As of October 18, 2026, the mitigation scope your crew writes on a Washington water loss is a document with a deadline attached to the other side of the table. The amendments to Washington’s unfair claims settlement practices regulation — WAC 284-30-300 through 284-30-395, adopted in Insurance Commissioner Matter R 2025-05 (WSR 26-17-089) — are in force, and two of their provisions land directly on restoration work: the insurer now has five business days to answer a mitigation scope, and your reports are now, by name, part of a claim file your client has the right to demand.
Read the two subsections that matter most. WAC 284-30-330(20) defines it as an unfair practice to fail “to approve the first party claimant’s scope of mitigation or to provide the first party claimant with an approved scope of mitigation within five business days after receipt of the scope of mitigation,” where the policy carries the usual duty to protect the property from further damage. WAC 284-30-330(21) covers the rejection: the insurer must disclose the reasons the scope does not meet technical or industry standards, “including a dollar amount itemization of the disapproved items.” The scope is submitted by your client, the insured. You write it. Write it like the document it now is.
Write the scope like it will be itemized — it will
A five-business-day approve-or-answer clock changes what a good scope looks like. The old mitigation scope could be a number and a paragraph, defended later on a phone call. The new one should be built to survive a line-by-line review against “technical or industry standards” — because that is the exact review the rule prescribes, and the rejection, if it comes, has to engage your document line by line, in dollars.
That means the documentation discipline this desk has taught for years is no longer just good practice; it is the scope’s armor. Timestamped photographs from the first walk, before a single piece of equipment is set. A moisture map and daily moisture logs that show why each drying day and each machine is there. A scope narrative written for a stranger — someone who was never in the building should be able to follow what was wet, what you did, and why, from the paper alone. Line-level pricing that a reviewer can check without calling you. This is the same packet standard set out in the emergency services plan levels — document from the beginning, hold conditions, or respond in full — applied to the document the statute now puts on a clock.
An itemized rejection is a gift — treat it like one
Operators will read subsection (21) as a threat. Read it again: if the insurer rejects your client’s scope, it must say why, in terms of technical or industry standards, with a dollar amount attached to each disapproved item. A verbal “that’s too much” cannot be answered. An itemized rejection can — line by line, with the moisture log, the photograph, and the standard. It converts the oldest argument in restoration into a document exchange, and document exchanges are won by the side that kept the records.
Two operating rules follow. First, get the scope to the client and into the insurer’s hands in writing, dated — the five business days run from the insurer’s receipt of the scope, so the submission itself needs a timestamp you control. Second, when an approval or an itemized rejection comes back, keep it in the job file with the scope it answers. The pair of documents is the record of the mitigation decision, and it will matter at supplement time, at billing time, and in any later dispute about what was authorized.
Your reports are in the claim file — and the claim file is your client’s to request
WAC 284-30-340(2) gives insureds the right to request any portion of the first-party claim file, and the rule lists the contents: written reports, claim notes, estimates, bids, plans, measurements, drawings, engineer reports, contractor reports, statements, photographs, video recordings. Contractor reports — your reports — are named in the text. The insurer has 15 business days from the request to produce them. It may redact privileged material, third-party financial information, or specific investigative records, but it must tell the insured when documents were withheld or redacted.
Work like your client will read everything you send the carrier, because they now can, on request, as of right. The moisture log with the sloppy gap, the narrative written for the adjuster instead of the record, the photograph that never got taken — all of it sits in a file the policyholder can pull. The restorers who document to the standard above have nothing to fear from that transparency; it is, frankly, a competitive gift. The file is also where your work defends itself when an engineer’s report reaches a different conclusion: your client can now obtain that report through the same request, instead of arguing against a summary of it.
“The software said so” is no longer a complete investigation
The supplement conversation changes too. WAC 284-30-330(4) makes it an unfair practice to deny or refuse payment without a reasonable investigation, and states that a reasonable investigation “may not rely solely on the use of a database, which includes, but is not limited to, estimating software and benchmarks.” The rule’s definition of investigation (WAC 284-30-320(11)) includes assessing “the reasonableness of the costs or expenses that have been or will be incurred to mitigate, treat, repair, replace, or recover” the loss — mitigation costs are expressly inside it.
And when the carrier’s number comes out of a database, survey, estimating software, or benchmarks, WAC 284-30-380(8) gives the claimant a disclosure right: on request, the insurer must provide the date the cost data was collected, where it was collected from, and which businesses provided it. Pair that with WAC 284-30-380(7) — the insurer is responsible for the accuracy of evaluations made on its behalf — and the supplement conversation has a new, statutory set of questions: When was this labor rate collected? From which market? Supplied by whom? Those are your client’s questions to ask, in writing, and they are strongest when your own file — the documented scope, the logs, the local invoices — is already in order. One more clock for the office calendar: under WAC 284-30-370, the investigation itself is due within 30 calendar days of notification of claim, or the insurer owes written reasons and updates every 30 days. Supplements filed into a documented job, early, land inside that window while the carrier’s own deadline is running.
The pattern across the whole rule is the one this industry keeps relearning: the file wins. Washington just wrote it into the claims standards. The broker’s side of the same amendments — the day-one briefing for the insureds you both serve — is Risk Coverage Hub’s companion piece, Washington’s Claims Clocks Started October 18.