Connecticut’s Insurance Department answers a question on its website that most homeowners have never thought to ask. If the previous owner of your house filed claims, can a new insurer hold those against you? The department’s answer is blunt: if a company can show a relationship between the prior owner’s loss and the probability of a future loss to the home, they may use the information, and “there are no laws that specifically govern the use of the prior owner’s loss history.”
That is the part of the CLUE report nobody explains. It is not a credit file for you. It is a claims history attached to an address, and it stays there for seven years regardless of who owns the place.
What a CLUE report actually is
The Comprehensive Loss Underwriting Exchange is run by LexisNexis Risk Solutions, and because it sells consumer reports to insurers, it is a consumer reporting agency regulated under the Fair Credit Reporting Act. That status is what gives you rights over it.
The database is close to comprehensive. LexisNexis states on its own product page that CLUE Property draws claims data from more than 90% of insurers writing homeowners coverage. Each record shows the date of loss, the cause, the amount paid and the status. Retention is up to seven years, a figure the insurance departments of Connecticut, Alabama, Washington and Texas all state consistently.
Here is the mechanism that makes it matter, and the piece all three top-ranking articles on this topic skip. Alabama’s Department of Insurance explains that CLUE reports are used almost exclusively to underwrite and rate new policies. Insurers renewing an existing policy generally do not pull them, because they already hold your loss history in their own systems.
So the report does not blindside your current carrier. It bites at three specific moments: when you shop, when you switch, and when you sell. Which means a claim filed in year one is a cost you pay in year four, when you go looking for a cheaper premium and discover the market has priced you differently than you expected.
The arithmetic on a small claim
This is where the seven-year retention turns into money.
The average homeowners premium was $1,559 in 2022, per NAIC data, up 10.5% from $1,411 the year before. Analyses of Quadrant Information Services rate data put the typical increase after a single claim in the range of 7% to 10%, with water damage claims running considerably higher, closer to 25%. Treat those as ranges rather than precise figures, because they vary by claim type, state and carrier.
Run the low end. A 7% surcharge on a $1,559 premium is about $109 a year. Carried across seven years of retention, that is roughly $763. At 10% it is $1,091. If the claim was water damage and your next carrier applies something nearer 25%, you are looking at $390 a year and $2,730 over the retention window.
Now put a small claim against that. Say a supply line fails and does $2,800 of damage with a $1,000 deductible. The insurer pays $1,800. If the claim costs you $763 in higher premiums over seven years, you netted about $1,037. If it was coded as water damage and the surcharge lands nearer the top of the range, you may have lost money by filing.
That is the calculation worth running before you call. The threshold is not your deductible, it is your deductible plus seven years of whatever the surcharge turns out to be.
And a claim you file is only part of it. You are also filing something roughly one homeowner in eighteen files each year: Insurance Information Institute figures calculated from ISO data put the share of insured homes with a claim at 5.3% in 2021 and 5.8% as a five-year average across 2018 to 2022. Claims are uncommon enough that carriers treat one as a meaningful signal.
Inquiries are murkier than you have been told
A persistent piece of advice says never call your insurer to ask whether something is covered, because the inquiry itself goes on your record.
The truth is narrower. Both Alabama’s and Connecticut’s insurance departments explain that LexisNexis instructs insurers not to report pure coverage inquiries, and that a record is created when a claim is opened, paid or denied. But if the conversation involves an actual loss, even one that is never paid, it can be logged as a claim.
Note what that is and is not. It is industry guidance from the database operator, not a statute. I could not find a state law or insurance department bulletin restricting insurers from using inquiries or unpaid claims in underwriting, so do not assume a legal protection exists. The practical rule: ask hypothetical questions hypothetically, and if you are describing a specific thing that happened to your specific house, understand that you may have started a file.
The rights you do have, and the one you do not
Because LexisNexis is an FCRA consumer reporting agency, you can order one free copy of your CLUE report every twelve months. Requests go to LexisNexis directly, by phone at 866-312-8076 or through its consumer portal, and the report arrives within about fifteen days. If something is wrong, you dispute it with LexisNexis, which contacts the reporting insurer and responds within thirty days. You can also attach a personal statement explaining a record, which is worth doing for a claim that was denied or withdrawn.
The right you do not have is the one buyers most want. You cannot pull the CLUE report on a house you are considering. Under the FCRA only the owner, their insurer or a lender can request it. Connecticut, Alabama, Washington and Texas all say the same thing. The workaround is to make the seller request it and share it, which is a reasonable thing to put in an offer alongside the inspection.
That matters more than it sounds. A house with two water claims in the past five years can be expensive or difficult to insure, and you will not find that out from a home inspection. You find it out after closing, when you go to buy a policy.
What to do this week
Order your free report. Read every record and check the cause coding in particular, because a claim logged as water damage prices differently from the same event logged as a burst pipe with sudden and accidental discharge. Dispute anything inaccurate and attach a statement to anything that was denied or closed without payment.
If you are about to list or buy a house, put the CLUE report on the paperwork checklist. Sellers can order theirs free, and a clean seven-year history is a selling point worth mentioning.
And before you file any claim under roughly three times your deductible, do the seven-year multiplication first. Your CLUE report is the only consumer file where a single entry quietly reprices a purchase you will not make for another four years. Our guide to cutting your homeowners premium covers the savings that do not require filing anything, and the water backup endorsement is worth reading before the claim that lands on this report is a flooded basement.
