After a storm, how long does my insurer have — and what has to be photographed before then?

The Insurance Code puts one outer term on the whole of a claim. The investigation, the adjustment and the resolution all have to happen inside ninety days, and the ninety days run from the day the claim was submitted to the insurer — not from the day an inspection happens, not from the day a file is considered complete.¶

Read the wording of the term carefully, because it says two things at once. It sets ninety days as a ceiling, and it also says the work has to be done in the shortest reasonable period inside that ceiling. Ninety days is the outer wall, not the schedule.¶

The Consumer Bill of Rights that Ley 14-2020 added to the Code says the same thing from the policyholder's side, and adds a second, much shorter clock at the front: the insurer has fifteen days to acknowledge that your claim arrived.¶

Both of those clocks start before anyone has looked at the property. That is the whole reason this page exists: the condition being claimed has to be captured while it still exists, and on a site that is being cleared or repaired it stops existing quickly.Field practice¶

1. Write down the date the claim was notified. That date, not any later one, is where the ninety days start (Art. 27.162(1)).
2. Put the fifteenth day in the same calendar. If no written acknowledgement has arrived by then, that absence is itself worth recording (Art. 1.120(h)).
3. Capture the condition before clearing or repair begins, because neither clock waits for the property to stay as it is.

This is the section most people have never read, and it is the one that changes behaviour. The Code lists three acts that constitute resolving a claim. Two are what anyone would expect: paying it in full, or denying it in writing with proper grounds.¶

The third is closure for the claimant's own inactivity — where the claimant does not cooperate or does not hand over the information the insurer needs in order to adjust. That is not the claim sitting open and waiting for you. In the eyes of the Code it is a resolved claim.¶

So the file you did not build is not a neutral absence. It is one of the three doors the statute leaves open for the claim to end, and it is the only one of the three that you control.Field practice¶

1. Treat every request for information as running against a clock, because the statute does.
2. Keep what you sent and the day you sent it. The record of having cooperated is a different record from the photographs themselves.

The inspection is the moment the condition gets looked at by someone other than you, and the Code gives it a written procedure. Where the insurer cannot coordinate the visit by telephone, it has to offer up to three alternative dates, in writing, to the physical or electronic addresses that appear in the policy and in the claim notice.¶

Read the last clause of that right, because it is the operative one: the insurer has to do this before it can close your claim. It is a precondition on closure, not a courtesy.¶

For anyone documenting a site, this is the date that matters. Whatever the record is going to show has to have been captured by then, because the inspection sees the property as it is on the day of the visit, not as it was on the day of the loss.Field practice¶

1. Check that the addresses in the policy and in the claim notice are ones you actually read. The written offer of dates goes there.
2. Fix the capture date against the earliest inspection date offered, not the latest.
3. Keep the letter offering the dates. It is what shows when the precondition in Art. 1.120(l) was met.

Not where the information could have been obtained by ordinary methods of investigation. The Code lists that refusal by name among the unfair practices in the adjustment of claims, and it does so in the same article that makes failing to acknowledge and act with reasonable diligence inside the ninety days an unfair practice.¶

That cuts in a direction worth being honest about. It does not oblige an insurer to build your file for you, and it does not make a thin record safe. What it does is remove the argument that a claim can be closed on the pretext of a gap that ordinary investigation would have filled.Field practice¶

It is also the reason the two provisions belong on the same page. Article 27.163(3) lets a claim close when the claimant does not deliver; Article 27.161(17) stops the insurer from calling a claim underdocumented when the information was there to be had. Between them sits the file you actually keep.Field practice¶

The Code does not treat the ninety days as a deadline that simply lapses. Where an insurer cannot resolve inside the term, it has to keep in its own files the documents that establish just cause for exceeding it. The obligation to justify the delay sits with the insurer, and it sits in writing.¶

Separately, the Commissioner may at any time order the immediate resolution of a claim if the Commissioner considers that resolution is being unduly and unjustifiably delayed.¶

Neither of those is a remedy you operate yourself, and this page is not the place to be told how to use them. What they change for the person with the claim is the value of dates: a delay only reads as a delay against a record of when things were sent and when they were answered.Field practice¶

1. Keep a dated log of what was sent and what came back. It is what turns a delay into a documented delay.
2. Where a term has been exceeded, the question to ask is about the just-cause documents the insurer is required to hold, not about the calendar.

Nothing in the Insurance Code specifies a format for the evidence behind a claim, and this page will not invent one. What follows is how the record is built here, and it is field practice rather than a rule.Field practice¶

The properties that matter are the ones that survive time and hands: a date that comes from the capture and not from a file system, a position that puts the frame somewhere specific, an archive nothing is deleted from, and a way of showing that what is being read now is what was written then.Field practice¶

Those properties are the subject of a separate reading in this guide, because they are the same properties a construction record needs when the person asking is not on your side. The clock on this page is what decides when they have to exist.Field practice¶

1. Capture before clearing. A record made after the site is tidied documents a tidy site.
2. Keep the original files, not only the exports that went into a report.
3. Record who received what and when, so the cooperation in Art. 27.163(3) is itself documented.

It is a line drawn by statute, not by preference, and it is the reason this page describes clocks and evidence and stops there. The Insurance Code defines the adjuster as the person who investigates and negotiates the settlement of claims, and it makes acting as one — or holding oneself out as one — without a licence unlawful.¶

Photographing a property on a date and filing the frames is data capture. Deciding what a loss is worth, what a policy covers, or what an insurer should pay is the licensed act. The two can sit in the same file and still be done by different people.Field practice¶

That separation is not a limitation to work around. It is what makes the record usable by whoever does hold the licence, because a record produced by someone with no interest in the number is a better record than one produced by someone with an interest in it.Field practice¶

1. Keep the deliverable to what was captured, when, and where.
2. Let the licensed professional the claim already involves make the determinations that belong to them.