The District will not let you sue your insurer in tort for bad faith. A wrongful denial is a breach-of-contract case, and the money usually stops at what the policy should have paid in the first place. The one weapon with teeth is the Consumer Protection Procedures Act, which carries treble damages and attorney’s fees — but it reaches only policies bought for personal, household or family purposes.
Three listing slots on this page are available to attorneys licensed in District of Columbia who handle disputes against insurers. Listings are paid advertising sold at a flat monthly rate. They are shown in the order they were purchased. We do not rank, score, endorse or recommend any attorney, and we have not assessed the quality of anyone’s work.
The referral service is free and runs online through MyDCLawyer; the D.C. Bar publishes no referral telephone line for it. The D.C. Bar recognises only one certified legal specialty — patent law. Nobody in the District can hold themselves out as a board-certified insurance lawyer, so judge a firm on its record instead.
Worth checking before you spend money on a lawyer. Two different measures exist, and they are not interchangeable — one is a real payment record, the other is a complaint count.
Health insurers selling on the federal marketplace must report how many claims they received and how many they refused. The figures are public and free to inspect.
The spread is the point. Two insurers selling comparable cover in the same state can refuse wildly different shares of what they are billed for. Look your own up before you assume your refusal was routine.
Source: CMS Transparency in Coverage public use files, plan year 2023 experience. Self-reported by insurers and not audited. Covers federal-marketplace plans only — not employer cover, and not state-run marketplaces. Post-service claims only.
There is no free public figure showing what share of home or auto claims any named insurer pays. Insurers do report it to regulators, but in most states that filing is confidential. Any table you see online quoting payout percentages for property insurers is either a paid commercial product or an estimate.
What is public is the complaint index — how many confirmed complaints a company generates against its share of the market. 1.00 is average. 3.00 means three times the complaints its size would predict.
Complaint indexes are published by state insurance departments and compiled by the NAIC. Figures move with both the company’s complaints and the wider market’s.
Vaguer than almost anywhere else. For property and casualty claims the District sets no day counts at all: § 31-2231.17(b) requires only that the insurer act reasonably promptly on communications, adopt reasonable investigation standards, and tell you within a reasonable time after proof of loss whether the claim is accepted. Health claims are the exception — a clean claim must be paid within 30 days, after which interest runs at 1.5% a month, rising to 2% after 60 days and 2.5% past 120 days (D.C. Code § 31-3132).
The unfair-claims statute does not protect you from a single bad denial. Both subsections of § 31-2231.17 prohibit the listed conduct only where an insurer does it with such frequency as to indicate a general business practice — so one arbitrary refusal, however outrageous, is not a violation of it at all. And the maximum penalty is $1,000 per violation, payable to the District rather than to you.
A complaint to the District of Columbia Department of Insurance, Securities and Banking costs nothing, creates a written record, and sometimes moves a stalled claim on its own. It is not a substitute for legal advice and it does not pause any deadline — but there is rarely a reason not to do it first.
This page is information, not legal advice. Insurance law differs by state and changes often. Nothing here creates a lawyer–client relationship, and no page can tell you whether your own claim is worth pursuing. If a deadline may be close, speak to a lawyer licensed in your state now rather than later — several of the deadlines described here start running on the date of the loss, not the date your claim was refused.
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