From 18 October 2026, your insurance company has five business days to approve the mitigation scope on a water damage claim in Washington. If it rejects that scope, it now has to tell you why and itemize the disputed amounts in dollars.
That is a real change, and it lands on the part of a claim that causes homeowners the most grief: the wait between the water stopping and the dryers being allowed to run.
The rules come from rulemaking R 2025-05, adopted by the Washington Office of the Insurance Commissioner on 18 August 2026 and effective 18 October 2026. They amend the minimum standards every insurer has to meet when handling a claim.
What changes on 18 October
| Rule | What it requires |
|---|---|
| WAC 284-30-330(20) | The insurer must approve your scope of mitigation, or give you an approved scope, within five business days of receiving it, where your policy puts a duty on you to protect the property from further damage. |
| WAC 284-30-330(21) | If the insurer rejects your scope, it must explain why it falls short of technical or industry standards, including a dollar itemization of the disapproved items. |
| WAC 284-30-340 | You can request your claim file — reports, adjuster notes, estimates, photographs, communications — and receive it within 15 business days, and the insurer must tell you if anything was withheld or redacted. |
| WAC 284-30-330(4) | A reasonable investigation cannot rely solely on estimating software or database benchmarks. |
What the five-day clock actually means
A scope of mitigation is the plan for stopping the damage getting worse: what gets extracted, what gets removed, how many air movers and dehumidifiers, how long they run, what gets monitored. On a water loss it is written in the first day or two, and until it is agreed, the work that saves the building is the work nobody has authorized.
That is where houses get lost. Wet drywall and framing do not wait for an adjuster. Mold is a matter of days, not weeks, and every day of delay moves material from the dry-and-save column to the cut-out-and-replace column.
From 18 October the insurer has five business days from receiving the scope. Note business days — a scope sent on a Friday before a holiday weekend has a longer real-world clock than it looks.
If your scope is rejected
A rejection used to be able to arrive as a sentence. Under the new rule it has to come with the reasons the scope does not meet technical or industry standards, and a dollar itemization of what was disapproved.
That matters because it turns a disagreement into a list. You can see which line items are disputed and argue those, instead of being told the whole plan is too expensive.
You can ask for your claim file
Separately, you can request the file the insurer has built on your claim and expect it within 15 business days: estimates, photographs, adjuster notes, correspondence. The insurer can redact or withhold material only on narrow grounds, such as legal privilege or third-party financial information, and it has to tell you when it has done so.
If you are being told your estimate is out of line, the claim file is where you find out what it is being compared against.
What the new rules do not do
They do not give you a stated right to pick your own restoration company. That claim circulates widely in this industry and is usually traced to WAC 284-30-390, which governs vehicle repair facilities, not property restoration. Nothing in the amended property rules says an insurer cannot recommend a vendor.
What your policy says about who does the work, and what you agree to, is a question for your policy and your adjuster.
If a deadline is missed
These are minimum standards an insurer has to meet. If you think yours has not, the Washington Office of the Insurance Commissioner takes consumer complaints on 800-562-6900, 8:30am to 4:30pm weekdays, and online.
Keep the dates. When you sent the scope, when you heard back, what the response said. The clock only helps if somebody wrote down when it started.
Where we fit
We write mitigation scopes on water losses across King, Pierce, Snohomish and Thurston counties and deal with adjusters every day. If your house is wet now, call 206-621-7774 — the scope is the first thing we produce, and the sooner it is in front of your insurer, the sooner that five-day clock starts.
This is a plain summary of a published Washington rule, current at 5 October 2026. It is not legal advice, and it is not a substitute for reading your own policy.