Iowa Legislature Sends AOB and Recalibration Disclosure Bill to the Governor

Iowa became the third state to send a comprehensive auto glass services regulation bill to its governor for signature when its legislature completed passage on April 28, 2025. The bill followed similar AOB-banning legislation enacted in Florida and Kentucky. It had passed the Senate on March 19, the House on April 21, and cleared the Senate again with a small House amendment on April 28.

The Iowa legislation—Senate File 573—prohibited consumers from assigning their insurance benefits to an auto glass shop and barred shops from offering gifts, rebates, or other items of value in exchange for a customer making a glass claim. These provisions directly targeted practices that insurers alleged had inflated claims in states with heavy AOB usage, particularly Florida. The Iowa bill explicitly protected customers' right to choose their own shop, even within an insurer's preferred network.

On the ADAS side, the Iowa bill required shops to inform customers before work begins whether recalibration will be necessary, whether the shop plans to perform it, and whether it will be covered by insurance. If recalibration is needed but will not be performed by the shop, the shop must tell the customer in writing where to go for proper service—a consumer protection provision that indirectly creates liability for shops that skip or delay disclosure.

The penalty structure in the Iowa bill was significant: the state insurance commissioner could impose civil penalties ranging from $1,000 to $50,000 per violation. That range—with the upper end representing more than most small shops earn in a week—was designed to be a genuine deterrent rather than a cost-of-doing-business fine. Shops that built their business models around AOB-enabled practices faced existential disruption if Iowa's law was signed.

The Iowa bill's passage was also notable because it followed the NCOIL model legislation closely, increasing the likelihood that additional states would adopt similar frameworks. Trade associations representing both shops and insurers were watching the Iowa law as a template they could either endorse or challenge in their own state capitals.

Iowa's AOB ban was signed into law in 2025, and by year-end several more states had introduced or passed comparable legislation. The Iowa vote was a meaningful data point in the trajectory of auto glass regulation in the United States.