The storm swept into Tulsa County, Okla., around dinnertime on May 21, 2024, hammering people's houses with hail the size of golf balls. It was so loud that when a neighbor called Tim Willard, he couldn't make out what they were saying on the phone. Afterward, Willard walked outside his home to see shingles ripped from the roof and a lawn covered by an inch of ice.
"These were jagged hailstones," Willard says. "They were coming just straight down and just peppered everything."
Weeks later, Willard claims that an adjuster for State Farm, his home insurer, said his roof should be replaced. But that same day, State Farm reversed itself and denied Willard's insurance claim. Soon after, State Farm canceled Willard's coverage, leaving him with a battered roof that no other company would insure.
"I'm kind of like most Americans: I just don't have 20 grand sitting in the bank" for a new roof, Willard says. But he worried that without coverage for his roof, the next hailstorm or tornado could be financially devastating. So he pulled money from savings and borrowed the rest to replace the roof, which enabled him to get insurance coverage elsewhere. Then, Willard sued State Farm, the country's largest home insurer.
Willard's allegation that State Farm, which sells home insurance in 47 states and Washington, D.C., refused to pay what it owed for hail damage is echoed in hundreds of lawsuits nationwide. In one of them, a former State Farm employee testified that the company's actions were putting it at risk of being sued. Some of those suits ended with multimillion-dollar settlements to homeowners, who are subject to confidentiality agreements as part of the deals.
As part of NPR's ongoing coverage of extreme weather's impact on the home insurance industry, we reviewed nearly two dozen lawsuits involving insurance claims following hailstorms, which often cause extensive property damage. The litigation sheds light on the specific strategies that one major insurer allegedly uses to deny coverage.
The epicenter of the hail litigation appears to be Oklahoma, where more than 600 lawsuits were pending against State Farm as of this spring, according to a law firm handling some of the cases. Oklahoma's Republican attorney general has joined one of the lawsuits, alleging that State Farm has been running a secret scheme to deny and minimize payments for roof damage from hail and wind.
State Farm's lawyers denied Willard's allegations in a filing in Oklahoma state court. Asked about accusations that it operated a wide-ranging program to cut insurance payouts for hail and wind damage, State Farm said in a statement to NPR that it pays what it owes on claims, based on the terms of individual policies and the facts of each case.
"We strongly reject any implication or political narrative that State Farm engages in illicit or unlawful conduct," State Farm said. "We work hard to protect our customers from predatory contractors and billboard attorneys who may take advantage of people after a loss."
State Farm has also faced lawsuits and government investigations over its handling of major disasters, also sometimes leading to steep settlements.
In California, the Los Angeles County Counsel is probing allegations that State Farm delayed, underpaid and denied valid insurance claims from last year's wildfires.
"When that claim is denied, that puts consumers in a significant imperiled position where they have to borrow money or they don't get the home repaired, and there's further deterioration of their homestead," Oklahoma's attorney general, Gentner Drummond, told NPR. "And it's a huge economic impact across the state."
Scrutiny of State Farm is intensifying at a time when U.S. homeowners face growing threats from climate change. Rising temperatures are fueling more intense storms, floods and wildfires that damage and destroy property, contributing to soaring insurance costs. As rates increase, a lot of homeowners can't keep up, or they're opting out of an insurance system they consider broken, leaving millions of houses uninsured. When homeowners lack adequate coverage, families and entire communities are exposed to profound financial risks as disasters strike.
"We risk, essentially, [homeowners] defaulting on their mortgages and increased foreclosures," says Jesse Keenan, associate professor of sustainable real estate and urban planning at Tulane University in New Orleans. "That drives down the values of homes in a neighborhood," he says, which can reduce all-important property tax revenue for local governments.
State Farm allegedly works in secret to cut hail expenses
State Farm's alleged efforts to cut spending on wind and hail damage go back to at least 2020, when the insurer launched a program to slash payouts for full roof replacements in Texas, plaintiffs' lawyers in Oklahoma claim in court filings. By the end of that year, State Farm had expanded the initiative to Oklahoma and other states, the lawyers say.
The initiative allegedly relies on two primary tactics, according to court filings in homeowner lawsuits against the company.
First, State Farm assesses claims for wind and hail damage using definitions and exclusions that do not appear in customers' policies, say plaintiffs' lawyers and Drummond, the Oklahoma attorney general.
In Wisconsin, for example, Nicole Maziasz filed a claim to repair her roof after a 2023 hailstorm. State Farm denied the claim after an engineer it hired said Maziasz's roof didn't show signs of "functional damage" because shingles weren't fractured or punctured. However, Maziasz's policy made no mention of so-called functional damage and didn't define what constituted a covered loss from hail, according to a lawsuit that Maziasz and her husband filed against State Farm.
After refusing to pay her claim, State Farm threatened to drop Maziasz's coverage if she didn't replace her roof. State Farm eventually settled the Maziaszes' lawsuit, paying the couple enough to cover the roughly $30,000 they had spent on a new roof, as well as attorney fees.
"You're going to cash my check," Maziasz says of State Farm, "but you're going to work your butt off to deny whatever damage I claim to have."
State Farm declined to comment on individual claims, citing customer privacy.
In a separate homeowner lawsuit in Oklahoma state court, State Farm's lawyers said the company launched an initiative in 2020 to improve the accuracy of its claims-handling practices, including correcting overpayment and underpayment of claims for wind and hail damage. The program was "neither sinister nor surprising," the company's lawyers said, "but part of corporate responsibility."
"When damage is covered, we pay. When coverage doesn't apply, we explain why and share available options with customers," State Farm said in a statement to NPR. "Paying for uncovered losses passes insurance costs on to other families, making insurance less affordable and available."
Nationwide, the most common type of policy sold by State Farm and other insurers covers a broad range of perils, including hail, according to the Insurance Information Institute, an industry-backed think tank. State Farm's policies don't identify any limitations on hail coverage, says Carole Dulisse, a plaintiffs' attorney in Oklahoma, adding that the company is "completely rewriting the terms of the policy to write in exclusions that do not exist."
"What State Farm did is basically recalibrate all their adjusters to say, 'If that hail has not punched through the shingle all the way down to the mat, it's not hail damage, period. It's wear and tear,'" Dulisse says.
According to Drummond, the Oklahoma attorney general, State Farm has "secretly and fraudulently withheld from policyholders" information about coverage restrictions that the insurer applies internally when it assesses claims for hail damage.
Lawyers for State Farm have denied the allegation. The company's lawyers have contended that the Oklahoma case in which Drummond intervened is a private dispute that doesn't involve government officials or public funds.
"My conscience was really getting to me"
State Farm's other strategy, according to claims in lawsuits against the company, has been to restrict claims adjusters from independently deciding when a roof should be replaced. Instead, State Farm managers have reviewed adjusters' assessments to ensure that they applied the company's internal definitions of hail damage, which are absent from customers' policies, plaintiffs' lawyers allege.
"I remember there were some major concerns that we were going to get sued," a former State Farm claims specialist, Amy Lanier, said in a 2022 deposition. Lanier said her team was told to deny claims even when adjusters "felt pretty strongly that we should be able to pay." Contacted by NPR, Lanier declined to comment.
"My conscience was really getting to me," Lanier said in the deposition, "because I would have to stand in front of an insured or call them and say, 'I'm sorry, I can't — I can't total your roof. It's wear and tear.'"
State Farm's lawyers have denied that the company has a "broader requirement" that managers review adjusters' assessments for full roof replacements.
Ryan Graff, a Wisconsin plaintiffs' lawyer who represented Maziasz, says State Farm could avoid the risk of litigation by writing policies that disclose to customers the coverage exclusions it uses to assess claims for hail damage. But he says the company doesn't do that because it can attract more customers and make more money by writing policies without explicit exemptions. State Farm declined to address Graff's claim.
Hail damage is a huge cost for home insurers
Unlike a publicly traded business that's owned by shareholders, State Farm is a mutual company that's held by its customers. Because of that corporate structure, the insurer told NPR that its sole focus is "to serve policyholders." State Farm reported $12.9 billion in net income in 2025, and it recently announced billions in dividend payments and insurance rate cuts for auto customers. That's a dramatic swing from three years prior, when the company said it lost $6.7 billion amid record underwriting losses on auto insurance.
Since 2021, the average cost of home insurance in the U.S. has jumped 46% — about three times the rate of inflation, according to Insurify, an insurance comparison website. Insurance rates are rising for a number of reasons. Threats are growing from more extreme weather. At the same time, people continue to move to risky areas, like coastlines vulnerable to hurricanes and forested regions prone to wildfires. That means more property is in harm's way. Then, when homes burn or are battered by storms, inflation has made it more expensive to rebuild.
But insurance cost isn't the only challenge for homeowners. Insurance availability is now an issue, too. Insurers have been dropping customers and pulling back from offering policies in some places regularly hit by extreme weather. Between 2018 and 2023, the rate of insurance nonrenewals ballooned by 280% in Florida, 136% in South Carolina and 82% in California, according to a 2024 report from the Senate Budget Committee. In Oklahoma, the nonrenewal rate climbed 103%, the committee reported, likely due to worsening damage from wind and hail.
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It was during that period — when homeowners began to see insurance costs shoot up and insurers started shedding customers — that State Farm allegedly rolled out its plan to cut spending on claims for roof damage from wind and hail, according to plaintiffs' lawyers.
Immediately, State Farm faced pushback in court. In August 2020, a pair of Oklahoma homeowners accused State Farm of refusing to pay for "obvious hail damage" to their home, an allegation the insurer denied. The federal judge in that case ruled that a jury could find that State Farm had acted in bad faith if the plaintiffs' lawyers demonstrated that the company ignored certain kinds of hail damage. Months after the ruling, State Farm and the homeowners settled the case on undisclosed terms.
There's nothing wrong with an insurer trying to reduce expenses, said Robert Miller, a plaintiffs' lawyer, at a 2022 trial in Oklahoma federal court over State Farm's claims-handling practices. But "you're not supposed to want to save money by saying, 'Too many hail claims are being paid' and decide to start denying them,'" Miller said.
In that lawsuit, State Farm said that the record only showed a disagreement over the cause of roof damage, and that there was no evidence the company had acted dishonestly. A jury disagreed, ordering State Farm to pay the homeowner $325,000 for denying their insurance claim in bad faith, plus nearly $16,000 for breach of contract.
For insurers, hail is a huge concern. Hail damage contributed to $51 billion in insured losses last year from severe storms, according to the Insurance Information Institute. Hail typically accounts for up to 80% of claims annually from severe storms, the group said.
Over the past two years, State Farm has paid more than $1 billion for wind and hail damage just in Oklahoma, the company told NPR. "Our Homeowner's Policy is designed to provide some of the broadest coverage offered in the insurance industry," State Farm said in a written statement. "Unfortunately, Oklahomans experience some of the highest numbers of wind and hail losses in the country."
Researchers warn that costly hailstorms are getting more likely in the U.S. Across the central and eastern parts of the country, weather conditions that can produce hail that's at least the size of a pool ball have gotten more common, Deborah Bathke, Nebraska's state climatologist, told NPR. And the Great Plains are expected to experience more frequent hail as the planet warms.
Insurers decry "legal system abuse"
Amid growing legal pressure, the insurance industry has criticized plaintiffs' attorneys and argued that frivolous lawsuits are partly to blame for the rising cost of coverage nationwide. In its statement to NPR, State Farm pointed to a blog post by the Insurance Information Institute titled "Stop Legal System Abuse." The group said it recently launched tort-reform campaigns in Oklahoma and Wisconsin that "highlight the 'billboard lawyer' narrative and expose how aggressive attorney advertising increases insurance costs."
But Graff, the Wisconsin plaintiffs' attorney, says lawyers like him are a "necessary evil," because state regulators aren't doing enough to police the insurance industry. Often, when homeowners report allegations of misconduct to insurance regulators, they're told to take it up in the courts, he says.
Drummond says it's his job as attorney general to defend Oklahoma consumers "when regulation fails."
Homeowners Maziasz and Willard both say they complained about State Farm to state regulators.
The National Association of Insurance Commissioners said in a statement to NPR that state regulators "investigate every formal complaint from consumers, frequently resolving disputes without the need for litigation." Consumers "can and should be able to access the judicial system," the group added, "if they still feel their insurer has violated state laws or rules."
The Oklahoma Insurance Department didn't respond to a message seeking comment. When Drummond moved to intervene in the homeowner lawsuit against State Farm, Oklahoma's insurance commissioner said that for two years, state regulators have been investigating how claims for roof damage are handled. A department spokesperson said information gathered during investigations is confidential.
Allegations of misconduct have followed State Farm for years. In the hail litigation he's handling now, Jeff Marr, an Oklahoma plaintiffs' lawyer, sees the same tactics that he alleges State Farm has used for decades to cut its losses from other perils. Marr's legal battles with State Farm started in 1999, when Marr says the insurer denied a claim that a friend filed for tornado damage.
"It is the same thing over and over, and just a rebranding of the same kind of scheme," Marr said in an interview with NPR.
In 2022, State Farm agreed to pay the federal government $100 million to settle allegations that the company defrauded the U.S. through its handling of insurance claims from Hurricane Katrina. State Farm said at the time that it was "pleased to bring an end to this 16-year litigation."
Meanwhile, recent hail lawsuits in Oklahoma have ended with hefty payouts to homeowners, including one for $3 million and another for $2 million. Settlements typically require plaintiffs to sign confidentiality agreements, and corporate documents obtained through discovery have to be returned to State Farm or destroyed.
Despite the large settlements that State Farm has had to pay, the company doesn't seem to be changing course, plaintiffs' lawyers say.
However, Drummond, the Oklahoma attorney general, thinks he can make a difference. So far, he says, State Farm has been able to reach settlements in hail litigation that "keep quiet" plaintiffs without hurting its own finances. That indicates a need for state intervention, Drummond says, "so that the penalty is significantly large enough that it can deter future behavior."
And Drummond says his office is looking at other insurers besides State Farm.
"If an industry were to self-regulate itself, then there would be little need for recourse through the courts," Drummond says. "But in the instance of the insurance industry, I believe that it does need to continue to be held accountable."
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