Consumer Safeguard Cut From Some Car Insurance Policies

When insurance companies and repair shops can’t agree, it’s often the driver who loses. And as a key consumer protection quietly disappears from some auto policies, that problem could get even worse.

The right to appraisal, or RTA, has long been a standard part of car insurance policies. It’s a common clause that grants policyholders the right to request an appraisal by a neutral third party if their repair shop and insurance company disagree on what it will cost to repair their car after a collision.

Now, however, repair professionals say that some insurers are dropping the clause from their policies — and have even started to push back on legislation that requires them to keep it.

In May 2025, two states passed bills to halt this emerging trend. Both laws — Texas Senate Bill 458 and Washington Senate Bill 5721 — require insurance companies serving the state to include an appraisal clause in all auto insurance policies. Other states may follow. Until then, in many parts of the country, the fate of this consumer right remains in the hands of insurers.

How does the right to appraisal work?

If you have a car insurance policy that includes comprehensive and collision coverage — that is, coverage for physical damage to your vehicle — your policy probably includes a short clause known as the appraisal clause, or RTA. If your insurance company and the collision repair shop fixing your car disagree about how much it costs to fix your vehicle after a crash, you can invoke this clause to request a third-party appraisal to resolve the dispute.

The right to appraisal plays an important role in the repair process, says Andrew Batenhorst, a body shop manager in California who’s handled dozens of RTA claims. With the cost and complexity of vehicle repairs on the rise, insurers’ estimates for vehicle repairs increasingly fall short of the estimates drawn up by repair shops.

“Disagreements are going to happen,” he says. “But there should be mechanisms in the policy that allow for an independent party to be able to mediate these types of situations.”

In most cases, Batenhorst says, consumers who invoke their right to appraisal do so to avoid shouldering steep out-of-pocket expenses for repairs that insurance companies won’t cover. “More often than not,” he says, “when I have used right to appraisal successfully, the insurance company is then forced to pay fairly for how the car should be fixed. And it works.”

But, he adds, “The insurance industry is not always a big fan of that.”

Why don’t insurance companies want the right to appraisal?

The right to appraisal grants consumers a key means of resolving disagreements between their repair shop and their insurance company during a car insurance claim. But Batenhorst says that insurance companies are becoming more critical of the appraisal process. “Most people don’t know,” he says, “but most of the big companies are actively working on trying to remove the clause in the policy that affords the right to appraisal.”

That might sound scary. After all, as Batenhorst points out, it’s rarely the insurance company calling for a third opinion on how much repairs should cost — so consumers may have more to lose than insurance companies when appraisal clauses are removed from policies.

But there’s more behind insurers’ ambivalence towards RTA clauses than an attempt to wiggle out of paying higher claims. Brandon Vick, regional VP for the Pacific Northwest at the National Association of Mutual Insurance Companies (NAMIC), says that while appraisal clauses are still standard for most insurers, there’s a concern that expensive appraisals could raise operating costs — and, in turn, the cost of coverage.

Take Washington state, where Senate Bill 5721 just passed. The majority of insurers in the state already had these clauses, Vick says. But for those that didn’t, the law’s new requirement to add appraisal clauses could cause “some increase in rates.”

Vick isn’t the only member of the insurance industry voicing these concerns. Representatives of the Northwest Insurance Council and American Property Casualty Insurance Association (APCIA) testified before the Washington State Senate in opposition to SB 5721, arguing that requiring appraisal clauses in every auto policy would incentivize more drivers to invoke their right to appraisal, thus “slowing down the repair process and raising costs over time.”

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