California has long been known as a progressive state that embraces evolving lifestyles, but when it comes to auto insurance, it seems stuck in the 1950s.
Single, divorced or widowed and need coverage for your car? You might very well pay more than your married neighbor — a penalty sanctioned by the state and judiciary.
A California appeals court last month upheld a lower court ruling that rejected a lawsuit seeking to abolish the right of insurers to charge the unwed more because of their higher statistical chance of getting into crashes. The decision is expected to be appealed.
The lawsuit by 11 unmarried drivers specifically sought a court order that would have forced Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara to eliminate marriage as an optional factor in setting rates — but he opposed it, even as regulators bar the consideration of sex, age, race and other personal characteristics.
“This is really a question about whether the insurance commissioner has the ability to pick and choose what civil rights laws are appropriate to enforce,” said Christian Schreiber, who is among several attorneys representing the drivers who also have filed proposed class actions against 12 insurers over the rule.
A test conducted by the Consumer Federation of America, cited in a legal brief in support of the litigation, found that unmarried drivers pay more.
Single, divorced and widowed drivers got quotes in April 2025 that were up to $108 higher for six months of premiums from four out of five California carriers.
Mercury, a large Los Angeles-based insurer, charged the highest differential, though it offered lower rates to widowed motorists with 34 or more years of driving experience. It declined to comment on the litigation.
State Farm, California’s largest auto insurer, charged the same for married and unmarried drivers.
Rex Frazier, president of the Personal Insurance Federation of California, a trade group that includes Mercury and other big auto insurers, said carriers charge the higher rates with good reason: unmarried people get into more collisions.
“I always assumed that marriage was related to a person being more likely to have kids, and so you’re going to drive safer if you’ve got kids in the car,” he said.
The demographic also helps capture the drivers most likely to get into crashes: young male drivers, since insurers in California are prohibited from considering sex and age in setting rates.
In arriving at the July 16 decision, the 1st Appellate District panel in San Francisco reasoned that two state civil rights laws that bar discrimination based on marital status have to defer to Proposition 103, the 1988 ballot measure that governs the state’s property and casualty insurance industry.
The proposition gave the insurance commissioner the authority to establish optional auto insurance rating factors that are predictive of loss claims — in addition to a policyholder’s driving record, experience and annual miles driven, three mandatory rating factors.
Among the legal arguments cited in the 2-1 majority opinion is that the state’s bedrock civil rights act doesn’t confer any right limited by law, in this case the authority the voter-passed proposition gives to the insurance commissioner to establish optional ratings factors that aren’t arbitrary.
A dissent by presiding Justice Alison Tucher concluded the majority misread the proposition, which she said must adhere to the state’s civil rights laws.
Harvey Rosenfield, the author of Proposition 103, whose organization, Consumer Watchdog, filed a brief in support of the drivers, said marital status “turns Prop 103 upside down” by allowing “unjust demographic characteristics to price auto insurance.”
“That’s why voters ordered the industry to obey the civil rights laws and to base premiums on factors within a person’s control — like their driving safety record and the number of miles they drive every year,” he said.
Only a handful of states, including Massachusetts and Hawaii, have barred marital status as a rating factor.
The regulation allowing marital status to be considered has been around since 1996, when then-California Insurance Commissioner Chuck Quackenbush included it in regulations implementing Proposition 103.
At the time, marital status was not a protected characteristic in the civil rights act, but it became so when the Legislature amended the law in 2005 and explicitly banned marital status discrimination — another issue debated by the jurists in coming to their differing conclusions.
Gabriel Sanchez, a spokesperson for Lara, stressed that the decision will not affect current rates since it left existing regulations in place.
“No one will be seeing higher or lower premiums for their automobile policies based on this ruling,” said Sanchez, who noted several previous commissioners didn’t change the regulation.
“The ruling also reaffirms the insurance commissioner’s broad authority over approval of automobile rates pursuant to Prop 103,” he said.
The 1996 regulations also allowed a person’s gender to be considered in setting auto premiums, but former Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones eliminated it as an optional ratings factor in 2019.
“Banning gender rating was a big fight and big first step to stop discrimination. Eliminating marital status rating is a logical next step and ought to be banned as well,” he said, in a statement to The Times.
Bella DePaulo, a former University of Virginia professor who has authored books on single living, said society has changed since the regulation was established, with more people getting married later or not marrying at all.
In 1996, 58% of adults were married, with the medianage at marriage for men at 27.1 and for women at 24.8. By 2025, only 51% of adults were married, with the median age at marriage rising to 30.8 for men and 28.4 for women, said DePaulo, now academically affiliated with UC Santa Barbara.
“Practices that discriminate against people who are not married are increasingly out of step with how we live now,” she said. “They are disadvantaging nearly half of the adult population.”
The Lara lawsuit, filed in 2022, similarly notes those societal changes, while alleging Black and Latino people are disproportionately affected by the marital status regulation since they marry at lower rates.
It also alleges LGBTQ+ individuals are disadvantaged, though same-sex marriage in California has been legal for more than a decade. However, domestic partners are treated as single by some insurers unless they are registered, according to the lawsuit.
The litigation against the commissioner stayed the proposed class-action lawsuits against the insurers. The defendants include Mercury and Farmers, a Los Angeles insurer that filed a brief in support of Lara in his case.
Those lawsuits will remain on hold pending a planned appeal of the July 16 ruling, Schreiber said.
“We think [it’s] a very dangerous precedent, and one that the California Supreme Court ought to weigh in on,” he said.
California has long been known as a progressive state that embraces evolving lifestyles, but when it comes to auto insurance, it seems stuck in the 1950s.
Single, divorced or widowed and need coverage for your car? You might very well pay more than your married neighbor — a penalty sanctioned by the state and judiciary.
A California appeals court last month upheld a lower court ruling that rejected a lawsuit seeking to abolish the right of insurers to charge the unwed more because of their higher statistical chance of getting into crashes. The decision is expected to be appealed.
The lawsuit by 11 unmarried drivers specifically sought a court order that would have forced Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara to eliminate marriage as an optional factor in setting rates — but he opposed it, even as regulators bar the consideration of sex, age, race and other personal characteristics.
“This is really a question about whether the insurance commissioner has the ability to pick and choose what civil rights laws are appropriate to enforce,” said Christian Schreiber, who is among several attorneys representing the drivers who also have filed proposed class actions against 12 insurers over the rule.
A test conducted by the Consumer Federation of America, cited in a legal brief in support of the litigation, found that unmarried drivers pay more.
Single, divorced and widowed drivers got quotes in April 2025 that were up to $108 higher for six months of premiums from four out of five California carriers.
Mercury, a large Los Angeles-based insurer, charged the highest differential, though it offered lower rates to widowed motorists with 34 or more years of driving experience. It declined to comment on the litigation.
State Farm, California’s largest auto insurer, charged the same for married and unmarried drivers.
Rex Frazier, president of the Personal Insurance Federation of California, a trade group that includes Mercury and other big auto insurers, said carriers charge the higher rates with good reason: unmarried people get into more collisions.
“I always assumed that marriage was related to a person being more likely to have kids, and so you’re going to drive safer if you’ve got kids in the car,” he said.
The demographic also helps capture the drivers most likely to get into crashes: young male drivers, since insurers in California are prohibited from considering sex and age in setting rates.
In arriving at the July 16 decision, the 1st Appellate District panel in San Francisco reasoned that two state civil rights laws that bar discrimination based on marital status have to defer to Proposition 103, the 1988 ballot measure that governs the state’s property and casualty insurance industry.
The proposition gave the insurance commissioner the authority to establish optional auto insurance rating factors that are predictive of loss claims — in addition to a policyholder’s driving record, experience and annual miles driven, three mandatory rating factors.
Among the legal arguments cited in the 2-1 majority opinion is that the state’s bedrock civil rights act doesn’t confer any right limited by law, in this case the authority the voter-passed proposition gives to the insurance commissioner to establish optional ratings factors that aren’t arbitrary.
A dissent by presiding Justice Alison Tucher concluded the majority misread the proposition, which she said must adhere to the state’s civil rights laws.
Harvey Rosenfield, the author of Proposition 103, whose organization, Consumer Watchdog, filed a brief in support of the drivers, said marital status “turns Prop 103 upside down” by allowing “unjust demographic characteristics to price auto insurance.”
“That’s why voters ordered the industry to obey the civil rights laws and to base premiums on factors within a person’s control — like their driving safety record and the number of miles they drive every year,” he said.
Only a handful of states, including Massachusetts and Hawaii, have barred marital status as a rating factor.
The regulation allowing marital status to be considered has been around since 1996, when then-California Insurance Commissioner Chuck Quackenbush included it in regulations implementing Proposition 103.
At the time, marital status was not a protected characteristic in the civil rights act, but it became so when the Legislature amended the law in 2005 and explicitly banned marital status discrimination — another issue debated by the jurists in coming to their differing conclusions.
Gabriel Sanchez, a spokesperson for Lara, stressed that the decision will not affect current rates since it left existing regulations in place.
“No one will be seeing higher or lower premiums for their automobile policies based on this ruling,” said Sanchez, who noted several previous commissioners didn’t change the regulation.
“The ruling also reaffirms the insurance commissioner’s broad authority over approval of automobile rates pursuant to Prop 103,” he said.
The 1996 regulations also allowed a person’s gender to be considered in setting auto premiums, but former Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones eliminated it as an optional ratings factor in 2019.
“Banning gender rating was a big fight and big first step to stop discrimination. Eliminating marital status rating is a logical next step and ought to be banned as well,” he said, in a statement to The Times.
Bella DePaulo, a former University of Virginia professor who has authored books on single living, said society has changed since the regulation was established, with more people getting married later or not marrying at all.
In 1996, 58% of adults were married, with the medianage at marriage for men at 27.1 and for women at 24.8. By 2025, only 51% of adults were married, with the median age at marriage rising to 30.8 for men and 28.4 for women, said DePaulo, now academically affiliated with UC Santa Barbara.
“Practices that discriminate against people who are not married are increasingly out of step with how we live now,” she said. “They are disadvantaging nearly half of the adult population.”
The Lara lawsuit, filed in 2022, similarly notes those societal changes, while alleging Black and Latino people are disproportionately affected by the marital status regulation since they marry at lower rates.
It also alleges LGBTQ+ individuals are disadvantaged, though same-sex marriage in California has been legal for more than a decade. However, domestic partners are treated as single by some insurers unless they are registered, according to the lawsuit.
The litigation against the commissioner stayed the proposed class-action lawsuits against the insurers. The defendants include Mercury and Farmers, a Los Angeles insurer that filed a brief in support of Lara in his case.
Those lawsuits will remain on hold pending a planned appeal of the July 16 ruling, Schreiber said.
“We think [it’s] a very dangerous precedent, and one that the California Supreme Court ought to weigh in on,” he said.
California has long been known as a progressive state that embraces evolving lifestyles, but when it comes to auto insurance, it seems stuck in the 1950s.
Single, divorced or widowed and need coverage for your car? You might very well pay more than your married neighbor — a penalty sanctioned by the state and judiciary.
A California appeals court last month upheld a lower court ruling that rejected a lawsuit seeking to abolish the right of insurers to charge the unwed more because of their higher statistical chance of getting into crashes. The decision is expected to be appealed.
The lawsuit by 11 unmarried drivers specifically sought a court order that would have forced Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara to eliminate marriage as an optional factor in setting rates — but he opposed it, even as regulators bar the consideration of sex, age, race and other personal characteristics.
“This is really a question about whether the insurance commissioner has the ability to pick and choose what civil rights laws are appropriate to enforce,” said Christian Schreiber, who is among several attorneys representing the drivers who also have filed proposed class actions against 12 insurers over the rule.
A test conducted by the Consumer Federation of America, cited in a legal brief in support of the litigation, found that unmarried drivers pay more.
Single, divorced and widowed drivers got quotes in April 2025 that were up to $108 higher for six months of premiums from four out of five California carriers.
Mercury, a large Los Angeles-based insurer, charged the highest differential, though it offered lower rates to widowed motorists with 34 or more years of driving experience. It declined to comment on the litigation.
State Farm, California’s largest auto insurer, charged the same for married and unmarried drivers.
Rex Frazier, president of the Personal Insurance Federation of California, a trade group that includes Mercury and other big auto insurers, said carriers charge the higher rates with good reason: unmarried people get into more collisions.
“I always assumed that marriage was related to a person being more likely to have kids, and so you’re going to drive safer if you’ve got kids in the car,” he said.
The demographic also helps capture the drivers most likely to get into crashes: young male drivers, since insurers in California are prohibited from considering sex and age in setting rates.
In arriving at the July 16 decision, the 1st Appellate District panel in San Francisco reasoned that two state civil rights laws that bar discrimination based on marital status have to defer to Proposition 103, the 1988 ballot measure that governs the state’s property and casualty insurance industry.
The proposition gave the insurance commissioner the authority to establish optional auto insurance rating factors that are predictive of loss claims — in addition to a policyholder’s driving record, experience and annual miles driven, three mandatory rating factors.
Among the legal arguments cited in the 2-1 majority opinion is that the state’s bedrock civil rights act doesn’t confer any right limited by law, in this case the authority the voter-passed proposition gives to the insurance commissioner to establish optional ratings factors that aren’t arbitrary.
A dissent by presiding Justice Alison Tucher concluded the majority misread the proposition, which she said must adhere to the state’s civil rights laws.
Harvey Rosenfield, the author of Proposition 103, whose organization, Consumer Watchdog, filed a brief in support of the drivers, said marital status “turns Prop 103 upside down” by allowing “unjust demographic characteristics to price auto insurance.”
“That’s why voters ordered the industry to obey the civil rights laws and to base premiums on factors within a person’s control — like their driving safety record and the number of miles they drive every year,” he said.
Only a handful of states, including Massachusetts and Hawaii, have barred marital status as a rating factor.
The regulation allowing marital status to be considered has been around since 1996, when then-California Insurance Commissioner Chuck Quackenbush included it in regulations implementing Proposition 103.
At the time, marital status was not a protected characteristic in the civil rights act, but it became so when the Legislature amended the law in 2005 and explicitly banned marital status discrimination — another issue debated by the jurists in coming to their differing conclusions.
Gabriel Sanchez, a spokesperson for Lara, stressed that the decision will not affect current rates since it left existing regulations in place.
“No one will be seeing higher or lower premiums for their automobile policies based on this ruling,” said Sanchez, who noted several previous commissioners didn’t change the regulation.
“The ruling also reaffirms the insurance commissioner’s broad authority over approval of automobile rates pursuant to Prop 103,” he said.
The 1996 regulations also allowed a person’s gender to be considered in setting auto premiums, but former Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones eliminated it as an optional ratings factor in 2019.
“Banning gender rating was a big fight and big first step to stop discrimination. Eliminating marital status rating is a logical next step and ought to be banned as well,” he said, in a statement to The Times.
Bella DePaulo, a former University of Virginia professor who has authored books on single living, said society has changed since the regulation was established, with more people getting married later or not marrying at all.
In 1996, 58% of adults were married, with the medianage at marriage for men at 27.1 and for women at 24.8. By 2025, only 51% of adults were married, with the median age at marriage rising to 30.8 for men and 28.4 for women, said DePaulo, now academically affiliated with UC Santa Barbara.
“Practices that discriminate against people who are not married are increasingly out of step with how we live now,” she said. “They are disadvantaging nearly half of the adult population.”
The Lara lawsuit, filed in 2022, similarly notes those societal changes, while alleging Black and Latino people are disproportionately affected by the marital status regulation since they marry at lower rates.
It also alleges LGBTQ+ individuals are disadvantaged, though same-sex marriage in California has been legal for more than a decade. However, domestic partners are treated as single by some insurers unless they are registered, according to the lawsuit.
The litigation against the commissioner stayed the proposed class-action lawsuits against the insurers. The defendants include Mercury and Farmers, a Los Angeles insurer that filed a brief in support of Lara in his case.
Those lawsuits will remain on hold pending a planned appeal of the July 16 ruling, Schreiber said.
“We think [it’s] a very dangerous precedent, and one that the California Supreme Court ought to weigh in on,” he said.
California has long been known as a progressive state that embraces evolving lifestyles, but when it comes to auto insurance, it seems stuck in the 1950s.
Single, divorced or widowed and need coverage for your car? You might very well pay more than your married neighbor — a penalty sanctioned by the state and judiciary.
A California appeals court last month upheld a lower court ruling that rejected a lawsuit seeking to abolish the right of insurers to charge the unwed more because of their higher statistical chance of getting into crashes. The decision is expected to be appealed.
The lawsuit by 11 unmarried drivers specifically sought a court order that would have forced Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara to eliminate marriage as an optional factor in setting rates — but he opposed it, even as regulators bar the consideration of sex, age, race and other personal characteristics.
“This is really a question about whether the insurance commissioner has the ability to pick and choose what civil rights laws are appropriate to enforce,” said Christian Schreiber, who is among several attorneys representing the drivers who also have filed proposed class actions against 12 insurers over the rule.
A test conducted by the Consumer Federation of America, cited in a legal brief in support of the litigation, found that unmarried drivers pay more.
Single, divorced and widowed drivers got quotes in April 2025 that were up to $108 higher for six months of premiums from four out of five California carriers.
Mercury, a large Los Angeles-based insurer, charged the highest differential, though it offered lower rates to widowed motorists with 34 or more years of driving experience. It declined to comment on the litigation.
State Farm, California’s largest auto insurer, charged the same for married and unmarried drivers.
Rex Frazier, president of the Personal Insurance Federation of California, a trade group that includes Mercury and other big auto insurers, said carriers charge the higher rates with good reason: unmarried people get into more collisions.
“I always assumed that marriage was related to a person being more likely to have kids, and so you’re going to drive safer if you’ve got kids in the car,” he said.
The demographic also helps capture the drivers most likely to get into crashes: young male drivers, since insurers in California are prohibited from considering sex and age in setting rates.
In arriving at the July 16 decision, the 1st Appellate District panel in San Francisco reasoned that two state civil rights laws that bar discrimination based on marital status have to defer to Proposition 103, the 1988 ballot measure that governs the state’s property and casualty insurance industry.
The proposition gave the insurance commissioner the authority to establish optional auto insurance rating factors that are predictive of loss claims — in addition to a policyholder’s driving record, experience and annual miles driven, three mandatory rating factors.
Among the legal arguments cited in the 2-1 majority opinion is that the state’s bedrock civil rights act doesn’t confer any right limited by law, in this case the authority the voter-passed proposition gives to the insurance commissioner to establish optional ratings factors that aren’t arbitrary.
A dissent by presiding Justice Alison Tucher concluded the majority misread the proposition, which she said must adhere to the state’s civil rights laws.
Harvey Rosenfield, the author of Proposition 103, whose organization, Consumer Watchdog, filed a brief in support of the drivers, said marital status “turns Prop 103 upside down” by allowing “unjust demographic characteristics to price auto insurance.”
“That’s why voters ordered the industry to obey the civil rights laws and to base premiums on factors within a person’s control — like their driving safety record and the number of miles they drive every year,” he said.
Only a handful of states, including Massachusetts and Hawaii, have barred marital status as a rating factor.
The regulation allowing marital status to be considered has been around since 1996, when then-California Insurance Commissioner Chuck Quackenbush included it in regulations implementing Proposition 103.
At the time, marital status was not a protected characteristic in the civil rights act, but it became so when the Legislature amended the law in 2005 and explicitly banned marital status discrimination — another issue debated by the jurists in coming to their differing conclusions.
Gabriel Sanchez, a spokesperson for Lara, stressed that the decision will not affect current rates since it left existing regulations in place.
“No one will be seeing higher or lower premiums for their automobile policies based on this ruling,” said Sanchez, who noted several previous commissioners didn’t change the regulation.
“The ruling also reaffirms the insurance commissioner’s broad authority over approval of automobile rates pursuant to Prop 103,” he said.
The 1996 regulations also allowed a person’s gender to be considered in setting auto premiums, but former Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones eliminated it as an optional ratings factor in 2019.
“Banning gender rating was a big fight and big first step to stop discrimination. Eliminating marital status rating is a logical next step and ought to be banned as well,” he said, in a statement to The Times.
Bella DePaulo, a former University of Virginia professor who has authored books on single living, said society has changed since the regulation was established, with more people getting married later or not marrying at all.
In 1996, 58% of adults were married, with the medianage at marriage for men at 27.1 and for women at 24.8. By 2025, only 51% of adults were married, with the median age at marriage rising to 30.8 for men and 28.4 for women, said DePaulo, now academically affiliated with UC Santa Barbara.
“Practices that discriminate against people who are not married are increasingly out of step with how we live now,” she said. “They are disadvantaging nearly half of the adult population.”
The Lara lawsuit, filed in 2022, similarly notes those societal changes, while alleging Black and Latino people are disproportionately affected by the marital status regulation since they marry at lower rates.
It also alleges LGBTQ+ individuals are disadvantaged, though same-sex marriage in California has been legal for more than a decade. However, domestic partners are treated as single by some insurers unless they are registered, according to the lawsuit.
The litigation against the commissioner stayed the proposed class-action lawsuits against the insurers. The defendants include Mercury and Farmers, a Los Angeles insurer that filed a brief in support of Lara in his case.
Those lawsuits will remain on hold pending a planned appeal of the July 16 ruling, Schreiber said.
“We think [it’s] a very dangerous precedent, and one that the California Supreme Court ought to weigh in on,” he said.
California has long been known as a progressive state that embraces evolving lifestyles, but when it comes to auto insurance, it seems stuck in the 1950s.
Single, divorced or widowed and need coverage for your car? You might very well pay more than your married neighbor — a penalty sanctioned by the state and judiciary.
A California appeals court last month upheld a lower court ruling that rejected a lawsuit seeking to abolish the right of insurers to charge the unwed more because of their higher statistical chance of getting into crashes. The decision is expected to be appealed.
The lawsuit by 11 unmarried drivers specifically sought a court order that would have forced Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara to eliminate marriage as an optional factor in setting rates — but he opposed it, even as regulators bar the consideration of sex, age, race and other personal characteristics.
“This is really a question about whether the insurance commissioner has the ability to pick and choose what civil rights laws are appropriate to enforce,” said Christian Schreiber, who is among several attorneys representing the drivers who also have filed proposed class actions against 12 insurers over the rule.
A test conducted by the Consumer Federation of America, cited in a legal brief in support of the litigation, found that unmarried drivers pay more.
Single, divorced and widowed drivers got quotes in April 2025 that were up to $108 higher for six months of premiums from four out of five California carriers.
Mercury, a large Los Angeles-based insurer, charged the highest differential, though it offered lower rates to widowed motorists with 34 or more years of driving experience. It declined to comment on the litigation.
State Farm, California’s largest auto insurer, charged the same for married and unmarried drivers.
Rex Frazier, president of the Personal Insurance Federation of California, a trade group that includes Mercury and other big auto insurers, said carriers charge the higher rates with good reason: unmarried people get into more collisions.
“I always assumed that marriage was related to a person being more likely to have kids, and so you’re going to drive safer if you’ve got kids in the car,” he said.
The demographic also helps capture the drivers most likely to get into crashes: young male drivers, since insurers in California are prohibited from considering sex and age in setting rates.
In arriving at the July 16 decision, the 1st Appellate District panel in San Francisco reasoned that two state civil rights laws that bar discrimination based on marital status have to defer to Proposition 103, the 1988 ballot measure that governs the state’s property and casualty insurance industry.
The proposition gave the insurance commissioner the authority to establish optional auto insurance rating factors that are predictive of loss claims — in addition to a policyholder’s driving record, experience and annual miles driven, three mandatory rating factors.
Among the legal arguments cited in the 2-1 majority opinion is that the state’s bedrock civil rights act doesn’t confer any right limited by law, in this case the authority the voter-passed proposition gives to the insurance commissioner to establish optional ratings factors that aren’t arbitrary.
A dissent by presiding Justice Alison Tucher concluded the majority misread the proposition, which she said must adhere to the state’s civil rights laws.
Harvey Rosenfield, the author of Proposition 103, whose organization, Consumer Watchdog, filed a brief in support of the drivers, said marital status “turns Prop 103 upside down” by allowing “unjust demographic characteristics to price auto insurance.”
“That’s why voters ordered the industry to obey the civil rights laws and to base premiums on factors within a person’s control — like their driving safety record and the number of miles they drive every year,” he said.
Only a handful of states, including Massachusetts and Hawaii, have barred marital status as a rating factor.
The regulation allowing marital status to be considered has been around since 1996, when then-California Insurance Commissioner Chuck Quackenbush included it in regulations implementing Proposition 103.
At the time, marital status was not a protected characteristic in the civil rights act, but it became so when the Legislature amended the law in 2005 and explicitly banned marital status discrimination — another issue debated by the jurists in coming to their differing conclusions.
Gabriel Sanchez, a spokesperson for Lara, stressed that the decision will not affect current rates since it left existing regulations in place.
“No one will be seeing higher or lower premiums for their automobile policies based on this ruling,” said Sanchez, who noted several previous commissioners didn’t change the regulation.
“The ruling also reaffirms the insurance commissioner’s broad authority over approval of automobile rates pursuant to Prop 103,” he said.
The 1996 regulations also allowed a person’s gender to be considered in setting auto premiums, but former Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones eliminated it as an optional ratings factor in 2019.
“Banning gender rating was a big fight and big first step to stop discrimination. Eliminating marital status rating is a logical next step and ought to be banned as well,” he said, in a statement to The Times.
Bella DePaulo, a former University of Virginia professor who has authored books on single living, said society has changed since the regulation was established, with more people getting married later or not marrying at all.
In 1996, 58% of adults were married, with the medianage at marriage for men at 27.1 and for women at 24.8. By 2025, only 51% of adults were married, with the median age at marriage rising to 30.8 for men and 28.4 for women, said DePaulo, now academically affiliated with UC Santa Barbara.
“Practices that discriminate against people who are not married are increasingly out of step with how we live now,” she said. “They are disadvantaging nearly half of the adult population.”
The Lara lawsuit, filed in 2022, similarly notes those societal changes, while alleging Black and Latino people are disproportionately affected by the marital status regulation since they marry at lower rates.
It also alleges LGBTQ+ individuals are disadvantaged, though same-sex marriage in California has been legal for more than a decade. However, domestic partners are treated as single by some insurers unless they are registered, according to the lawsuit.
The litigation against the commissioner stayed the proposed class-action lawsuits against the insurers. The defendants include Mercury and Farmers, a Los Angeles insurer that filed a brief in support of Lara in his case.
Those lawsuits will remain on hold pending a planned appeal of the July 16 ruling, Schreiber said.
“We think [it’s] a very dangerous precedent, and one that the California Supreme Court ought to weigh in on,” he said.
California has long been known as a progressive state that embraces evolving lifestyles, but when it comes to auto insurance, it seems stuck in the 1950s.
Single, divorced or widowed and need coverage for your car? You might very well pay more than your married neighbor — a penalty sanctioned by the state and judiciary.
A California appeals court last month upheld a lower court ruling that rejected a lawsuit seeking to abolish the right of insurers to charge the unwed more because of their higher statistical chance of getting into crashes. The decision is expected to be appealed.
The lawsuit by 11 unmarried drivers specifically sought a court order that would have forced Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara to eliminate marriage as an optional factor in setting rates — but he opposed it, even as regulators bar the consideration of sex, age, race and other personal characteristics.
“This is really a question about whether the insurance commissioner has the ability to pick and choose what civil rights laws are appropriate to enforce,” said Christian Schreiber, who is among several attorneys representing the drivers who also have filed proposed class actions against 12 insurers over the rule.
A test conducted by the Consumer Federation of America, cited in a legal brief in support of the litigation, found that unmarried drivers pay more.
Single, divorced and widowed drivers got quotes in April 2025 that were up to $108 higher for six months of premiums from four out of five California carriers.
Mercury, a large Los Angeles-based insurer, charged the highest differential, though it offered lower rates to widowed motorists with 34 or more years of driving experience. It declined to comment on the litigation.
State Farm, California’s largest auto insurer, charged the same for married and unmarried drivers.
Rex Frazier, president of the Personal Insurance Federation of California, a trade group that includes Mercury and other big auto insurers, said carriers charge the higher rates with good reason: unmarried people get into more collisions.
“I always assumed that marriage was related to a person being more likely to have kids, and so you’re going to drive safer if you’ve got kids in the car,” he said.
The demographic also helps capture the drivers most likely to get into crashes: young male drivers, since insurers in California are prohibited from considering sex and age in setting rates.
In arriving at the July 16 decision, the 1st Appellate District panel in San Francisco reasoned that two state civil rights laws that bar discrimination based on marital status have to defer to Proposition 103, the 1988 ballot measure that governs the state’s property and casualty insurance industry.
The proposition gave the insurance commissioner the authority to establish optional auto insurance rating factors that are predictive of loss claims — in addition to a policyholder’s driving record, experience and annual miles driven, three mandatory rating factors.
Among the legal arguments cited in the 2-1 majority opinion is that the state’s bedrock civil rights act doesn’t confer any right limited by law, in this case the authority the voter-passed proposition gives to the insurance commissioner to establish optional ratings factors that aren’t arbitrary.
A dissent by presiding Justice Alison Tucher concluded the majority misread the proposition, which she said must adhere to the state’s civil rights laws.
Harvey Rosenfield, the author of Proposition 103, whose organization, Consumer Watchdog, filed a brief in support of the drivers, said marital status “turns Prop 103 upside down” by allowing “unjust demographic characteristics to price auto insurance.”
“That’s why voters ordered the industry to obey the civil rights laws and to base premiums on factors within a person’s control — like their driving safety record and the number of miles they drive every year,” he said.
Only a handful of states, including Massachusetts and Hawaii, have barred marital status as a rating factor.
The regulation allowing marital status to be considered has been around since 1996, when then-California Insurance Commissioner Chuck Quackenbush included it in regulations implementing Proposition 103.
At the time, marital status was not a protected characteristic in the civil rights act, but it became so when the Legislature amended the law in 2005 and explicitly banned marital status discrimination — another issue debated by the jurists in coming to their differing conclusions.
Gabriel Sanchez, a spokesperson for Lara, stressed that the decision will not affect current rates since it left existing regulations in place.
“No one will be seeing higher or lower premiums for their automobile policies based on this ruling,” said Sanchez, who noted several previous commissioners didn’t change the regulation.
“The ruling also reaffirms the insurance commissioner’s broad authority over approval of automobile rates pursuant to Prop 103,” he said.
The 1996 regulations also allowed a person’s gender to be considered in setting auto premiums, but former Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones eliminated it as an optional ratings factor in 2019.
“Banning gender rating was a big fight and big first step to stop discrimination. Eliminating marital status rating is a logical next step and ought to be banned as well,” he said, in a statement to The Times.
Bella DePaulo, a former University of Virginia professor who has authored books on single living, said society has changed since the regulation was established, with more people getting married later or not marrying at all.
In 1996, 58% of adults were married, with the medianage at marriage for men at 27.1 and for women at 24.8. By 2025, only 51% of adults were married, with the median age at marriage rising to 30.8 for men and 28.4 for women, said DePaulo, now academically affiliated with UC Santa Barbara.
“Practices that discriminate against people who are not married are increasingly out of step with how we live now,” she said. “They are disadvantaging nearly half of the adult population.”
The Lara lawsuit, filed in 2022, similarly notes those societal changes, while alleging Black and Latino people are disproportionately affected by the marital status regulation since they marry at lower rates.
It also alleges LGBTQ+ individuals are disadvantaged, though same-sex marriage in California has been legal for more than a decade. However, domestic partners are treated as single by some insurers unless they are registered, according to the lawsuit.
The litigation against the commissioner stayed the proposed class-action lawsuits against the insurers. The defendants include Mercury and Farmers, a Los Angeles insurer that filed a brief in support of Lara in his case.
Those lawsuits will remain on hold pending a planned appeal of the July 16 ruling, Schreiber said.
“We think [it’s] a very dangerous precedent, and one that the California Supreme Court ought to weigh in on,” he said.
California has long been known as a progressive state that embraces evolving lifestyles, but when it comes to auto insurance, it seems stuck in the 1950s.
Single, divorced or widowed and need coverage for your car? You might very well pay more than your married neighbor — a penalty sanctioned by the state and judiciary.
A California appeals court last month upheld a lower court ruling that rejected a lawsuit seeking to abolish the right of insurers to charge the unwed more because of their higher statistical chance of getting into crashes. The decision is expected to be appealed.
The lawsuit by 11 unmarried drivers specifically sought a court order that would have forced Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara to eliminate marriage as an optional factor in setting rates — but he opposed it, even as regulators bar the consideration of sex, age, race and other personal characteristics.
“This is really a question about whether the insurance commissioner has the ability to pick and choose what civil rights laws are appropriate to enforce,” said Christian Schreiber, who is among several attorneys representing the drivers who also have filed proposed class actions against 12 insurers over the rule.
A test conducted by the Consumer Federation of America, cited in a legal brief in support of the litigation, found that unmarried drivers pay more.
Single, divorced and widowed drivers got quotes in April 2025 that were up to $108 higher for six months of premiums from four out of five California carriers.
Mercury, a large Los Angeles-based insurer, charged the highest differential, though it offered lower rates to widowed motorists with 34 or more years of driving experience. It declined to comment on the litigation.
State Farm, California’s largest auto insurer, charged the same for married and unmarried drivers.
Rex Frazier, president of the Personal Insurance Federation of California, a trade group that includes Mercury and other big auto insurers, said carriers charge the higher rates with good reason: unmarried people get into more collisions.
“I always assumed that marriage was related to a person being more likely to have kids, and so you’re going to drive safer if you’ve got kids in the car,” he said.
The demographic also helps capture the drivers most likely to get into crashes: young male drivers, since insurers in California are prohibited from considering sex and age in setting rates.
In arriving at the July 16 decision, the 1st Appellate District panel in San Francisco reasoned that two state civil rights laws that bar discrimination based on marital status have to defer to Proposition 103, the 1988 ballot measure that governs the state’s property and casualty insurance industry.
The proposition gave the insurance commissioner the authority to establish optional auto insurance rating factors that are predictive of loss claims — in addition to a policyholder’s driving record, experience and annual miles driven, three mandatory rating factors.
Among the legal arguments cited in the 2-1 majority opinion is that the state’s bedrock civil rights act doesn’t confer any right limited by law, in this case the authority the voter-passed proposition gives to the insurance commissioner to establish optional ratings factors that aren’t arbitrary.
A dissent by presiding Justice Alison Tucher concluded the majority misread the proposition, which she said must adhere to the state’s civil rights laws.
Harvey Rosenfield, the author of Proposition 103, whose organization, Consumer Watchdog, filed a brief in support of the drivers, said marital status “turns Prop 103 upside down” by allowing “unjust demographic characteristics to price auto insurance.”
“That’s why voters ordered the industry to obey the civil rights laws and to base premiums on factors within a person’s control — like their driving safety record and the number of miles they drive every year,” he said.
Only a handful of states, including Massachusetts and Hawaii, have barred marital status as a rating factor.
The regulation allowing marital status to be considered has been around since 1996, when then-California Insurance Commissioner Chuck Quackenbush included it in regulations implementing Proposition 103.
At the time, marital status was not a protected characteristic in the civil rights act, but it became so when the Legislature amended the law in 2005 and explicitly banned marital status discrimination — another issue debated by the jurists in coming to their differing conclusions.
Gabriel Sanchez, a spokesperson for Lara, stressed that the decision will not affect current rates since it left existing regulations in place.
“No one will be seeing higher or lower premiums for their automobile policies based on this ruling,” said Sanchez, who noted several previous commissioners didn’t change the regulation.
“The ruling also reaffirms the insurance commissioner’s broad authority over approval of automobile rates pursuant to Prop 103,” he said.
The 1996 regulations also allowed a person’s gender to be considered in setting auto premiums, but former Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones eliminated it as an optional ratings factor in 2019.
“Banning gender rating was a big fight and big first step to stop discrimination. Eliminating marital status rating is a logical next step and ought to be banned as well,” he said, in a statement to The Times.
Bella DePaulo, a former University of Virginia professor who has authored books on single living, said society has changed since the regulation was established, with more people getting married later or not marrying at all.
In 1996, 58% of adults were married, with the medianage at marriage for men at 27.1 and for women at 24.8. By 2025, only 51% of adults were married, with the median age at marriage rising to 30.8 for men and 28.4 for women, said DePaulo, now academically affiliated with UC Santa Barbara.
“Practices that discriminate against people who are not married are increasingly out of step with how we live now,” she said. “They are disadvantaging nearly half of the adult population.”
The Lara lawsuit, filed in 2022, similarly notes those societal changes, while alleging Black and Latino people are disproportionately affected by the marital status regulation since they marry at lower rates.
It also alleges LGBTQ+ individuals are disadvantaged, though same-sex marriage in California has been legal for more than a decade. However, domestic partners are treated as single by some insurers unless they are registered, according to the lawsuit.
The litigation against the commissioner stayed the proposed class-action lawsuits against the insurers. The defendants include Mercury and Farmers, a Los Angeles insurer that filed a brief in support of Lara in his case.
Those lawsuits will remain on hold pending a planned appeal of the July 16 ruling, Schreiber said.
“We think [it’s] a very dangerous precedent, and one that the California Supreme Court ought to weigh in on,” he said.
California has long been known as a progressive state that embraces evolving lifestyles, but when it comes to auto insurance, it seems stuck in the 1950s.
Single, divorced or widowed and need coverage for your car? You might very well pay more than your married neighbor — a penalty sanctioned by the state and judiciary.
A California appeals court last month upheld a lower court ruling that rejected a lawsuit seeking to abolish the right of insurers to charge the unwed more because of their higher statistical chance of getting into crashes. The decision is expected to be appealed.
The lawsuit by 11 unmarried drivers specifically sought a court order that would have forced Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara to eliminate marriage as an optional factor in setting rates — but he opposed it, even as regulators bar the consideration of sex, age, race and other personal characteristics.
“This is really a question about whether the insurance commissioner has the ability to pick and choose what civil rights laws are appropriate to enforce,” said Christian Schreiber, who is among several attorneys representing the drivers who also have filed proposed class actions against 12 insurers over the rule.
A test conducted by the Consumer Federation of America, cited in a legal brief in support of the litigation, found that unmarried drivers pay more.
Single, divorced and widowed drivers got quotes in April 2025 that were up to $108 higher for six months of premiums from four out of five California carriers.
Mercury, a large Los Angeles-based insurer, charged the highest differential, though it offered lower rates to widowed motorists with 34 or more years of driving experience. It declined to comment on the litigation.
State Farm, California’s largest auto insurer, charged the same for married and unmarried drivers.
Rex Frazier, president of the Personal Insurance Federation of California, a trade group that includes Mercury and other big auto insurers, said carriers charge the higher rates with good reason: unmarried people get into more collisions.
“I always assumed that marriage was related to a person being more likely to have kids, and so you’re going to drive safer if you’ve got kids in the car,” he said.
The demographic also helps capture the drivers most likely to get into crashes: young male drivers, since insurers in California are prohibited from considering sex and age in setting rates.
In arriving at the July 16 decision, the 1st Appellate District panel in San Francisco reasoned that two state civil rights laws that bar discrimination based on marital status have to defer to Proposition 103, the 1988 ballot measure that governs the state’s property and casualty insurance industry.
The proposition gave the insurance commissioner the authority to establish optional auto insurance rating factors that are predictive of loss claims — in addition to a policyholder’s driving record, experience and annual miles driven, three mandatory rating factors.
Among the legal arguments cited in the 2-1 majority opinion is that the state’s bedrock civil rights act doesn’t confer any right limited by law, in this case the authority the voter-passed proposition gives to the insurance commissioner to establish optional ratings factors that aren’t arbitrary.
A dissent by presiding Justice Alison Tucher concluded the majority misread the proposition, which she said must adhere to the state’s civil rights laws.
Harvey Rosenfield, the author of Proposition 103, whose organization, Consumer Watchdog, filed a brief in support of the drivers, said marital status “turns Prop 103 upside down” by allowing “unjust demographic characteristics to price auto insurance.”
“That’s why voters ordered the industry to obey the civil rights laws and to base premiums on factors within a person’s control — like their driving safety record and the number of miles they drive every year,” he said.
Only a handful of states, including Massachusetts and Hawaii, have barred marital status as a rating factor.
The regulation allowing marital status to be considered has been around since 1996, when then-California Insurance Commissioner Chuck Quackenbush included it in regulations implementing Proposition 103.
At the time, marital status was not a protected characteristic in the civil rights act, but it became so when the Legislature amended the law in 2005 and explicitly banned marital status discrimination — another issue debated by the jurists in coming to their differing conclusions.
Gabriel Sanchez, a spokesperson for Lara, stressed that the decision will not affect current rates since it left existing regulations in place.
“No one will be seeing higher or lower premiums for their automobile policies based on this ruling,” said Sanchez, who noted several previous commissioners didn’t change the regulation.
“The ruling also reaffirms the insurance commissioner’s broad authority over approval of automobile rates pursuant to Prop 103,” he said.
The 1996 regulations also allowed a person’s gender to be considered in setting auto premiums, but former Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones eliminated it as an optional ratings factor in 2019.
“Banning gender rating was a big fight and big first step to stop discrimination. Eliminating marital status rating is a logical next step and ought to be banned as well,” he said, in a statement to The Times.
Bella DePaulo, a former University of Virginia professor who has authored books on single living, said society has changed since the regulation was established, with more people getting married later or not marrying at all.
In 1996, 58% of adults were married, with the medianage at marriage for men at 27.1 and for women at 24.8. By 2025, only 51% of adults were married, with the median age at marriage rising to 30.8 for men and 28.4 for women, said DePaulo, now academically affiliated with UC Santa Barbara.
“Practices that discriminate against people who are not married are increasingly out of step with how we live now,” she said. “They are disadvantaging nearly half of the adult population.”
The Lara lawsuit, filed in 2022, similarly notes those societal changes, while alleging Black and Latino people are disproportionately affected by the marital status regulation since they marry at lower rates.
It also alleges LGBTQ+ individuals are disadvantaged, though same-sex marriage in California has been legal for more than a decade. However, domestic partners are treated as single by some insurers unless they are registered, according to the lawsuit.
The litigation against the commissioner stayed the proposed class-action lawsuits against the insurers. The defendants include Mercury and Farmers, a Los Angeles insurer that filed a brief in support of Lara in his case.
Those lawsuits will remain on hold pending a planned appeal of the July 16 ruling, Schreiber said.
“We think [it’s] a very dangerous precedent, and one that the California Supreme Court ought to weigh in on,” he said.
California has long been known as a progressive state that embraces evolving lifestyles, but when it comes to auto insurance, it seems stuck in the 1950s.
Single, divorced or widowed and need coverage for your car? You might very well pay more than your married neighbor — a penalty sanctioned by the state and judiciary.
A California appeals court last month upheld a lower court ruling that rejected a lawsuit seeking to abolish the right of insurers to charge the unwed more because of their higher statistical chance of getting into crashes. The decision is expected to be appealed.
The lawsuit by 11 unmarried drivers specifically sought a court order that would have forced Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara to eliminate marriage as an optional factor in setting rates — but he opposed it, even as regulators bar the consideration of sex, age, race and other personal characteristics.
“This is really a question about whether the insurance commissioner has the ability to pick and choose what civil rights laws are appropriate to enforce,” said Christian Schreiber, who is among several attorneys representing the drivers who also have filed proposed class actions against 12 insurers over the rule.
A test conducted by the Consumer Federation of America, cited in a legal brief in support of the litigation, found that unmarried drivers pay more.
Single, divorced and widowed drivers got quotes in April 2025 that were up to $108 higher for six months of premiums from four out of five California carriers.
Mercury, a large Los Angeles-based insurer, charged the highest differential, though it offered lower rates to widowed motorists with 34 or more years of driving experience. It declined to comment on the litigation.
State Farm, California’s largest auto insurer, charged the same for married and unmarried drivers.
Rex Frazier, president of the Personal Insurance Federation of California, a trade group that includes Mercury and other big auto insurers, said carriers charge the higher rates with good reason: unmarried people get into more collisions.
“I always assumed that marriage was related to a person being more likely to have kids, and so you’re going to drive safer if you’ve got kids in the car,” he said.
The demographic also helps capture the drivers most likely to get into crashes: young male drivers, since insurers in California are prohibited from considering sex and age in setting rates.
In arriving at the July 16 decision, the 1st Appellate District panel in San Francisco reasoned that two state civil rights laws that bar discrimination based on marital status have to defer to Proposition 103, the 1988 ballot measure that governs the state’s property and casualty insurance industry.
The proposition gave the insurance commissioner the authority to establish optional auto insurance rating factors that are predictive of loss claims — in addition to a policyholder’s driving record, experience and annual miles driven, three mandatory rating factors.
Among the legal arguments cited in the 2-1 majority opinion is that the state’s bedrock civil rights act doesn’t confer any right limited by law, in this case the authority the voter-passed proposition gives to the insurance commissioner to establish optional ratings factors that aren’t arbitrary.
A dissent by presiding Justice Alison Tucher concluded the majority misread the proposition, which she said must adhere to the state’s civil rights laws.
Harvey Rosenfield, the author of Proposition 103, whose organization, Consumer Watchdog, filed a brief in support of the drivers, said marital status “turns Prop 103 upside down” by allowing “unjust demographic characteristics to price auto insurance.”
“That’s why voters ordered the industry to obey the civil rights laws and to base premiums on factors within a person’s control — like their driving safety record and the number of miles they drive every year,” he said.
Only a handful of states, including Massachusetts and Hawaii, have barred marital status as a rating factor.
The regulation allowing marital status to be considered has been around since 1996, when then-California Insurance Commissioner Chuck Quackenbush included it in regulations implementing Proposition 103.
At the time, marital status was not a protected characteristic in the civil rights act, but it became so when the Legislature amended the law in 2005 and explicitly banned marital status discrimination — another issue debated by the jurists in coming to their differing conclusions.
Gabriel Sanchez, a spokesperson for Lara, stressed that the decision will not affect current rates since it left existing regulations in place.
“No one will be seeing higher or lower premiums for their automobile policies based on this ruling,” said Sanchez, who noted several previous commissioners didn’t change the regulation.
“The ruling also reaffirms the insurance commissioner’s broad authority over approval of automobile rates pursuant to Prop 103,” he said.
The 1996 regulations also allowed a person’s gender to be considered in setting auto premiums, but former Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones eliminated it as an optional ratings factor in 2019.
“Banning gender rating was a big fight and big first step to stop discrimination. Eliminating marital status rating is a logical next step and ought to be banned as well,” he said, in a statement to The Times.
Bella DePaulo, a former University of Virginia professor who has authored books on single living, said society has changed since the regulation was established, with more people getting married later or not marrying at all.
In 1996, 58% of adults were married, with the medianage at marriage for men at 27.1 and for women at 24.8. By 2025, only 51% of adults were married, with the median age at marriage rising to 30.8 for men and 28.4 for women, said DePaulo, now academically affiliated with UC Santa Barbara.
“Practices that discriminate against people who are not married are increasingly out of step with how we live now,” she said. “They are disadvantaging nearly half of the adult population.”
The Lara lawsuit, filed in 2022, similarly notes those societal changes, while alleging Black and Latino people are disproportionately affected by the marital status regulation since they marry at lower rates.
It also alleges LGBTQ+ individuals are disadvantaged, though same-sex marriage in California has been legal for more than a decade. However, domestic partners are treated as single by some insurers unless they are registered, according to the lawsuit.
The litigation against the commissioner stayed the proposed class-action lawsuits against the insurers. The defendants include Mercury and Farmers, a Los Angeles insurer that filed a brief in support of Lara in his case.
Those lawsuits will remain on hold pending a planned appeal of the July 16 ruling, Schreiber said.
“We think [it’s] a very dangerous precedent, and one that the California Supreme Court ought to weigh in on,” he said.
California has long been known as a progressive state that embraces evolving lifestyles, but when it comes to auto insurance, it seems stuck in the 1950s.
Single, divorced or widowed and need coverage for your car? You might very well pay more than your married neighbor — a penalty sanctioned by the state and judiciary.
A California appeals court last month upheld a lower court ruling that rejected a lawsuit seeking to abolish the right of insurers to charge the unwed more because of their higher statistical chance of getting into crashes. The decision is expected to be appealed.
The lawsuit by 11 unmarried drivers specifically sought a court order that would have forced Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara to eliminate marriage as an optional factor in setting rates — but he opposed it, even as regulators bar the consideration of sex, age, race and other personal characteristics.
“This is really a question about whether the insurance commissioner has the ability to pick and choose what civil rights laws are appropriate to enforce,” said Christian Schreiber, who is among several attorneys representing the drivers who also have filed proposed class actions against 12 insurers over the rule.
A test conducted by the Consumer Federation of America, cited in a legal brief in support of the litigation, found that unmarried drivers pay more.
Single, divorced and widowed drivers got quotes in April 2025 that were up to $108 higher for six months of premiums from four out of five California carriers.
Mercury, a large Los Angeles-based insurer, charged the highest differential, though it offered lower rates to widowed motorists with 34 or more years of driving experience. It declined to comment on the litigation.
State Farm, California’s largest auto insurer, charged the same for married and unmarried drivers.
Rex Frazier, president of the Personal Insurance Federation of California, a trade group that includes Mercury and other big auto insurers, said carriers charge the higher rates with good reason: unmarried people get into more collisions.
“I always assumed that marriage was related to a person being more likely to have kids, and so you’re going to drive safer if you’ve got kids in the car,” he said.
The demographic also helps capture the drivers most likely to get into crashes: young male drivers, since insurers in California are prohibited from considering sex and age in setting rates.
In arriving at the July 16 decision, the 1st Appellate District panel in San Francisco reasoned that two state civil rights laws that bar discrimination based on marital status have to defer to Proposition 103, the 1988 ballot measure that governs the state’s property and casualty insurance industry.
The proposition gave the insurance commissioner the authority to establish optional auto insurance rating factors that are predictive of loss claims — in addition to a policyholder’s driving record, experience and annual miles driven, three mandatory rating factors.
Among the legal arguments cited in the 2-1 majority opinion is that the state’s bedrock civil rights act doesn’t confer any right limited by law, in this case the authority the voter-passed proposition gives to the insurance commissioner to establish optional ratings factors that aren’t arbitrary.
A dissent by presiding Justice Alison Tucher concluded the majority misread the proposition, which she said must adhere to the state’s civil rights laws.
Harvey Rosenfield, the author of Proposition 103, whose organization, Consumer Watchdog, filed a brief in support of the drivers, said marital status “turns Prop 103 upside down” by allowing “unjust demographic characteristics to price auto insurance.”
“That’s why voters ordered the industry to obey the civil rights laws and to base premiums on factors within a person’s control — like their driving safety record and the number of miles they drive every year,” he said.
Only a handful of states, including Massachusetts and Hawaii, have barred marital status as a rating factor.
The regulation allowing marital status to be considered has been around since 1996, when then-California Insurance Commissioner Chuck Quackenbush included it in regulations implementing Proposition 103.
At the time, marital status was not a protected characteristic in the civil rights act, but it became so when the Legislature amended the law in 2005 and explicitly banned marital status discrimination — another issue debated by the jurists in coming to their differing conclusions.
Gabriel Sanchez, a spokesperson for Lara, stressed that the decision will not affect current rates since it left existing regulations in place.
“No one will be seeing higher or lower premiums for their automobile policies based on this ruling,” said Sanchez, who noted several previous commissioners didn’t change the regulation.
“The ruling also reaffirms the insurance commissioner’s broad authority over approval of automobile rates pursuant to Prop 103,” he said.
The 1996 regulations also allowed a person’s gender to be considered in setting auto premiums, but former Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones eliminated it as an optional ratings factor in 2019.
“Banning gender rating was a big fight and big first step to stop discrimination. Eliminating marital status rating is a logical next step and ought to be banned as well,” he said, in a statement to The Times.
Bella DePaulo, a former University of Virginia professor who has authored books on single living, said society has changed since the regulation was established, with more people getting married later or not marrying at all.
In 1996, 58% of adults were married, with the medianage at marriage for men at 27.1 and for women at 24.8. By 2025, only 51% of adults were married, with the median age at marriage rising to 30.8 for men and 28.4 for women, said DePaulo, now academically affiliated with UC Santa Barbara.
“Practices that discriminate against people who are not married are increasingly out of step with how we live now,” she said. “They are disadvantaging nearly half of the adult population.”
The Lara lawsuit, filed in 2022, similarly notes those societal changes, while alleging Black and Latino people are disproportionately affected by the marital status regulation since they marry at lower rates.
It also alleges LGBTQ+ individuals are disadvantaged, though same-sex marriage in California has been legal for more than a decade. However, domestic partners are treated as single by some insurers unless they are registered, according to the lawsuit.
The litigation against the commissioner stayed the proposed class-action lawsuits against the insurers. The defendants include Mercury and Farmers, a Los Angeles insurer that filed a brief in support of Lara in his case.
Those lawsuits will remain on hold pending a planned appeal of the July 16 ruling, Schreiber said.
“We think [it’s] a very dangerous precedent, and one that the California Supreme Court ought to weigh in on,” he said.
California has long been known as a progressive state that embraces evolving lifestyles, but when it comes to auto insurance, it seems stuck in the 1950s.
Single, divorced or widowed and need coverage for your car? You might very well pay more than your married neighbor — a penalty sanctioned by the state and judiciary.
A California appeals court last month upheld a lower court ruling that rejected a lawsuit seeking to abolish the right of insurers to charge the unwed more because of their higher statistical chance of getting into crashes. The decision is expected to be appealed.
The lawsuit by 11 unmarried drivers specifically sought a court order that would have forced Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara to eliminate marriage as an optional factor in setting rates — but he opposed it, even as regulators bar the consideration of sex, age, race and other personal characteristics.
“This is really a question about whether the insurance commissioner has the ability to pick and choose what civil rights laws are appropriate to enforce,” said Christian Schreiber, who is among several attorneys representing the drivers who also have filed proposed class actions against 12 insurers over the rule.
A test conducted by the Consumer Federation of America, cited in a legal brief in support of the litigation, found that unmarried drivers pay more.
Single, divorced and widowed drivers got quotes in April 2025 that were up to $108 higher for six months of premiums from four out of five California carriers.
Mercury, a large Los Angeles-based insurer, charged the highest differential, though it offered lower rates to widowed motorists with 34 or more years of driving experience. It declined to comment on the litigation.
State Farm, California’s largest auto insurer, charged the same for married and unmarried drivers.
Rex Frazier, president of the Personal Insurance Federation of California, a trade group that includes Mercury and other big auto insurers, said carriers charge the higher rates with good reason: unmarried people get into more collisions.
“I always assumed that marriage was related to a person being more likely to have kids, and so you’re going to drive safer if you’ve got kids in the car,” he said.
The demographic also helps capture the drivers most likely to get into crashes: young male drivers, since insurers in California are prohibited from considering sex and age in setting rates.
In arriving at the July 16 decision, the 1st Appellate District panel in San Francisco reasoned that two state civil rights laws that bar discrimination based on marital status have to defer to Proposition 103, the 1988 ballot measure that governs the state’s property and casualty insurance industry.
The proposition gave the insurance commissioner the authority to establish optional auto insurance rating factors that are predictive of loss claims — in addition to a policyholder’s driving record, experience and annual miles driven, three mandatory rating factors.
Among the legal arguments cited in the 2-1 majority opinion is that the state’s bedrock civil rights act doesn’t confer any right limited by law, in this case the authority the voter-passed proposition gives to the insurance commissioner to establish optional ratings factors that aren’t arbitrary.
A dissent by presiding Justice Alison Tucher concluded the majority misread the proposition, which she said must adhere to the state’s civil rights laws.
Harvey Rosenfield, the author of Proposition 103, whose organization, Consumer Watchdog, filed a brief in support of the drivers, said marital status “turns Prop 103 upside down” by allowing “unjust demographic characteristics to price auto insurance.”
“That’s why voters ordered the industry to obey the civil rights laws and to base premiums on factors within a person’s control — like their driving safety record and the number of miles they drive every year,” he said.
Only a handful of states, including Massachusetts and Hawaii, have barred marital status as a rating factor.
The regulation allowing marital status to be considered has been around since 1996, when then-California Insurance Commissioner Chuck Quackenbush included it in regulations implementing Proposition 103.
At the time, marital status was not a protected characteristic in the civil rights act, but it became so when the Legislature amended the law in 2005 and explicitly banned marital status discrimination — another issue debated by the jurists in coming to their differing conclusions.
Gabriel Sanchez, a spokesperson for Lara, stressed that the decision will not affect current rates since it left existing regulations in place.
“No one will be seeing higher or lower premiums for their automobile policies based on this ruling,” said Sanchez, who noted several previous commissioners didn’t change the regulation.
“The ruling also reaffirms the insurance commissioner’s broad authority over approval of automobile rates pursuant to Prop 103,” he said.
The 1996 regulations also allowed a person’s gender to be considered in setting auto premiums, but former Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones eliminated it as an optional ratings factor in 2019.
“Banning gender rating was a big fight and big first step to stop discrimination. Eliminating marital status rating is a logical next step and ought to be banned as well,” he said, in a statement to The Times.
Bella DePaulo, a former University of Virginia professor who has authored books on single living, said society has changed since the regulation was established, with more people getting married later or not marrying at all.
In 1996, 58% of adults were married, with the medianage at marriage for men at 27.1 and for women at 24.8. By 2025, only 51% of adults were married, with the median age at marriage rising to 30.8 for men and 28.4 for women, said DePaulo, now academically affiliated with UC Santa Barbara.
“Practices that discriminate against people who are not married are increasingly out of step with how we live now,” she said. “They are disadvantaging nearly half of the adult population.”
The Lara lawsuit, filed in 2022, similarly notes those societal changes, while alleging Black and Latino people are disproportionately affected by the marital status regulation since they marry at lower rates.
It also alleges LGBTQ+ individuals are disadvantaged, though same-sex marriage in California has been legal for more than a decade. However, domestic partners are treated as single by some insurers unless they are registered, according to the lawsuit.
The litigation against the commissioner stayed the proposed class-action lawsuits against the insurers. The defendants include Mercury and Farmers, a Los Angeles insurer that filed a brief in support of Lara in his case.
Those lawsuits will remain on hold pending a planned appeal of the July 16 ruling, Schreiber said.
“We think [it’s] a very dangerous precedent, and one that the California Supreme Court ought to weigh in on,” he said.
California has long been known as a progressive state that embraces evolving lifestyles, but when it comes to auto insurance, it seems stuck in the 1950s.
Single, divorced or widowed and need coverage for your car? You might very well pay more than your married neighbor — a penalty sanctioned by the state and judiciary.
A California appeals court last month upheld a lower court ruling that rejected a lawsuit seeking to abolish the right of insurers to charge the unwed more because of their higher statistical chance of getting into crashes. The decision is expected to be appealed.
The lawsuit by 11 unmarried drivers specifically sought a court order that would have forced Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara to eliminate marriage as an optional factor in setting rates — but he opposed it, even as regulators bar the consideration of sex, age, race and other personal characteristics.
“This is really a question about whether the insurance commissioner has the ability to pick and choose what civil rights laws are appropriate to enforce,” said Christian Schreiber, who is among several attorneys representing the drivers who also have filed proposed class actions against 12 insurers over the rule.
A test conducted by the Consumer Federation of America, cited in a legal brief in support of the litigation, found that unmarried drivers pay more.
Single, divorced and widowed drivers got quotes in April 2025 that were up to $108 higher for six months of premiums from four out of five California carriers.
Mercury, a large Los Angeles-based insurer, charged the highest differential, though it offered lower rates to widowed motorists with 34 or more years of driving experience. It declined to comment on the litigation.
State Farm, California’s largest auto insurer, charged the same for married and unmarried drivers.
Rex Frazier, president of the Personal Insurance Federation of California, a trade group that includes Mercury and other big auto insurers, said carriers charge the higher rates with good reason: unmarried people get into more collisions.
“I always assumed that marriage was related to a person being more likely to have kids, and so you’re going to drive safer if you’ve got kids in the car,” he said.
The demographic also helps capture the drivers most likely to get into crashes: young male drivers, since insurers in California are prohibited from considering sex and age in setting rates.
In arriving at the July 16 decision, the 1st Appellate District panel in San Francisco reasoned that two state civil rights laws that bar discrimination based on marital status have to defer to Proposition 103, the 1988 ballot measure that governs the state’s property and casualty insurance industry.
The proposition gave the insurance commissioner the authority to establish optional auto insurance rating factors that are predictive of loss claims — in addition to a policyholder’s driving record, experience and annual miles driven, three mandatory rating factors.
Among the legal arguments cited in the 2-1 majority opinion is that the state’s bedrock civil rights act doesn’t confer any right limited by law, in this case the authority the voter-passed proposition gives to the insurance commissioner to establish optional ratings factors that aren’t arbitrary.
A dissent by presiding Justice Alison Tucher concluded the majority misread the proposition, which she said must adhere to the state’s civil rights laws.
Harvey Rosenfield, the author of Proposition 103, whose organization, Consumer Watchdog, filed a brief in support of the drivers, said marital status “turns Prop 103 upside down” by allowing “unjust demographic characteristics to price auto insurance.”
“That’s why voters ordered the industry to obey the civil rights laws and to base premiums on factors within a person’s control — like their driving safety record and the number of miles they drive every year,” he said.
Only a handful of states, including Massachusetts and Hawaii, have barred marital status as a rating factor.
The regulation allowing marital status to be considered has been around since 1996, when then-California Insurance Commissioner Chuck Quackenbush included it in regulations implementing Proposition 103.
At the time, marital status was not a protected characteristic in the civil rights act, but it became so when the Legislature amended the law in 2005 and explicitly banned marital status discrimination — another issue debated by the jurists in coming to their differing conclusions.
Gabriel Sanchez, a spokesperson for Lara, stressed that the decision will not affect current rates since it left existing regulations in place.
“No one will be seeing higher or lower premiums for their automobile policies based on this ruling,” said Sanchez, who noted several previous commissioners didn’t change the regulation.
“The ruling also reaffirms the insurance commissioner’s broad authority over approval of automobile rates pursuant to Prop 103,” he said.
The 1996 regulations also allowed a person’s gender to be considered in setting auto premiums, but former Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones eliminated it as an optional ratings factor in 2019.
“Banning gender rating was a big fight and big first step to stop discrimination. Eliminating marital status rating is a logical next step and ought to be banned as well,” he said, in a statement to The Times.
Bella DePaulo, a former University of Virginia professor who has authored books on single living, said society has changed since the regulation was established, with more people getting married later or not marrying at all.
In 1996, 58% of adults were married, with the medianage at marriage for men at 27.1 and for women at 24.8. By 2025, only 51% of adults were married, with the median age at marriage rising to 30.8 for men and 28.4 for women, said DePaulo, now academically affiliated with UC Santa Barbara.
“Practices that discriminate against people who are not married are increasingly out of step with how we live now,” she said. “They are disadvantaging nearly half of the adult population.”
The Lara lawsuit, filed in 2022, similarly notes those societal changes, while alleging Black and Latino people are disproportionately affected by the marital status regulation since they marry at lower rates.
It also alleges LGBTQ+ individuals are disadvantaged, though same-sex marriage in California has been legal for more than a decade. However, domestic partners are treated as single by some insurers unless they are registered, according to the lawsuit.
The litigation against the commissioner stayed the proposed class-action lawsuits against the insurers. The defendants include Mercury and Farmers, a Los Angeles insurer that filed a brief in support of Lara in his case.
Those lawsuits will remain on hold pending a planned appeal of the July 16 ruling, Schreiber said.
“We think [it’s] a very dangerous precedent, and one that the California Supreme Court ought to weigh in on,” he said.
California has long been known as a progressive state that embraces evolving lifestyles, but when it comes to auto insurance, it seems stuck in the 1950s.
Single, divorced or widowed and need coverage for your car? You might very well pay more than your married neighbor — a penalty sanctioned by the state and judiciary.
A California appeals court last month upheld a lower court ruling that rejected a lawsuit seeking to abolish the right of insurers to charge the unwed more because of their higher statistical chance of getting into crashes. The decision is expected to be appealed.
The lawsuit by 11 unmarried drivers specifically sought a court order that would have forced Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara to eliminate marriage as an optional factor in setting rates — but he opposed it, even as regulators bar the consideration of sex, age, race and other personal characteristics.
“This is really a question about whether the insurance commissioner has the ability to pick and choose what civil rights laws are appropriate to enforce,” said Christian Schreiber, who is among several attorneys representing the drivers who also have filed proposed class actions against 12 insurers over the rule.
A test conducted by the Consumer Federation of America, cited in a legal brief in support of the litigation, found that unmarried drivers pay more.
Single, divorced and widowed drivers got quotes in April 2025 that were up to $108 higher for six months of premiums from four out of five California carriers.
Mercury, a large Los Angeles-based insurer, charged the highest differential, though it offered lower rates to widowed motorists with 34 or more years of driving experience. It declined to comment on the litigation.
State Farm, California’s largest auto insurer, charged the same for married and unmarried drivers.
Rex Frazier, president of the Personal Insurance Federation of California, a trade group that includes Mercury and other big auto insurers, said carriers charge the higher rates with good reason: unmarried people get into more collisions.
“I always assumed that marriage was related to a person being more likely to have kids, and so you’re going to drive safer if you’ve got kids in the car,” he said.
The demographic also helps capture the drivers most likely to get into crashes: young male drivers, since insurers in California are prohibited from considering sex and age in setting rates.
In arriving at the July 16 decision, the 1st Appellate District panel in San Francisco reasoned that two state civil rights laws that bar discrimination based on marital status have to defer to Proposition 103, the 1988 ballot measure that governs the state’s property and casualty insurance industry.
The proposition gave the insurance commissioner the authority to establish optional auto insurance rating factors that are predictive of loss claims — in addition to a policyholder’s driving record, experience and annual miles driven, three mandatory rating factors.
Among the legal arguments cited in the 2-1 majority opinion is that the state’s bedrock civil rights act doesn’t confer any right limited by law, in this case the authority the voter-passed proposition gives to the insurance commissioner to establish optional ratings factors that aren’t arbitrary.
A dissent by presiding Justice Alison Tucher concluded the majority misread the proposition, which she said must adhere to the state’s civil rights laws.
Harvey Rosenfield, the author of Proposition 103, whose organization, Consumer Watchdog, filed a brief in support of the drivers, said marital status “turns Prop 103 upside down” by allowing “unjust demographic characteristics to price auto insurance.”
“That’s why voters ordered the industry to obey the civil rights laws and to base premiums on factors within a person’s control — like their driving safety record and the number of miles they drive every year,” he said.
Only a handful of states, including Massachusetts and Hawaii, have barred marital status as a rating factor.
The regulation allowing marital status to be considered has been around since 1996, when then-California Insurance Commissioner Chuck Quackenbush included it in regulations implementing Proposition 103.
At the time, marital status was not a protected characteristic in the civil rights act, but it became so when the Legislature amended the law in 2005 and explicitly banned marital status discrimination — another issue debated by the jurists in coming to their differing conclusions.
Gabriel Sanchez, a spokesperson for Lara, stressed that the decision will not affect current rates since it left existing regulations in place.
“No one will be seeing higher or lower premiums for their automobile policies based on this ruling,” said Sanchez, who noted several previous commissioners didn’t change the regulation.
“The ruling also reaffirms the insurance commissioner’s broad authority over approval of automobile rates pursuant to Prop 103,” he said.
The 1996 regulations also allowed a person’s gender to be considered in setting auto premiums, but former Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones eliminated it as an optional ratings factor in 2019.
“Banning gender rating was a big fight and big first step to stop discrimination. Eliminating marital status rating is a logical next step and ought to be banned as well,” he said, in a statement to The Times.
Bella DePaulo, a former University of Virginia professor who has authored books on single living, said society has changed since the regulation was established, with more people getting married later or not marrying at all.
In 1996, 58% of adults were married, with the medianage at marriage for men at 27.1 and for women at 24.8. By 2025, only 51% of adults were married, with the median age at marriage rising to 30.8 for men and 28.4 for women, said DePaulo, now academically affiliated with UC Santa Barbara.
“Practices that discriminate against people who are not married are increasingly out of step with how we live now,” she said. “They are disadvantaging nearly half of the adult population.”
The Lara lawsuit, filed in 2022, similarly notes those societal changes, while alleging Black and Latino people are disproportionately affected by the marital status regulation since they marry at lower rates.
It also alleges LGBTQ+ individuals are disadvantaged, though same-sex marriage in California has been legal for more than a decade. However, domestic partners are treated as single by some insurers unless they are registered, according to the lawsuit.
The litigation against the commissioner stayed the proposed class-action lawsuits against the insurers. The defendants include Mercury and Farmers, a Los Angeles insurer that filed a brief in support of Lara in his case.
Those lawsuits will remain on hold pending a planned appeal of the July 16 ruling, Schreiber said.
“We think [it’s] a very dangerous precedent, and one that the California Supreme Court ought to weigh in on,” he said.
California has long been known as a progressive state that embraces evolving lifestyles, but when it comes to auto insurance, it seems stuck in the 1950s.
Single, divorced or widowed and need coverage for your car? You might very well pay more than your married neighbor — a penalty sanctioned by the state and judiciary.
A California appeals court last month upheld a lower court ruling that rejected a lawsuit seeking to abolish the right of insurers to charge the unwed more because of their higher statistical chance of getting into crashes. The decision is expected to be appealed.
The lawsuit by 11 unmarried drivers specifically sought a court order that would have forced Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara to eliminate marriage as an optional factor in setting rates — but he opposed it, even as regulators bar the consideration of sex, age, race and other personal characteristics.
“This is really a question about whether the insurance commissioner has the ability to pick and choose what civil rights laws are appropriate to enforce,” said Christian Schreiber, who is among several attorneys representing the drivers who also have filed proposed class actions against 12 insurers over the rule.
A test conducted by the Consumer Federation of America, cited in a legal brief in support of the litigation, found that unmarried drivers pay more.
Single, divorced and widowed drivers got quotes in April 2025 that were up to $108 higher for six months of premiums from four out of five California carriers.
Mercury, a large Los Angeles-based insurer, charged the highest differential, though it offered lower rates to widowed motorists with 34 or more years of driving experience. It declined to comment on the litigation.
State Farm, California’s largest auto insurer, charged the same for married and unmarried drivers.
Rex Frazier, president of the Personal Insurance Federation of California, a trade group that includes Mercury and other big auto insurers, said carriers charge the higher rates with good reason: unmarried people get into more collisions.
“I always assumed that marriage was related to a person being more likely to have kids, and so you’re going to drive safer if you’ve got kids in the car,” he said.
The demographic also helps capture the drivers most likely to get into crashes: young male drivers, since insurers in California are prohibited from considering sex and age in setting rates.
In arriving at the July 16 decision, the 1st Appellate District panel in San Francisco reasoned that two state civil rights laws that bar discrimination based on marital status have to defer to Proposition 103, the 1988 ballot measure that governs the state’s property and casualty insurance industry.
The proposition gave the insurance commissioner the authority to establish optional auto insurance rating factors that are predictive of loss claims — in addition to a policyholder’s driving record, experience and annual miles driven, three mandatory rating factors.
Among the legal arguments cited in the 2-1 majority opinion is that the state’s bedrock civil rights act doesn’t confer any right limited by law, in this case the authority the voter-passed proposition gives to the insurance commissioner to establish optional ratings factors that aren’t arbitrary.
A dissent by presiding Justice Alison Tucher concluded the majority misread the proposition, which she said must adhere to the state’s civil rights laws.
Harvey Rosenfield, the author of Proposition 103, whose organization, Consumer Watchdog, filed a brief in support of the drivers, said marital status “turns Prop 103 upside down” by allowing “unjust demographic characteristics to price auto insurance.”
“That’s why voters ordered the industry to obey the civil rights laws and to base premiums on factors within a person’s control — like their driving safety record and the number of miles they drive every year,” he said.
Only a handful of states, including Massachusetts and Hawaii, have barred marital status as a rating factor.
The regulation allowing marital status to be considered has been around since 1996, when then-California Insurance Commissioner Chuck Quackenbush included it in regulations implementing Proposition 103.
At the time, marital status was not a protected characteristic in the civil rights act, but it became so when the Legislature amended the law in 2005 and explicitly banned marital status discrimination — another issue debated by the jurists in coming to their differing conclusions.
Gabriel Sanchez, a spokesperson for Lara, stressed that the decision will not affect current rates since it left existing regulations in place.
“No one will be seeing higher or lower premiums for their automobile policies based on this ruling,” said Sanchez, who noted several previous commissioners didn’t change the regulation.
“The ruling also reaffirms the insurance commissioner’s broad authority over approval of automobile rates pursuant to Prop 103,” he said.
The 1996 regulations also allowed a person’s gender to be considered in setting auto premiums, but former Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones eliminated it as an optional ratings factor in 2019.
“Banning gender rating was a big fight and big first step to stop discrimination. Eliminating marital status rating is a logical next step and ought to be banned as well,” he said, in a statement to The Times.
Bella DePaulo, a former University of Virginia professor who has authored books on single living, said society has changed since the regulation was established, with more people getting married later or not marrying at all.
In 1996, 58% of adults were married, with the medianage at marriage for men at 27.1 and for women at 24.8. By 2025, only 51% of adults were married, with the median age at marriage rising to 30.8 for men and 28.4 for women, said DePaulo, now academically affiliated with UC Santa Barbara.
“Practices that discriminate against people who are not married are increasingly out of step with how we live now,” she said. “They are disadvantaging nearly half of the adult population.”
The Lara lawsuit, filed in 2022, similarly notes those societal changes, while alleging Black and Latino people are disproportionately affected by the marital status regulation since they marry at lower rates.
It also alleges LGBTQ+ individuals are disadvantaged, though same-sex marriage in California has been legal for more than a decade. However, domestic partners are treated as single by some insurers unless they are registered, according to the lawsuit.
The litigation against the commissioner stayed the proposed class-action lawsuits against the insurers. The defendants include Mercury and Farmers, a Los Angeles insurer that filed a brief in support of Lara in his case.
Those lawsuits will remain on hold pending a planned appeal of the July 16 ruling, Schreiber said.
“We think [it’s] a very dangerous precedent, and one that the California Supreme Court ought to weigh in on,” he said.
California has long been known as a progressive state that embraces evolving lifestyles, but when it comes to auto insurance, it seems stuck in the 1950s.
Single, divorced or widowed and need coverage for your car? You might very well pay more than your married neighbor — a penalty sanctioned by the state and judiciary.
A California appeals court last month upheld a lower court ruling that rejected a lawsuit seeking to abolish the right of insurers to charge the unwed more because of their higher statistical chance of getting into crashes. The decision is expected to be appealed.
The lawsuit by 11 unmarried drivers specifically sought a court order that would have forced Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara to eliminate marriage as an optional factor in setting rates — but he opposed it, even as regulators bar the consideration of sex, age, race and other personal characteristics.
“This is really a question about whether the insurance commissioner has the ability to pick and choose what civil rights laws are appropriate to enforce,” said Christian Schreiber, who is among several attorneys representing the drivers who also have filed proposed class actions against 12 insurers over the rule.
A test conducted by the Consumer Federation of America, cited in a legal brief in support of the litigation, found that unmarried drivers pay more.
Single, divorced and widowed drivers got quotes in April 2025 that were up to $108 higher for six months of premiums from four out of five California carriers.
Mercury, a large Los Angeles-based insurer, charged the highest differential, though it offered lower rates to widowed motorists with 34 or more years of driving experience. It declined to comment on the litigation.
State Farm, California’s largest auto insurer, charged the same for married and unmarried drivers.
Rex Frazier, president of the Personal Insurance Federation of California, a trade group that includes Mercury and other big auto insurers, said carriers charge the higher rates with good reason: unmarried people get into more collisions.
“I always assumed that marriage was related to a person being more likely to have kids, and so you’re going to drive safer if you’ve got kids in the car,” he said.
The demographic also helps capture the drivers most likely to get into crashes: young male drivers, since insurers in California are prohibited from considering sex and age in setting rates.
In arriving at the July 16 decision, the 1st Appellate District panel in San Francisco reasoned that two state civil rights laws that bar discrimination based on marital status have to defer to Proposition 103, the 1988 ballot measure that governs the state’s property and casualty insurance industry.
The proposition gave the insurance commissioner the authority to establish optional auto insurance rating factors that are predictive of loss claims — in addition to a policyholder’s driving record, experience and annual miles driven, three mandatory rating factors.
Among the legal arguments cited in the 2-1 majority opinion is that the state’s bedrock civil rights act doesn’t confer any right limited by law, in this case the authority the voter-passed proposition gives to the insurance commissioner to establish optional ratings factors that aren’t arbitrary.
A dissent by presiding Justice Alison Tucher concluded the majority misread the proposition, which she said must adhere to the state’s civil rights laws.
Harvey Rosenfield, the author of Proposition 103, whose organization, Consumer Watchdog, filed a brief in support of the drivers, said marital status “turns Prop 103 upside down” by allowing “unjust demographic characteristics to price auto insurance.”
“That’s why voters ordered the industry to obey the civil rights laws and to base premiums on factors within a person’s control — like their driving safety record and the number of miles they drive every year,” he said.
Only a handful of states, including Massachusetts and Hawaii, have barred marital status as a rating factor.
The regulation allowing marital status to be considered has been around since 1996, when then-California Insurance Commissioner Chuck Quackenbush included it in regulations implementing Proposition 103.
At the time, marital status was not a protected characteristic in the civil rights act, but it became so when the Legislature amended the law in 2005 and explicitly banned marital status discrimination — another issue debated by the jurists in coming to their differing conclusions.
Gabriel Sanchez, a spokesperson for Lara, stressed that the decision will not affect current rates since it left existing regulations in place.
“No one will be seeing higher or lower premiums for their automobile policies based on this ruling,” said Sanchez, who noted several previous commissioners didn’t change the regulation.
“The ruling also reaffirms the insurance commissioner’s broad authority over approval of automobile rates pursuant to Prop 103,” he said.
The 1996 regulations also allowed a person’s gender to be considered in setting auto premiums, but former Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones eliminated it as an optional ratings factor in 2019.
“Banning gender rating was a big fight and big first step to stop discrimination. Eliminating marital status rating is a logical next step and ought to be banned as well,” he said, in a statement to The Times.
Bella DePaulo, a former University of Virginia professor who has authored books on single living, said society has changed since the regulation was established, with more people getting married later or not marrying at all.
In 1996, 58% of adults were married, with the medianage at marriage for men at 27.1 and for women at 24.8. By 2025, only 51% of adults were married, with the median age at marriage rising to 30.8 for men and 28.4 for women, said DePaulo, now academically affiliated with UC Santa Barbara.
“Practices that discriminate against people who are not married are increasingly out of step with how we live now,” she said. “They are disadvantaging nearly half of the adult population.”
The Lara lawsuit, filed in 2022, similarly notes those societal changes, while alleging Black and Latino people are disproportionately affected by the marital status regulation since they marry at lower rates.
It also alleges LGBTQ+ individuals are disadvantaged, though same-sex marriage in California has been legal for more than a decade. However, domestic partners are treated as single by some insurers unless they are registered, according to the lawsuit.
The litigation against the commissioner stayed the proposed class-action lawsuits against the insurers. The defendants include Mercury and Farmers, a Los Angeles insurer that filed a brief in support of Lara in his case.
Those lawsuits will remain on hold pending a planned appeal of the July 16 ruling, Schreiber said.
“We think [it’s] a very dangerous precedent, and one that the California Supreme Court ought to weigh in on,” he said.
California has long been known as a progressive state that embraces evolving lifestyles, but when it comes to auto insurance, it seems stuck in the 1950s.
Single, divorced or widowed and need coverage for your car? You might very well pay more than your married neighbor — a penalty sanctioned by the state and judiciary.
A California appeals court last month upheld a lower court ruling that rejected a lawsuit seeking to abolish the right of insurers to charge the unwed more because of their higher statistical chance of getting into crashes. The decision is expected to be appealed.
The lawsuit by 11 unmarried drivers specifically sought a court order that would have forced Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara to eliminate marriage as an optional factor in setting rates — but he opposed it, even as regulators bar the consideration of sex, age, race and other personal characteristics.
“This is really a question about whether the insurance commissioner has the ability to pick and choose what civil rights laws are appropriate to enforce,” said Christian Schreiber, who is among several attorneys representing the drivers who also have filed proposed class actions against 12 insurers over the rule.
A test conducted by the Consumer Federation of America, cited in a legal brief in support of the litigation, found that unmarried drivers pay more.
Single, divorced and widowed drivers got quotes in April 2025 that were up to $108 higher for six months of premiums from four out of five California carriers.
Mercury, a large Los Angeles-based insurer, charged the highest differential, though it offered lower rates to widowed motorists with 34 or more years of driving experience. It declined to comment on the litigation.
State Farm, California’s largest auto insurer, charged the same for married and unmarried drivers.
Rex Frazier, president of the Personal Insurance Federation of California, a trade group that includes Mercury and other big auto insurers, said carriers charge the higher rates with good reason: unmarried people get into more collisions.
“I always assumed that marriage was related to a person being more likely to have kids, and so you’re going to drive safer if you’ve got kids in the car,” he said.
The demographic also helps capture the drivers most likely to get into crashes: young male drivers, since insurers in California are prohibited from considering sex and age in setting rates.
In arriving at the July 16 decision, the 1st Appellate District panel in San Francisco reasoned that two state civil rights laws that bar discrimination based on marital status have to defer to Proposition 103, the 1988 ballot measure that governs the state’s property and casualty insurance industry.
The proposition gave the insurance commissioner the authority to establish optional auto insurance rating factors that are predictive of loss claims — in addition to a policyholder’s driving record, experience and annual miles driven, three mandatory rating factors.
Among the legal arguments cited in the 2-1 majority opinion is that the state’s bedrock civil rights act doesn’t confer any right limited by law, in this case the authority the voter-passed proposition gives to the insurance commissioner to establish optional ratings factors that aren’t arbitrary.
A dissent by presiding Justice Alison Tucher concluded the majority misread the proposition, which she said must adhere to the state’s civil rights laws.
Harvey Rosenfield, the author of Proposition 103, whose organization, Consumer Watchdog, filed a brief in support of the drivers, said marital status “turns Prop 103 upside down” by allowing “unjust demographic characteristics to price auto insurance.”
“That’s why voters ordered the industry to obey the civil rights laws and to base premiums on factors within a person’s control — like their driving safety record and the number of miles they drive every year,” he said.
Only a handful of states, including Massachusetts and Hawaii, have barred marital status as a rating factor.
The regulation allowing marital status to be considered has been around since 1996, when then-California Insurance Commissioner Chuck Quackenbush included it in regulations implementing Proposition 103.
At the time, marital status was not a protected characteristic in the civil rights act, but it became so when the Legislature amended the law in 2005 and explicitly banned marital status discrimination — another issue debated by the jurists in coming to their differing conclusions.
Gabriel Sanchez, a spokesperson for Lara, stressed that the decision will not affect current rates since it left existing regulations in place.
“No one will be seeing higher or lower premiums for their automobile policies based on this ruling,” said Sanchez, who noted several previous commissioners didn’t change the regulation.
“The ruling also reaffirms the insurance commissioner’s broad authority over approval of automobile rates pursuant to Prop 103,” he said.
The 1996 regulations also allowed a person’s gender to be considered in setting auto premiums, but former Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones eliminated it as an optional ratings factor in 2019.
“Banning gender rating was a big fight and big first step to stop discrimination. Eliminating marital status rating is a logical next step and ought to be banned as well,” he said, in a statement to The Times.
Bella DePaulo, a former University of Virginia professor who has authored books on single living, said society has changed since the regulation was established, with more people getting married later or not marrying at all.
In 1996, 58% of adults were married, with the medianage at marriage for men at 27.1 and for women at 24.8. By 2025, only 51% of adults were married, with the median age at marriage rising to 30.8 for men and 28.4 for women, said DePaulo, now academically affiliated with UC Santa Barbara.
“Practices that discriminate against people who are not married are increasingly out of step with how we live now,” she said. “They are disadvantaging nearly half of the adult population.”
The Lara lawsuit, filed in 2022, similarly notes those societal changes, while alleging Black and Latino people are disproportionately affected by the marital status regulation since they marry at lower rates.
It also alleges LGBTQ+ individuals are disadvantaged, though same-sex marriage in California has been legal for more than a decade. However, domestic partners are treated as single by some insurers unless they are registered, according to the lawsuit.
The litigation against the commissioner stayed the proposed class-action lawsuits against the insurers. The defendants include Mercury and Farmers, a Los Angeles insurer that filed a brief in support of Lara in his case.
Those lawsuits will remain on hold pending a planned appeal of the July 16 ruling, Schreiber said.
“We think [it’s] a very dangerous precedent, and one that the California Supreme Court ought to weigh in on,” he said.
