At a glance
Legal framework
Tort, with a statutory fee-shifting bolt-on. The common-law tort of bad faith comes from McCullough v. Golden Rule Insurance Co., 789 P.2d 855 (Wyo. 1990). The Unfair Trade Practices Act, W.S. § 26-13-124, lists seventeen unfair claim settlement practices but is enforced by the Insurance Commissioner, not by you. Attorney fees and interest come from a different section, W.S. § 26-15-124(c).
Can you sue directly?
Yes for the tort — McCullough lets you sue your own insurer directly. No for the statute: W.S. § 26-13-124 only bites when an insurer does these things “with such frequency as to indicate a general business practice,” and Wyoming courts have not read a private right of action into it. Its list is still useful as evidence of what unreasonable claim handling looks like.
Deadline
10 years to sue on the policy as a written contract (W.S. § 1-3-105(a)(i)) — one of the longest contract periods in the country. The bad-faith tort itself runs on 4 years as an injury to the rights of the plaintiff not arising on contract (W.S. § 1-3-105(a)(iv)(C)). A claim resting on a liability created by statute gets 8 years under § 1-3-105(a)(ii).
Before you file
None required. Wyoming has no notice letter, no cure period and no certificate of merit. You can complain to the Insurance Department first, and it is often worth doing, but it is not a precondition to filing.
What you can recover

Damages available in Wyoming

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Insurance dispute attorneys — Wyoming

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How to find one yourself, free

Referrals are reviewed by hand by a staff coordinator rather than generated automatically, and normally come back within one or two business days. The Bar's main line is 307-632-9061. Wyoming operates no certified-specialist programme, in insurance law or anything else. No Wyoming lawyer can be a state-certified insurance specialist, so judge them on their reported cases instead.

Before you sue

How often does your insurer actually pay?

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 cover — real denial rates

Published, per insurer

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.

20%
Average denied, 2023
1%–54%
Range across 175 insurers

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.

Home, auto & property

No payout rate is published

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.

These two numbers are not the same thing. A denial rate is the share of claims an insurer refused. A complaint index is how often customers complained relative to the company’s size. A low complaint index does not mean an insurer pays well, and a high one does not prove it refuses claims — it can reflect the kind of cover it sells or the customers it attracts. Neither figure says anything about whether your claim should have been paid.
The clock

What the insurer is required to do, and by when

W.S. § 26-15-124 puts a hard number on it. A life, accident or health claim must be accepted or rejected and paid within 45 days of the insurer receiving proofs of loss and supporting evidence. A property or casualty claim must be accepted or rejected and paid within 45 days of receiving the claim and supporting bills. Separately, § 26-13-124 makes it an unfair practice to fail to acknowledge communications promptly, to refuse payment without a reasonable investigation, or to demand the same documents twice.

The thing most people miss

The two statute numbers look almost identical and do opposite things. W.S. 26-13-124 is the famous unfair-practices list — and it gives you nothing you can sue on. W.S. 26-15-124 is the short, unglamorous one that actually pays your lawyer. In 2021 the Supreme Court widened its reach in Sinclair Wyoming Refining Co. v. Infrassure Ltd., 2021 WY 66, holding a policy is “issued for delivery” in Wyoming whenever the insured and the risk are here, even if the paperwork never was.

Unsettled: Wyoming is a small jurisdiction and the case law is thin. Two points are genuinely unsettled. First, the Supreme Court has never squarely fixed the burden of proof for punitive damages — whether preponderance or clear and convincing evidence — so assume a judge may demand the higher one. Second, the reach of “procedural” or claim-handling bad faith, where the denial itself was defensible but the handling was not, has been recognised in principle but rarely tested, and the insurer's fairly debatable defence remains hard to get past.
Free first step

Complain to the regulator before you spend anything

A complaint to the Wyoming Department of Insurance 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.

Where this comes from

Sources

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