Riverside County FAIR Plan policies jumped 509% in four years as insurers pulled back from wildfire risk

Citrus Belt Review: The California FAIR Plan's county data tells a story the statewide premium number flattens out. San Bernardino County held 65,132 FAIR Plan policies as of September 2025, up from 31,211 four years earlier — a 109% rise. Riverside's near-quintupling pushed it past most coastal counties in raw policy count. The two counties together hold roughly 122,000 policies, well over a sixth of the FAIR Plan's 642,010 statewide total.

FEMA's National Risk Index rates both counties "Very High" for wildfire exposure, and the growth concentrates in the foothill and mountain belt — Lake Arrowhead, Big Bear, Crestline, Idyllwild — not the flat valley floor where the bulk of the region's homeowners and its warehouse base sit.

The FAIR Plan is structurally a stopgap: it offers narrower coverage at higher cost than the admitted market it is replacing, and its statewide exposure has reached $750 billion as of March 2026. For the IE, the pattern marks a widening split between a low-risk economic core that still draws private carriers and a high-country residential belt increasingly dependent on the state backstop — a fault line that becomes a housing-market question as those policies compound.