What your policy actually covers

We read the filed policy forms and tell you what the clauses say — the covered part, the excluded part, and the part every other article gets wrong.

Compiled from filed policy formsSources cited on every pageUpdated 2026-11-03

Most insurance answers online are written by people selling insurance, or by sites that never opened a policy form. We do the opposite: every judgment on this site points to a clause in a real form, quoted word for word.

The judgments people search for most

Flood damageExcluded. But the fire that follows it is not.MoldExcluded — with a $10,000 sub-limit on many forms.Sewer backupExcluded unless you added the endorsement.Jewelry theft$1,500 per article, $3,000 total — on the form we read.Hotel & temporary housingCovered, capped at 12 months.Two causes at onceWhy a hurricane can pay nothing.

Why the wording matters more than the headline

Take flood. Nearly every article says "renters insurance does not cover flood." That is true and incomplete. The exclusion ends with a sentence most people never read: direct loss by fire, explosion or theft resulting from water damage is covered. So if flood water starts a fire, the fire damage is a covered loss. That single sentence changes what you should claim.

The same pattern repeats across the form: an exclusion, a carve-back, and a dollar limit. A judgment that ignores any of the three is wrong. That is the whole reason this site exists.

How we work

We read specimen policy forms filed by carriers, and quote the clause with its form number.
Where a state changes the answer, we say so and link to the state regulator instead of guessing.
We mark anything still being verified. We do not fill gaps with plausible-sounding numbers.

Were you denied?Start with the clause they cited, then work backwards.

Read the denial guide