Can Roommates Share Car Insurance?

The Contract Has No Word for “Roommate”

Most private passenger policies sold in the United States are built from the Insurance Services Office Personal Auto Policy form, though carrier forms vary and yours may read differently. Everything about shared housing is settled on the specimen form’s first page, in a definitions section that runs about forty lines and never once mentions a lease.

Two sentences do the work. The form says that “you” and “your” refer to the named insured shown in the declarations and to the spouse if a resident of the same household. It then defines a “family member” as a person related to you by blood, marriage, or adoption who is a resident of your household, and adds that this includes a ward or foster child.^[1] Read those two definitions against a rented house shared by two coworkers who met on a listing site, and the result is immediate: one of them is the named insured, and the other one is a stranger to the contract.

Notice what the form is actually keying on. Residency alone is not enough — a resident who is not a spouse and not a relative gets nothing. Relation alone is not enough either, because a brother who lives across town is not a “family member” under this form. The definition requires both conditions at once, and a roommate satisfies exactly one of them.

The form even demonstrates how carefully it tracks residency when it wants to. When a spouse stops being a resident of the same household, the form keeps treating them as “you” until the earlier of three events: the end of 90 days following the change of residency, the effective date of another policy listing the spouse as a named insured, or the end of the policy period.^[1] That is a drafted, three-branch grace period for one relationship. There is no equivalent sentence anywhere in the form for a person who simply lives with you.

The Trap Is Not Where People Look for It

Start with the piece that works, because most of the internet gets this backwards. Part A of the specimen form lists who is an “insured” for liability, and the second entry on that list is any person using “your covered auto.”^[1] Not any relative. Not any listed driver. Any person. Hand your roommate the keys with permission, and the liability coverage on that scheduled vehicle follows the vehicle to them.

So the naive fear — that a housemate behind the wheel is instantly driving uninsured — is not what the base form says. The real failures sit one layer out, and there are three of them.

The first is the roommate’s own policy.Every personal auto policy carries a definition of “non-owned auto,” and the form defines it as a private passenger auto, pickup, van, or trailer not owned by or furnished or available for the regular use of you or any “family member”while in your custody or being operated by you.^[1] Part A repeats the same boundary as an exclusion: there is no liability coverage for any vehicle, other than your covered auto, that is owned by you or furnished or available for your regular use.^[1]

Now walk the dominoes, and note first what the test measures. The Risk & Insurance Education Alliance puts it plainly: an auto is “available” for regular use any time the insured has regular access to it, any time they do not have to ask permission for each and every use — and it names cars owned by other members of the household, “like roommates or domestic partners,” as a specific example of vehicles the exclusion strips out.^[4] The two variables in that sentence are frequency of access and whether permission has to be sought trip by trip. A parking spot is evidence of access, not the test itself.

So the facts point in opposite directions depending on how the house actually runs. A spare key on the hook, a standing arrangement to take the car to work when it rains, and a pattern of use nobody clears in advance put the car squarely inside “furnished or available for regular use.” A car the housemate has borrowed twice in a year, each time by asking for that specific trip and getting a yes for that specific trip, sits outside it. Because a shared address is what supplies the standing access in the first place, the first fact pattern is the ordinary one in a shared house — which is why the roommate’s own liability policy so often contributes nothing when they drive your car, and why the carrier puts that in writing.

The second failure is physical damage.Liability follows the vehicle under Part A, but Part D pays for damage to “your covered auto” and to a “non-owned auto,” and that second term carries the same regular-use carve-out. Part D also excludes loss to a non-owned auto used by you or a family member without a reasonable belief of being entitled to do so.^[1] Between the two, a roommate who wrecks a housemate’s car is not reaching anyone’s collision coverage except the owner’s.

The third failure runs in the opposite direction.The extended protections a policy gives for borrowed and rented vehicles — the reason you can rent a car on vacation without buying the counter coverage — are written for “you” and for “family members.” A roommate listed as a driver on your policy is neither, so those protections do not travel with them. Being added as a driver changes how the policy is priced; it does not change who the definitions section says you are.^[4]

Our companion research on who can drive your car under your insurance works through the permissive-use doctrine in more depth, and whether insurance follows the car or the driver traces the primary-versus-excess hierarchy that decides which policy pays first.

Four Mechanisms That Actually Put a Roommate on a Policy

The industry did not ignore the fact that Americans increasingly live with people they are not married or related to. It solved the problem the way insurance always solves problems: by drafting forms that amend the definitions section. There are four distinct tools, they do different things, and picking the wrong one produces confident, documented, worthless coverage.

Joint Ownership Coverage, ISO form PP 03 34 09 18,is the only one that makes two unrelated housemates genuine equals on a policy. Its definitions section states that for the coverage provided by the endorsement, “you” and “your” refer to two or more individuals, other than spouses, residing in the same household, or to “nonresident relatives,” who jointly own a private passenger auto or an eligible pickup or van.^[2] That first clause is written for roommates. Umialik Insurance Company’s filing summary of the 2018 revisions describes the change in the same terms, noting that ISO amended the definitions to cover two or more individuals other than spouses residing in the same household who jointly own an eligible vehicle, and replaced the older phrase “husband and wife” with the gender-neutral “spouses.”^[3]

The price of admission is the title. The endorsement schedules the jointly owned vehicles by description and lists the joint owners by name, which means the car has to actually be titled in both names before the form has anything to attach to. It also adds a Part A exclusion, unless the schedule or declarations say it does not apply, removing liability coverage for the use of any vehicle other than “your covered auto” by a nonresident relative or a family member of one.^[2]

The Additional Resident Of Your Household endorsement, ISO form PP 33 37, takes the opposite approach: instead of rewriting who owns the car, it rewrites who counts as a relative. Introduced in the 2018 Personal Auto Policy program, the form carries a schedule naming the additional resident and amends the definition of “family member” to include that person, so that any coverage the policy affords a family member now extends to them.^[3] That is the single cleanest fix for the coverage gap described above, because it hands the roommate the borrowed-and-rented-vehicle protection the base form reserves for blood relatives. It comes with two documented limits: it does not provide the automatic coverage a family member would get on a newly purchased vehicle, and the named insured must notify the insurer within 30 days of any change in the scheduled resident’s residency.^[4]

The Extended Non-Owned Coverage endorsement, ISO form PP 03 06 01 05, attacks the regular-use exclusion head on. Its Part A amendment states that Exclusion B.2.b does not apply to the coverages provided by the endorsement, and that the insurer will provide liability coverage for any vehicle, other than “your covered auto,” which is furnished or available for the regular use of the named individual.^[4] That is the exact sentence that fixes a housemate’s car. The catch is in the schedule: coverage runs only to the individual shown, not to that person’s spouse or family members unless the schedule says so, so in a house where the access runs both ways, both people have to be named on their respective policies.

Listed-driver status on the vehicle owner’s policyis the fourth and by far the most common. It is not an endorsement and it does not add a definition; it simply puts the roommate’s name, license number, and driving record in front of the underwriter so the premium is calculated against the real population of people who can reach the keys. It is worth being clear about what it buys, because it is routinely oversold: the liability grant for a permissive user was already there under Part A. What listing does is remove the insurer’s ability to argue later that the risk it priced was not the risk it insured.^[1] Our step-by-step research on adding someone to your car insurance covers what the carrier will ask for.

Why Joint Titling Is the Hinge, Not the Shared Lease

The reason a married couple can cover two cars on one policy is not that they share an address. It is that the form hands a resident spouse the status of “you,” and “your covered auto” then means any vehicle shown in the declarations of the policy that person is a named insured on.^[1] Two roommates want the same result, and the only route the form offers is to give both of them that status — which Joint Ownership Coverage does, on the condition that they jointly own the described vehicle.

This is where a paperwork decision at the DMV counter becomes an insurance decision years later. Two unrelated people can hold a vehicle title together, and the form of co-ownership the title records — the choice a title application typically presents as joint tenancy with right of survivorship versus tenancy in common — is what later decides who owns the car when one owner dies and how a total-loss check is apportioned between two owners. Those are questions of state title, probate, and claims-settlement law, and this report does not resolve them. Which forms of co-ownership are even available on a motor vehicle title, how the names have to be joined on the application, and what an insurer does with a two-owner settlement are all set by your state’s motor vehicle agency and insurance department, and the reliable answer is in that agency’s own title application instructions rather than in any generic description of the two forms. The insurance point is narrower and it is firm: the endorsement attaches to ownership, so the title has to change before the policy can.^[2]

There is also a quiet exposure in becoming co-insureds that housemates rarely think about before signing. The Risk & Insurance Education Alliance notes that personal umbrella and some auto policies exclude liability coverage for one “you” injuring another “you,” and that while state law often bars spouses from suing each other, those protections frequently do not extend to unmarried co-insureds.^[4] Two roommates on one policy have, in effect, agreed that if one injures the other in the shared car, the coverage that would normally respond may not. The same source also flags a procedural point worth an extra ten minutes: when a policy is issued jointly to two unmarried people, one cannot legally sign on the other’s behalf, so both signatures belong on the application and on the uninsured motorist selection forms.^[4]

If the two of you are not going to co-own anything, our research on getting insurance on a car you don’t own walks through the insurable-interest statutes that decide whether a carrier may write the policy at all.

Access Is the Rating Variable, Not Intent

Coverage and disclosure are two separate questions, and conflating them is how people talk themselves into trouble. You can conclude, correctly, that your roommate has no defined status in your policy’s definitions section — and then draw the incorrect conclusion that there is therefore nothing to tell the insurer.

An underwriter is not pricing your intentions. They are pricing an environment: a specific vehicle, garaged at a specific address, reachable by a specific set of adults. The promise that a housemate will never drive the car is not a term the policy contains and not a condition the underwriter can enforce, and it is falsified by any of a dozen ordinary Tuesdays — moving the car so another one can get out, a run to the pharmacy, a ride to the emergency room. Because the liability grant in Part A reaches any person using your covered auto, the carrier is on the hook in every one of those scenarios.^[1] It follows that the carrier wants the name.

State regulators put the consequence in blunt consumer language. The Washington State Office of the Insurance Commissioner states that insurance companies can deny coverage for claims if a licensed driver in your home is not listed on your policy and has an accident in your vehicle.^[13] That guidance is written around teen drivers, but the operative phrase is “a licensed driver in your home,” and it is not qualified by relation.

What the carrier does with the name is set by its own filed rules, and carriers differ. Depending on those rules and on your state, a disclosed housemate is rated as a regular operator, recorded as a non-driving or deferred resident who is covered elsewhere, or excluded by signed endorsement where the state permits it. Those three classifications have very different premium effects and very different consequences at claim time, and choosing among them is the carrier’s job, not yours. Your obligation is the one on the paperwork: the application and the renewal questionnaire ask specific questions about who lives at the garaging address and who has access to the vehicles, and those questions get complete, accurate answers. A carrier that does not ask you to list a non-driving resident has not created a duty to volunteer one; a carrier that asks who resides at the address has, and answering that question incompletely is the act that creates the exposure.

How an Undisclosed Housemate Surfaces

The assumption behind most non-disclosure is that the insurer has no practical way to know. That assumption was reasonable in 1995 and is not reasonable now, because a data vendor now sells carriers a product whose entire stated job is to name the drivers in a household that the applicant did not.

The Comprehensive Loss Underwriting Exchange is the oldest of them. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau lists it as a LexisNexis Risk Solutions product collecting and reporting up to seven years of auto insurance claims plus seven years of home and personal property claims, used by insurers for pricing and underwriting decisions.^[14] The Washington State Office of the Insurance Commissioner enumerates the fields a report carries: name, date of birth, policy number, date of loss, type of loss, amount the company paid, and either the property address for a homeowner claim or the specific vehicle information for an auto claim.^[12] Be precise about what that file is and is not. Both the federal listing and the state regulator describe C.L.U.E. as a claims history used for underwriting and pricing. Neither describes it as a roster of who lives at an address, and neither says your own report carries another resident’s entries. C.L.U.E. prices the claims you have already had. Finding an undisclosed housemate is a different product’s job.

That product is the second category, and it is built for this exact purpose. LexisNexis markets a Driver Discovery line whose stated function is to “reveal potential additional drivers in an applicant’s household who may not have been disclosed by the applicant.” Its Additional Driver Discovery product identifies potential additional drivers in a household along with the identities associated with them, and is offered in all 50 states and the District of Columbia; a companion Youthful Driver Discovery product alerts a carrier when a newly licensed driver aged 15 to 25 appears at a given address.^[15] The vendor also states that Driver Discovery is not a consumer report under the Fair Credit Reporting Act and cannot be used as a factor in determining eligibility for credit, insurance, employment, or other permissible purposes — which is a meaningful distinction: the tool generates the question the carrier asks you, rather than the decision itself.^[15]

The third moment is the claim. LexisNexis reports that a claim involving an unlisted driver carries a 1.6x surcharge, or a 13 percent increase in property damage loss cost relativity, and that the figure rises to 1.8x, or 31 percent, where the unlisted driver was not living in the household and carried no insurance at the time of the claim.^[16] Numbers like that are why carriers pay for detection at all: the unlisted driver is not a paperwork irregularity to them, it is a measured loss-cost differential.

You can read the file yourself. Both the CFPB listing and the Washington regulator confirm the Fair Credit Reporting Act right to a free copy of your C.L.U.E. report on request, and the Washington guidance describes disputing an inaccurate entry through the LexisNexis consumer center, with a response due within 30 days and the option to attach an explanatory statement that appears on future reports.^{[14] [12]} Our research on whether other insurers can see your claims covers the statutory mechanics of that file in detail.

Five Things an Insurer Can Do, and Rescission Is the Last One

Most people picture the downside of a discovered roommate as a letter: a rate increase, maybe a non-renewal at the end of the term. That is one point on a range of five, and it is the cheap end of it.

Lay the five out, because they are genuinely different acts. The carrier can re-rate the policy for the corrected household and bill the premium difference. It can nonrenew at the end of the term. It can cancel forward, which ends a valid contract on a future date and leaves everything before that date intact. It can deny the specific claim while the policy otherwise stands. Or it can rescind, which is a different instrument entirely: the contract is treated as void from inception, the premiums go back, and the legal position is that there was never any insurance at all.

Which of the five lands on a given household is decided by three things, and they are separate tests. First, what the application and the renewal questionnaire actually asked — a misrepresentation needs a question to misrepresent. Second, whether the true answer would have changed the underwriting decision or the premium, which is the materiality question. Third, what the state’s misrepresentation statute requires before a policy can be voided rather than merely re-rated. An omission can clear one of those and fail another, and that is the mechanism that separates a corrected-premium letter from a rescission notice.

California Insurance Code § 331 is one sentence long: “Concealment, whether intentional or unintentional, entitles the injured party to rescind insurance.”^[5] Read the middle clause: the statute does not ask whether you meant to deceive anyone. Then read what the sentence leaves out. Section 331 supplies the consequence of concealment; it does not define what concealment is, so it does not by itself convert every unreported change in a household into one.

The definition comes from the two sections around it. Section 332 requires each party to a contract of insurance to communicate in good faith all facts within their knowledge that are, or that they believe to be, material to the contract and that the other party has not the means of ascertaining. Section 334 then fixes materiality “not by the event, but solely by the probable and reasonable influence of the facts upon the party to whom the communication is due, in forming his estimate of the disadvantages of the proposed contract, or in making his inquiries.”^[5] Chain those together and the spare-bedroom example gets its real shape. The roommate who moved in during March becomes a § 331 problem where the insured knew the fact, the fact would probably and reasonably have influenced the carrier’s estimate of the risk under § 334, and the carrier had no means of ascertaining it itself. A month passing without a phone call is not, on its own, any of those three.

Florida draws the line at materiality rather than intent, but arrives in a similar place. Florida Statute § 627.409(1) provides that a statement in an application is a representation rather than a warranty, and that a misrepresentation, omission, concealment, or incorrect statement prevents recovery under the policy where it is fraudulent, material to the acceptance of the risk or the hazard assumed, or where the insurer in good faith would not have issued the policy, or would not have issued it at the same premium rate, in the same amount, or with the same coverage, had it known the true facts.^[6] That last branch is the one an insurer argues an undisclosed housemate under, and the statute imposes two conditions on the argument. The provision operates on a statement or description made in the application or in negotiations for the policy, so there has to be an application answer for the omission to sit inside. And the insurer has to establish one of the enumerated grounds — fraud, materiality to the acceptance of the risk or the hazard assumed, or that in good faith it would not have issued this policy at this rate, in this amount, or with this coverage. A household fact that would have moved the rate is evidence going to that third ground. It is what the insurer has to prove, not a shortcut past having to prove it.

The policy form carries its own version. Part F of the specimen form states flatly that the insurer does not provide coverage for any insured who has made fraudulent statements or engaged in fraudulent conduct in connection with any accident or loss for which coverage is sought.^[1] That provision operates on conduct at claim time; the statutes above operate on the application. An undisclosed roommate who crashes the car can trip both at once.

Trace the consequence of the worst branch rather than treating it as the default. Where the policy is rescinded, there is no liability limit standing between the injured party and the vehicle owner; there is no collision payment to repair the car; and there is no defense counsel appointed to appear at the hearing. The owner and the driver answer for the judgment out of their own assets, and the owner’s exposure is not limited to having lent the keys — vehicle owners are commonly reached through negligent entrustment and statutory owner-liability theories that vary by state. Whether the insurer can also pursue the driver depends on whether the driver was an insured: the anti-subrogation principle bars a carrier from suing its own insured to recover a risk the policy covered, and an undisclosed housemate is precisely the person that protection does not attach to. The specific rules on subrogation, owner liability, and apportionment between defendants are state law and differ materially across jurisdictions; treat this paragraph as a map of the exposure, not as a statement of the rule where you live.

Our companion research on when a car insurance company can deny a claim covers the procedural side of a denial and what a policyholder can do about one.

The Exclusion Route, and the States Where It Is Closed

Sometimes disclosure produces a quote nobody in the house can pay. A housemate with a recent impaired-driving conviction, a suspended license, or a stack of at-fault claims can move a household premium by a multiple, and the honest answer to “what do we do” is sometimes a named driver exclusion: a signed endorsement under which the carrier agrees to price the policy without that person’s record, in exchange for the policyholder’s agreement that the excluded person will never operate the insured vehicles.

The bargain is absolute in both directions, which is exactly why states regulate it. California authorizes it explicitly: Insurance Code § 11580.1(d)(1) permits the insurer and the named insured to agree that coverage and the insurer’s obligation to defend do not apply, and do not accrue to the benefit of any insured or third-party claimant, while a motor vehicle is being used or operated by a natural person or persons designated by name. The same paragraph then writes in one exception, and it is worth reading before signing anything: the insurer shallhave an obligation to defend the named insured when all three of the following apply to the designated person — they are a resident of the same household as the named insured, they are jointly sued with the named insured as a result of operating the named insured’s vehicle, and they are an insured under a separate automobile liability policy issued to them as a named insured that does not provide a defense to the named insured.^[7] Michigan authorizes it too, but MCL § 500.3009(2) conditions validity on the insured’s authorization and on the presence of the statutory warning language in the policy.^[8]

Kentucky’s statute is the one written most directly for this page’s question. KRS § 304.39-045 provides that the insurer and the named insured may agree to exclude any member of the household not a spouse or dependent from coverage as the operator of an insured vehicle, with the excluded names set forth in the policy or in an endorsement signed by both parties.^[10] “A member of the household not a spouse or dependent” is a statutory description of a roommate.

Two other jurisdictions are cited constantly for more than their texts say, so read them narrowly. North Carolina’s G.S. § 20-309(a2) provides that an owner’s policy issued to a foster parent, carrying an endorsement excluding coverage for one or more foster children residing in the household, may be certified as proof of financial responsibility, provided each excluded child is insured elsewhere at or above the minimum limits required by G.S. § 20-279.21.^[11] That subsection answers one question: what satisfies the registration-time financial responsibility requirement when a foster child is excluded. It does not say that other named-driver exclusions are prohibited in North Carolina, and § 20-309 contains no such sentence. A North Carolina household asking whether it can exclude an unrelated resident is asking about the carrier’s filed form and the Department of Insurance’s treatment of it, not about § 20-309(a2).

New York’s authority is a regulator opinion with a specific fact pattern attached. OGC Opinion No. 03-09-17 answered whether an insurer may attach an endorsement to a commercialautomobile liability policy providing that it will not be liable for losses occurring while a covered auto is driven, with the employer’s consent, by a specifically named employee with a poor driving record. The Office of General Counsel’s answer was no: such an endorsement violates 11 NYCRR § 60-1.1, which the opinion reads as requiring an owner’s liability policy to cover any other person using the vehicle with the named insured’s permission, subject to only three enumerated categories of exclusion and not to specifically named individuals. N.Y. Insurance Law § 3103(a) then completes the circuit: a policy issued in violation of the Insurance Law is still valid and binding on the insurer and is enforceable as if it conformed, meaning the coverage is read as though the endorsement were not attached.^[9] The reasoning runs on a regulation governing owner’s liability policies generally, which is why the opinion is the standard citation for the proposition that New York does not allow named-driver exclusions. What the opinion itself decided was a commercial policy and a named employee, and a personal-auto roommate exclusion has not been ruled on in it.

Whatever the state, understand what an exclusion does on the ground. It is not a discount with an asterisk. Take California, where the statute is explicit: if the excluded roommate drives the car, Cal. Ins. Code § 11580.1(d)(1) lets the agreement switch off both the liability coverage and the duty to defend, and it says that neither accrues to the benefit of any insured or any third-party claimant— so the person the roommate injures has no policy limit to reach either. The one thing the statute preserves is the defense carve-out set out above, and note exactly how narrow it is: it buys the named insured a defense in a joint suit where the excluded resident carries their own auto liability policy that will not defend the named insured. It is not coverage for the excluded driver, and it pays no judgment.

Keep the scope of that statute straight, too. Section 11580.1 governs automobile liability coverage, so it decides what happens to the liability side and to the defense. Whether the owner’s own collision coverage pays to repair the car after an excluded driver wrecks it is a question about the physical damage provisions in the policy form and in the exclusion endorsement the carrier drafted — endorsements commonly extend to physical damage as well, and the endorsement text is what settles it. What no version of the endorsement contains is a medical-emergency carve-out, and no version of the story where the owner was asleep changes the result. A named driver exclusion is a decision to accept personal liability for one specific person’s access to one specific set of keys.

Why a Non-Owner Policy Does Not Solve a Shared Driveway

A housemate who owns no car and occasionally borrows one reliably lands on the same idea: buy a non-owner policy, drive the roommate’s car, problem solved. It is a real product and it solves a real problem — maintaining continuous coverage, satisfying a filing requirement, covering liability in rented and borrowed vehicles — but it is built on the same boundary line that defeats it here.

Non-owner coverage is constructed around the concept of a vehicle the insured does not own and does not have regular access to. The base form’s definition of “non-owned auto” is the template: an auto not owned by or furnished or available for the regular use of the insured.^[1] A car the policyholder can take without clearing each trip in advance lands on the wrong side of that definition, and a housemate’s car parked at the shared address is the arrangement most likely to work that way. Where the access really is trip-by-trip — ask, get a yes, hand the keys back — the non-owner policy does what it is sold to do; where a spare key lives by the door, it does not.

The strongest evidence that this is the real boundary is that ISO drafted a separate endorsement to move it. The Extended Non-Owned Coverage form, PP 03 06 01 05, exists specifically to switch off Part A Exclusion B.2.b and provide liability coverage for a vehicle furnished or available for the named individual’s regular use.^[4] If an ordinary non-owner arrangement already covered the housemate’s car, there would be nothing for that endorsement to fix.

Our step-by-step research on how to get non-owner car insurance covers the eligibility gates in detail, including the household-vehicle and regular-use screens carriers apply during the application call.

The Order of Operations

1. Read your own definitions section first.Find the words “you” and “family member” on your declarations package and see whether your carrier’s form matches the specimen language. State amendatory endorsements and newer editions change these definitions, and every answer below depends on which version you actually hold.^[1]
2. Disclose the household before you optimize it. Tell the carrier who lives at the address and let them classify. A licensed driver in the home who is not listed is the fact pattern regulators point to when explaining how a claim gets denied.^[13]
3. Decide whether you are combining cars or combining people. Combining two separately owned cars onto one policy requires joint ownership plus Joint Ownership Coverage, ISO form PP 03 34. Keeping separate policies but closing the coverage gap for a housemate is what PP 33 37 and PP 03 06 are for. These are different problems with different forms.^{[2] [3]}
4. Ask for the endorsement by form number.A front-line service representative may not recognize “can my roommate be on my policy.” They will recognize “can you quote PP 33 37, Additional Resident Of Your Household.” Availability varies by carrier and state, so ask whether the form is filed where you live.^[3]
5. If either of you drives the other’s car regularly, name that person in an extended non-owned endorsement.Coverage under PP 03 06 runs to the individual shown in the schedule, not automatically to that person’s spouse or family members, so in a two-way household both policies need their own scheduled name.^[4]
6. Pull your own C.L.U.E. report before the carrier does. You are entitled to a free copy under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, and reviewing it tells you which of your own claims the underwriter is about to price, and lets you dispute an entry through the LexisNexis consumer center before it costs you money.^{[14] [12]}
7. Treat an exclusion as a last resort and confirm it is legal where you live. Kentucky and California authorize excluding a named person, and California’s statute preserves a defense for the named insured in one narrow joint-suit scenario. Michigan conditions validity on statutory warning language. North Carolina’s § 20-309(a2) speaks only to certifying a foster-child exclusion as proof of financial responsibility and leaves everything else to the carrier’s filed form. New York’s regulator, ruling on a commercial auto policy and a named employee, read 11 NYCRR § 60-1.1 as not permitting a named-individual exclusion.^{[10] [7] [9]}
8. Put the move-out on the calendar. When the scheduled resident leaves, PP 33 37 obligates the named insured to notify the insurer within 30 days. The endorsement that solved your problem becomes a misrepresentation the moment the underlying fact stops being true.^[3]