The Model Bill Behind Your State's New Glass Law, and the Section It Leaves Blank
Short answer: the auto glass disclosure laws appearing in state after state are largely one document, adopted by the National Council of Insurance Legislators in 2025. It did not come from a think tank; it came out of Kentucky's own law. And Section 9, headed "Penalties", contains no penalty at all.
Model text and NCOIL's announcement read 2026-08-04; the fifty-state sweep this page relies on completed 2026-08-05.
Where it came from, which is not where you would guess
The model is the NCOIL Motor Vehicle Glass Model Act, sponsored by Rep. Michael Sarge Pollock of Kentucky. NCOIL's Property and Casualty Insurance Committee adopted it on 14 February 2025; the Executive Committee ratified it at the Spring Meeting in Charleston that April.
Pollock's own explanation is one sentence: "it is based on a law we passed in Kentucky."
That reverses the usual telling. States are not adopting a national template that appeared from nowhere. Kentucky's SB 29 (2024) became the template. The order runs:
- Florida, May 2023: before any model existed
- Kentucky, April 2024: the law the model was written from
- The NCOIL model, February and April 2025
- Everyone since
Correction: the ADAS notice duty is older than all of it
An earlier version of this page treated Florida 2023 as the start of the story. That is wrong, and the error is worth showing rather than quietly deleting, because it comes from the thing this page is about, reading the model and assuming the model invented what it contains.
Utah got there in 2020. Arizona in 2022. Both verified against the states' own texts on 2026-08-04:
- Utah Code 41-6a-1645, enacted by Laws of Utah 2020, Chapter 267 and amended by S.B. 78 (2021). It already required a glass company to tell the consumer in writing, before the work, whether recalibration is required and whether it will be performed; to meet or exceed manufacturer specification; and to notify the consumer if a recalibration failed or was skipped, with a referral to a dealer or qualified facility.
- Arizona A.R.S. 20-463.02, added by S.B. 1410 (55th Legislature, 2nd Regular Session, 2022). Same notice sequence, plus notice to the insurer as well as the customer when a recalibration fails, and a $2,500 civil penalty.
So the NCOIL model did not originate the duty shops actually feel. What Florida, Kentucky and the model added on top was a different thing: the insurance-claims apparatus: the assignment-of-benefits ban, the inducement ban, the claim-number gate, the reasonable-and-customary cap, the free-choice section. Utah and Arizona have the ADAS notice and no AOB ban at all.
That distinction matters more than the chronology. If your state adopts the model, you are not mainly getting a calibration-disclosure law. You are getting a glass-claims-fraud law with a calibration-disclosure section inside it.
Two further things the older statutes carry that the model does not:
- Both Utah and Arizona expressly free the shop from OEM-dictated glass, tooling and equipment while still requiring calibration to OEM specification. Utah 41-6a-1645(4)(a), Arizona 20-463.02(E)(1). The NCOIL model contains no such clause. That is a substantive pro-aftermarket provision, and it is in the two oldest laws rather than the newest.
- Utah alone reaches resale. Section 41-6a-1645(6) makes it unlawful to sell a vehicle you know has an inoperable or uncalibrated ADAS without written notice to the buyer, with a private action for the greater of actual damages or $1,500. No other state we have read extends the duty past the repair transaction.
A citation warning from the same check: Arizona's Senate fact sheet of 7 February 2022 states a $500 civil penalty. The enacted statute says $2,500. The figure was raised during passage. Cite 20-463.02, not the fact sheet, and this is the general rule, because fact sheets describe introduced bills and outlive them.
Who was in the room
NCOIL's release names the parties it heard from while drafting: the American Property Casualty Insurance Association, the National Association of Mutual Insurance Companies, the National Insurance Crime Bureau, and Safelite Auto Group.
The same four turn up supporting California's SB 988. The Independent Glass Association filed a written rebuttal to the model in March 2025 and opposes the California bill.
None of that makes the model wrong. Its supporters credit Florida's version with an 80% fall in glass-related lawsuits in the year after enactment, and most of the disclosure duties are things a careful shop already does. But if a "new consumer protection law" lands in your state, it is worth knowing it was drafted once, promoted nationally, and shaped with the people who pay the claims at the table, and that the glass trade's own association objected in writing.
What the model actually requires
Eleven sections. The substance:
Assignment of benefits is banned (Section 3). An insured may not assign or transfer policy duties, rights or benefits, before or after a loss. A contract that does is void and unenforceable.
ADAS notice, before and after (Section 4). Before service: whether the vehicle has an ADAS; whether calibration is needed as the manufacturer recommends; whether you intend to do it to specification; and if you cannot or will not, that the vehicle should go to a certified dealership or qualified specialist. After: written notice of whether it succeeded, and the same referral if it did not.
No contracting before the claim exists (Section 5). On a first-party job you may not contract until the customer has actually made the claim, you hold a claim or referral number, and the Section 4 disclosures are done. Plus a good-faith estimate, an updated estimate before work, an itemised invoice, and, if a calibration failed, an instruction to tell the customer not to rely on the system.
Prohibited acts (Section 6). No inducements of any kind to anyone, including an insurance producer. No charging above reasonable and customary. Then a specific list: falsifying the date of damage, claiming work happened in a different geographic area, falsely signing a work order, saying the insurer approved a job without written confirmation. And a small provision that tells you what problem they were looking at, notices must be in the same size font as the invoice.
Free choice of shop (Section 7), which expressly does not create a private cause of action.
A knowing-violation presumption (Section 8) where a shop shows a regular and consistent pattern of prohibited activity.
Section 9 is the interesting one
It is headed "Penalties" and contains none. In full, it reads:
Drafting Note: Legislators may wish to consider provisions that establish rules that allow for [regulatory body] to be responsible for the administration and enforcement, including penalties, of all motor vehicle glass repair shops in [State].
Every adopting state got identical duties and a blank where the consequences go. So the consequences are the part each legislature invented for itself, and they are not close to one another:
| State | What happens when you breach it |
|---|---|
| Kentucky | Attorney General, via a new section of KRS ch. 367 |
| Virginia | Attorney General, under the Consumer Protection Act. No schedule in the chapter |
| New York | Graduated: written warning, then up to $500, then up to $2,000 |
| Florida | Under the Motor Vehicle Repair Act. No private cause of action |
| California (proposed) | City attorney, DA, county counsel or AG. $500 then $2,000. No private cause of action |
| South Carolina (bill) | A private right of action, $2,500 statutory damages per violation, treble damages, personal liability |
South Carolina is the outlier because it is the one bill that did not treat the blank as an invitation to be modest. It is also the one that has not moved since January.
How closely states actually followed it
California's SB 988 is the model nearly section for section: estimates, the prohibited-acts list, the presumption clause, the same-font rule, free choice of shop.
Virginia took only Section 4, the ADAS notice, and attached its own enforcement. Its Motor Vehicle Glass Act is three operative sections and a title.
New York is not the model, despite being described as its New York enactment. GBL 392-k shares the ADAS notice core and the assignment and inducement bans, then diverges: no prohibited-acts catalogue, no estimate structure, no reasonable-and-customary cap, no presumption clause, no free-choice section. It also adds two things the model lacks, shops may not charge for an unsuccessful recalibration, and insurers may not require glass that cannot be calibrated to specification.
What this means for a shop
Read your own state's text, not a summary of the model. The duties travel; the enforcement does not, and the enforcement is what decides your exposure.
The paperwork rules are the ones most likely to catch you out. The assignment-of-benefits ban and the inducement ban are contract-level, not procedural. A form that was fine in 2023 may be void now.
Watch for the model in your legislature by its shape, not its title: an AOB ban, an ADAS notice sequence, an inducement ban, and a same-font-size clause appearing together is this document.
What we could not verify
- How many states have introduced it. The sweep is now complete; all fifty states read from their own statutes and rules, the map is in the auto glass disclosure guide, and the three states that would not serve us a page (Connecticut, Michigan, Oklahoma) have since been opened; Connecticut turned out to be the only state in the country to name this model in a bill. What we still will not give is a national count of adoptions, and the reason has changed. It is no longer that we have not looked. It is that "adopted the model" is not a fact you can count: several states enacted the duties without the model's structure, and New York is routinely described as its New York enactment while sharing only part of it. A count would require us to decide how much resemblance qualifies, and that decision would be ours rather than the record's.
- Whether the model has been amended since April 2025. We read the adopted text; we did not establish whether a later version exists.
- The Florida lawsuit-reduction figure. It is the supporters' claim, reported in the California committee analysis. We have not seen the underlying data and present it as their claim, not as a fact.
- A citation warning. The California Senate Judiciary analysis links the model at a URL that returns 404, the real filename carries a hyphen the citation omits. That is the second citation defect we found in that same document, after the Kentucky bill and chapter numbers being transposed.
Sources
- NCOIL Motor Vehicle Glass Model Act, full adopted text, eleven sections, sponsored by Rep. Michael Sarge Pollock (KY), adopted 14 February and 27 April 2025
- NCOIL, "Property & Casualty Insurance Committee Adopts Motor Vehicle Glass Model Act", 24 February 2025
- California Senate Judiciary Committee analysis of SB 988, version of 23 March 2026
- State-by-state enforcement detail as recorded in our auto glass disclosure guide
General consumer information: not legal, insurance, or financial advice. Requirements, coverage, and practices vary by state, policy, and manufacturer.