Trucking industry insurance costs are on the rise, with premiums outpacing consumer inflation by more than five percentage points, according to data from the American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI), released this week.
ATRI’s report, Trucking’s Rising Insurance Costs: Issues and Opportunities, details the rising costs of commercial auto liability insurance across the industry and provides risk management strategies that motor carriers can use to mitigate those costs.
According to the research, from 2021 to 2024, liability insurance premium costs rose by 18.6% to 10.2 cents per mile—outpacing consumer inflation by 5.4 percentage points—at the same time that heavy-duty truck-involved crash rates fell by 2.6% industry-wide. ATRI said a sharp rise in crash claims expenses fueled the increase: Among respondents, per-mile liability losses rose by an average of 33.1% over the same period.
Premium costs for excess coverage rose at an even higher rate. From 2021 to 2024, per-mile premium costs for the $5 million to $10 million insurance layer rose by 34% to 1.58 cents, and per-mile premium costs for the $10 million to $15 million layer rose by 45% to 1.05 cents.
“These increases in excess coverage expenses point to the role of rampant litigation in inflating claims costs,” ATRI said in a statement announcing the findings.
The report found that several risk management approaches yielded positive outcomes during the period, however. Fleets with more retained risk in their primary coverage layer experienced lower combined liability losses and premium costs during this period, regardless of size. What’s more, fleets that reduced total purchased coverage experienced an average reduction of 2.4% in combined liability losses and premium costs in the subsequent year when adjusted for inflation.
Those outcomes can be attributed to a combination of premium reductions and aggressive implementation of safety strategies by fleets, ATRI said in the release.
The report includes benchmarks for fleets to evaluate trends and assess their own risk management approach, including coverage limits, percent of revenue spent on insurance, and deductible or self-insurance levels by fleet size.
