Why Your Trucking Insurance Went Up While Crashes Went Down

Why did trucking insurance premiums rise while crash rates fell?

Commercial auto insurers paid out $1.07 for every dollar they collected in 2024. The industry posted a $4.9 billion underwriting loss that year, its fourteenth consecutive year in the red. Between 2021 and 2024, heavy-duty truck crash rates fell 2.6 percent industry-wide. During that same window, liability premiums climbed 38 percent, reaching 10.2 cents per mile in 2024. Fourteen of the twenty largest commercial auto insurers posted combined ratios above 100 last year, meaning the majority of the country's biggest writers are losing money on the product they sell.

The disconnect is stark. Crashes went down. Premiums went up. Losses kept compounding. AM Best reports the line has accumulated more than $10 billion in net underwriting losses in the last two years alone.

What drove the premium surge

Trucking insurance premiums surged an average of 8.3 percent annually between 2017 and 2025, more than double the general inflation rate. ATRI data shows liability premiums climbed nearly 38 percent between 2015 and 2024. From 2021 to 2024, per-mile costs in the $5 million to $10 million excess layer rose 34 percent. In the $10 million to $15 million layer, they rose 45 percent.

The industry frames this as a nuclear verdict problem, a social inflation problem, a third-party litigation funding problem. Those factors are real. But they are not the whole story. The whole story starts with the insurance industry itself, with the decisions it made over the past decade that created the risk pool it is now drowning in.

How insurers flooded their own market with unvetted risk

The one thing in the entire new entrant process that you could not fake your way past when starting your trucking company was insurance. You could get a DOT number without proving operational competence. You could file for authority without demonstrating safety management systems. But you could not put a truck on the road without an insurance certificate.

That gate held until insurers decided to abandon underwriting discipline. Over the past decade, the industry flooded its own market with unvetted risk. Carriers self-certified applications. Insurers collected premiums on those applications without verifying the information. When the losses showed up, the industry acted surprised.

The combined ratio of 107.2 in 2024 means insurers are paying out more in claims and expenses than they collect in premiums. That gap has persisted for fourteen years. The industry's response has been to raise rates across the board, penalizing clean fleets alongside the carriers who generated the losses.

What this means for a 5-truck fleet

A carrier running five trucks at 100,000 miles per truck per year pays $51,000 annually in liability premiums at the 2024 average of 10.2 cents per mile. That same fleet paid $37,500 in 2015 at the then-prevailing rate. The $13,500 annual increase hits the settlement statement every month, whether the fleet has filed a claim or not.

Fleets with clean CSA scores and no claims history are subsidizing the losses generated by carriers who should not have been insured in the first place. The Supreme Court's recent ruling expanding broker liability in carrier-crash cases may push premiums higher still, as insurers price in the risk of brokers scrutinizing carrier safety records more closely and steering freight away from marginal operators.

The underwriting collapse that built the crisis

Insurers abandoned the underwriting standards that once separated insurable risk from uninsurable risk. They collected premiums on self-certified applications. They wrote policies for new entrants without verifying safety management systems, driver qualification files, or maintenance records. They flooded the market with capacity, competed on price, and deferred the reckoning.

The reckoning arrived in the form of $10 billion in net underwriting losses over two years. The industry now wants clean fleets to pay for the mess. Premiums climbed 38 percent while crash rates fell 2.6 percent because insurers are trying to recover losses they generated by writing bad business.

Why the losses persist despite rate increases

The combined ratio of 107.2 in 2024 shows that even after eight years of premium increases averaging 8.3 percent annually, insurers are still losing money. Fourteen of the twenty largest commercial auto insurers posted combined ratios above 100 last year. The rate increases have not closed the gap because the underlying risk pool remains polluted with carriers who should not have been insured.

Nuclear verdicts and social inflation are real factors. But they are symptoms of a deeper problem. Insurers wrote policies for carriers who lacked the safety management systems, driver training, and operational discipline to prevent the crashes that generate the verdicts. The industry collected premiums on those policies for years. Now it is paying out the claims.

What changes for small fleets

Premiums will keep climbing until insurers either restore underwriting discipline or exit the line entirely. Fleets with clean records and strong safety scores may see some relief if insurers begin to differentiate risk more carefully, but the industry has shown little appetite for that work. The easier path is to raise rates across the board and let the market sort itself out.

For a 10-truck fleet running 1 million miles annually, every penny-per-mile increase in liability premiums costs $10,000 a year. The 38 percent increase since 2015 translates to roughly $38,000 in additional annual expense for that fleet. That money comes out of the settlement statement whether the fleet has filed a claim or not.

The recent spot rate climb to $3.55 per mile offers some revenue relief heading into summer, but insurance remains a fixed cost that rises regardless of freight market conditions. Fleets that survived the 2023 freight recession by cutting every variable cost now face a fixed expense that has climbed 38 percent in nine years, driven by losses generated by carriers who should never have been insured in the first place.