What Is a CLUE on My Home Insurance?
It's a seven-year claims history tied to your house, used by insurers to decide whether to cover it.
Free to compare
What's actually in it
The report lists every claim filed on the house in the last seven years, including the date, the type of loss, and the amount paid out. It follows the property, not you. Claims made by a previous owner can still show up.
Why you got the letter
If your non-renewal or cancellation mentions claims history or prior losses, the insurer likely pulled this report and saw a pattern it won't cover. That could mean two or more claims in a short span, even small ones. The letter should say what triggered it.
Check your own report
You're entitled to a free copy once a year. Ordering it tells you exactly what insurers see, including claims you may have forgotten, like a small water damage report that never resulted in a payout.
Effect on new coverage
A thin or clean report helps you shop with other insurers. A report with several claims may limit your options or raise what you pay. The specific history matters more than the mere fact of a claim.
Every insurer that quotes you will pull the same report, so the claims on it aren't going away. What changes is how each one weighs them, some decline over the same history that others price without much trouble. A non-renewal from one company doesn't mean the next one sees it the same way. Comparing quotes now shows which insurers still work with a house like yours, and at what price.
Can you get a claim removed from the report?
Not by asking the insurer that filed it. The report pulls directly from a shared claims database. The company that paid out a claim doesn't get to edit it afterward. What you can do is dispute an error, meaning the report shows a claim that didn't happen, or shows a payout amount that's wrong, or lists a claim tied to your house that actually belongs to a different property. That dispute goes through the reporting agency, not the insurer, and it can take several weeks to resolve.
A claim that's accurate but hurts you isn't an error. If a pipe burst and the insurer paid to fix it, that claim stays on the report for the full seven years no matter how the next insurer feels about it. Filing the claim was still the right call at the time. The report doesn't track whether filing was reasonable. It only tracks that it happened.
Some claims on the report may not count against you the way you'd expect. A claim that was filed but closed with no payout often carries less weight than one that was paid. A single claim from a major, widespread event, like a regional hailstorm, usually reads differently to an insurer than a claim unique to your house. If your report has one of these, it's worth asking a new insurer directly how they treat it rather than assuming the worst.
The seven-year window means old claims age off on their own. A claim from eight years ago shouldn't appear on a current report. If your non-renewal cited claims and most of them happened long ago, the report may already look better than it did when the letter went out. That's another reason to pull your own copy before you shop, so you know what the next insurer will actually see.
What happens to the report when you sell or buy a house
The claims history stays with the house, not the person who filed them. If you're buying a house, the seller's claims are already part of what you'd be insuring, even though none of them were yours. Ask the seller for a copy of the report, or ask the agent to pull one, before you're far into the purchase. Finding out after closing that the house has four water damage claims in six years is a bad time to find out.
If you're selling, the same report can work against you. A buyer's lender may require insurance before closing. If the house's claims history makes that hard to get, it can slow down or threaten the sale. Some sellers order their own copy ahead of listing, just to know what they're dealing with and to have an answer ready if a buyer's insurer balks.
The report doesn't expire when ownership changes hands. A claim filed by someone who sold the house five years ago still shows up for the current owner. It still counts against the current owner when an insurer prices the policy or decides whether to write it at all. There's no way to inherit a house without inheriting its claims history along with it.
Two identical houses next door to each other can get very different offers from the same insurer because of this. The house itself matters, but so does what's been filed on it before you ever owned it. If a non-renewal or a high quote seems out of proportion to your own time in the house, the report is where that history lives, and it's worth checking before assuming the price reflects something you did.
Before you shop again
Pull your own copy of the report and check it against the letter you got. Confirm every claim is accurate and recent, then compare quotes to see which insurers still write a house with this history.
