else to live. After a declared emergency, coverage for additional living expenses must run no less than 24 months from the inception of the loss. Same start, same January date.

It extends, but not by itself. The section says the insurer shall grant an extension of up to 12 additional months, for a total of 36, where a policyholder acting in good faith and with reasonable diligence hits delays outside their control — it names permit delays, missing construction materials and unavailable contractors. After that, further extensions of six months are to be provided for good cause. The Department of Insurance summarizes the same ladder in its own consumer alert as 36 months plus six-month extensions. Ask in writing before the 24 months are up, and name which of those causes is yours.

The sentence that matters most to a household whose house is still standing sits in the next paragraph of that section: a policy subject to the subdivision shall not limit the right to recovery if the insured home is rendered uninhabitable by a covered peril. Destroyed is not the test. Uninhabitable is. The same paragraph also lets an insurer offer a reasonable alternative remedy that addresses the property condition preventing habitation — fixing the condition, in other words, instead of paying you to live elsewhere while it stands.

Clock three: 36 months, counted from a different day

Section 2051.5 is the replacement-cost clock, and it is the one people miss, because it does not start at the fire. In a loss relating to a state of emergency, no policy may impose a time limit shorter than 36 months from the date the first payment toward the actual cash value is made to collect the full replacement cost, up to the policy limit. It carries its own six-month extensions for delays beyond the policyholder’s control.

So find the date your first actual-cash-value payment was issued and write it on the front of the file. That date plus 36 months is your rebuilding deadline, and on a claim that took months to pay anything it can land the better part of a year after the two January dates above. Three clocks, two start dates.

The four deadlines the insurer owes you

Those three are yours to watch. The next set belongs to the company, and they live in the fair claims settlement practices regulations at Title 10 of the California Code of Regulations, section 2695.

15 calendar days from notice of a claim: the insurer must acknowledge it, provide the necessary forms and instructions, and begin any necessary investigation (section 2695.5(e)).

40 calendar days from proof of claim: it must accept or deny the claim, in whole or in part (section 2695.7(b)).

Every 30 calendar days after that: if it needs longer, it owes you written notice of the need for more time, repeated every thirty calendar days until it decides or a lawsuit is served (2695.7(c)).

30 calendar days from acceptance: it must tender payment or otherwise perform its claim obligation (2695.7(h)).

There is a fifth, and it is the one that makes a complaint worth filing. Under section 2695.5(b), a company that receives an inquiry from the Department of Insurance about a claim has 21 calendar days to furnish a complete written response, with the documents and the claim file the Department asked for. Your letter to the company has no clock on it. The Department’s letter does.

The 60 percent figure everyone is quoting may not be yours

SB 495 was signed on October 10, 2025. It requires an insurer to pay 60 percent of the personal-property limit, up to $350,000, without an itemized claim, and to allow at least 100 days for proof of loss, as the Department’s announcement of the signing describes it. The figure is real, and it is the one circulating in Altadena group chats.

It may not reach this fire. The amended section 10103.7 says that on and after July 1, 2026, all policy forms issued or renewed by an insurer shall comply with the section in its entirety, and the bill text carries no clause reaching back to losses under policies written before that. A policy in force on January 7, 2025 was neither issued nor renewed under it.

What applied to that policy is the older rule, which the Department describes in the same announcement as existing law: 30 percent of the dwelling limit, capped at $250,000, paid without an itemized claim after a declared emergency and a total loss, with 60 days to complete the contents inventory and submit proof of loss. If a company has quoted you the newer figures, get the commitment in writing. If it has quoted you the older ones, that is what the section it was written under says.

What the county’s investigation does, and what it doesn’t

County Counsel Dawyn R. Harrison’s office is investigating Farmers under California’s Unfair Competition Law, over what the county’s announcement describes as delays, refusals to pay for testing and remediation of lead and other contamination, underpayments and denials of legitimate claims. Supervisor Kathryn Barger, in that announcement, said her constituents should not be walking back into homes holding lead and asbestos because an insurance company “won’t pay for the test that would prove it’s there.” That is the county’s allegation, and it is an allegation rather than a finding.

Farmers told CBS News Los Angeles that serving customers in difficult times is at the heart of what it does, that each claim is reviewed individually, that it operates in accordance with applicable laws and regulations, that it disagrees with the county’s characterization of its conduct, and that it will cooperate with the process.

It is the county’s second move of this kind in nine days; it sued State Farm on August 31 over Eaton and Palisades claims, which we wrote about then. Harrison’s statement says the office is committed to investigating Farmers’ actions and to making sure claimants are treated fairly.

What the announcement does not contain is a phone number, a form or a date for you. It names no consumer contact at all. An Unfair Competition Law action seeks restitution and civil penalties on the public’s behalf; it does not adjust your claim, and it moves none of the clocks above. Your own file has two free routes, and they run in a fixed order.

The two free routes, in the order they work

First, the complaint. File a Request for Assistance with the California Department of Insurance, on its own complaint page, or call the consumer hotline at (800) 927-4357 — the number the Department prints in its wildfire claimant guidance. The complaint is what triggers the 21-day rule above: the company then has three weeks to hand the Department a written account of how it has handled your claim.

Then, mediation. The Department runs a Residential Property and Earthquake Claims Mediation Program for residential fire claims in an emergency the governor declared. The thresholds are specific: the amount you claimed must exceed $7,500 and the amount still in dispute must exceed $2,000. Your insurer pays the mediator. The result is non-binding, and even after you agree to settle you have three business days to change your mind. You have to finish the complaint process first, then say in writing that you want mediation, on the election form the Department sends you.

Here is the edge case, and it is a wide one. The program excludes coverage questions, disagreements about how the policy should be read, statute-of-limitations disputes, allegations of bad faith, and any claim already in civil court. An argument about whether smoke residue is covered at all is not a mediation. An argument about what the agreed damage costs to put right is exactly one.

The testing bill is not law yet

The specific thing the county says Farmers refused — paying an industrial hygienist to test a house that is still standing — is the subject of a bill that has passed and has not taken effect. AB 1795, the Smoke Damage Recovery Act, was enrolled on September 4, after the Assembly concurred in the Senate’s amendments on August 31. It puts the cost of the sampling and testing on the insurer and bars cutting off living expenses until the property is restored and cleared for occupancy. As we reported, it and its companion AB 1642 become law without a signature if the governor does not return them by September 30. Until that happens, no section of the Insurance Code makes the company pay for the test.

The order to do it in

Today: write three dates on the front of the file. January 7, 2027 for the suit limitation. January 7, 2027 for the living-expense floor. Your first actual-cash-value payment plus 36 months for the replacement cost. If you cannot find that payment date, ask the company for it in writing, and note the day you asked.

Before the 24 months run out, and not after: ask in writing for the living-expense extension, naming the delay — permits, materials, contractors — that the section requires you to be encountering. An extension asked for in December 2026 is a different conversation than one asked for in February 2027.

If the file is stuck: file the Request for Assistance, then count 21 days. If the dispute is about the price of agreed damage rather than about coverage, elect mediation after that. And whatever the claim is doing in the autumn of 2026, take the suit limitation to a lawyer before January. That is the one date on this page nobody at the county, the Department or the company can move for you.

Statutes, regulations, deadlines and dollar figures above were read on September 10, 2026 from Insurance Code sections 2051.5, 2060, 2071 and 10103.7 and the text of SB 495 on the Legislature’s own site; from the text of sections 2695.5 and 2695.7 of Title 10 of the California Code of Regulations as published by the Legal Information Institute; from the Supreme Court of California’s 1990 opinion in Prudential-LMI Commercial Insurance v. Superior Court; from the California Department of Insurance’s wildfire claimant tips, its additional-living-expense alert, its complaint page, its mediation program page and its announcement of SB 495’s signing; from CAL FIRE’s Palisades and Eaton incident pages; from the Governor’s January 7, 2025 emergency proclamation announcement; from the county’s September 9 announcement; and from the legislative history of AB 1795. Where a linked source and this page disagree, the source wins.