Commercial Auto Loss Trends Over the Last 20 Years

 

Higher Premiums Aren’t Just a Passing Problem, They’re the norm.

Every conversation about commercial auto insurance eventually lands in the same place. Premiums are too high and renewal increases feel brutal.

The last 20 years of commercial auto loss trends have told a pretty blunt story. Claims got pricier, lawsuits are nastier, and the insurance math…well, it just wasn’t mathing.

What the last 20 years really look like

Commercial auto insurers measure profitability using the combined ratio. It’s a key insurance metric showing underwriting profitability by adding the loss ratio (claims paid + expenses) and the expense ratio (operating costs) and dividing by earned premiums.

Under 100 means underwriting profit. Over 100 means losses, before their investment income enters the conversation.

For most of the last two decades, commercial auto has lived on the wrong side of that line. Liability has been the anchor dragging results down, year after year, while physical damage occasionally caught its breath.

Organizations like AM Best have repeatedly flagged commercial auto liability as one of the most unprofitable lines in the entire industry. Carriers didn’t forget how to price risks, the cost of claims changed faster than the tools used to predict them.

2006 to 2010, predictable pain

In the late 2000s, trucking claims were far from gentle, but they were familiar.

Vehicles were simpler. Repair estimates were grounded. Lawsuits followed a more traditional path and while large verdicts existed, they were the exception, not the norm.

Loss trends moved, but they moved slowly enough for pricing to adjust.

2011 to 2015, severity starts pulling ahead

This is where the curve begins to bend.

With the rise of cell phones, distracted driving increased across passenger vehicles. Traffic density rose. Medical costs climbed. Verdict sizes quietly crept upward. None of these triggered alarms on their own.  Together though?  They began creating a widening gap between what claims actually cost and what premiums assumed they would cost.

2016 to 2020, liability breaks the model

By the mid-2010s, commercial auto liability stopped behaving like a normal insurance line.

Social inflation took hold, led by shifts in societal attitudes, legal environments, and litigation practices.  We start to see larger – no outrageous jury awards and settlements.  Lawyers are gonna lawyer, quickly refining their litigation strategies and becoming more aggressive.

Trucking defendants were no longer just defending accidents, they were defending narratives. Every hire, every random violation became a weapon in the courtroom.

Research from Swiss Re has tied a significant share of liability claim growth to non-economic forces, including third party litigation financing, expanded theories of liability, and jury behavior.

In trucking terms, a crash no longer needed to be catastrophic to become financially devastating.

2021 to 2024, different problems stack together

Coming out of the pandemic, the industry picked up more weight.

Repair costs surged. Parts delays stretched downtime. Technology has made vehicles safer but far more expensive to fix. Physical damage pricing eventually responded, and in some segments even stabilized.

Liability never did.

Data from S&P Global shows modest improvement in overall commercial auto results in recent years, but liability continues to absorb the gains. Insurers might breathe a little easier on comp and collision, yet one bodily injury claim can still wipe out a book’s progress.

What this means heading into 2026

Commercial trucking liability is still our pressure point. Even when carriers report improvement, it is fragile and easily reversed by one large loss.  I mean how long can we expect insurance carriers to pay out $23,000,000 losses on a policy that should have only covered up to $1,000,000? Eventually they have to charge the entire segment more money, to literally stay in business.

The most recent premium increases that we started seeing in March 2024 are not random. They are delayed reactions to years of underpriced severity finally rearing its ugly head. The underwriting lens has narrowed substantially, and fleets without visible structure feel that squeeze the hardest.

The days of skating by on “no claims” are over. Why? They’ve changed the question.

Instead of asking what happened in the past, they are asking what could happen next. Behavior, consistency, and controls matter more than 3-5 years of loss runs now.

Fancy algorithms scrape your MCS150 looking for any and all discrepancies from what your quote info says.  If you haven’t shared ELD data yet, you will be in the next 5 years.  Insurance carrier's pattern recognition… it's incredible.

All of this explains why insurance feels different now.

Underwriting is no longer built around what already happened. It’s built around what the data suggests could happen next. Speed patterns, inspection history, mileage inconsistencies, driver turnover, garaging signals, ELD data, and operational discipline now carry more weight than a clean loss run alone.

This shift is particularly uncomfortable for operations that don’t or can't hold up well under closer scrutiny. When underwriting starts comparing data points instead of taking answers at face value, weak controls and inconsistent practices become hard to hide.

This is the environment trucking is operating in heading into 2026.

Truck U Take

We’re still in the middle of a market reset. As non-domiciled exposure, foreign interests, and structurally risky operations are pushed out or forced to clean up, there’s a real chance the industry eventually overcorrects its own overcorrection.

Until the industry gets serious about what actually drives losses, litigation exposure, and operational discipline though - premium pressure isn’t going anywhere.

Disclosure

This post is for educational purposes only. It is not legal advice, insurance advice, or a substitute for calling your agent. Truck U is good, but we are not psychic. Policies vary, laws change, and courtrooms get weird. Do not make decisions based solely on something you read on the internet unless it is from us, in writing, with your name on it.

All opinions are our own and do not represent the views of any carrier, employer, or underwriting department that occasionally wishes we were quieter on LinkedIn.