Your Crash Rate Dropped. Your Premium Didn't. Here's the Bill They're Hiding.
Small fleets pay twice the per-mile premium of large carriers — while posting lower crash rates. Here's how insurers built this mess and handed you the tab.
By Herman Armstrong
If you run a fleet in the 5–25-truck bracket, you paid 20.3 cents per mile in liability premiums in 2024. A fleet in the 101–250-truck bracket paid 10.4 cents — for the same roads, the same cargo, in an industry whose fatal-crash rate sits 13.9% below its 2019 peak. Your reward for running small in an industry whose safety numbers improved was a bill twice the size of the carrier in the next bucket up.
That is not a pricing quirk. That is an industry offloading its own actuarial failure onto the operators least able to absorb it.
The Hole Is Real, and They Dug It
Commercial auto liability has now logged its 14th consecutive year of underwriting losses, according to rating agency AM Best. Physical damage stayed profitable in 2024; the entire catastrophe lives in liability — and the bleed isn't a one-year blip. Sentry, Chubb, and State Farm posted 2024 combined ratios of 130, 126.2, and 123.6. These are the carriers that are supposed to have underwriting discipline.
They built this hole themselves. During the 2021 freight boom, more than 109,000 new trucking companies launched. Instant-issue platforms wrote them all. No underwriter touched the file. No one verified fleet counts. No one checked driver records. Self-certified applications, premiums collected, authority activated, trucks rolled.
When spot rates collapsed, those carriers ran harder, slept less, and maintained equipment with money they did not have. The losses the instant-issue market was always going to produce started showing up. The insurers are not victims of bad luck. They chose volume over discipline and are now bleeding for it.
ATRI's 2026 research shows insurance now consumes nearly 5% of asset-based revenue for a small carrier. That is not a cost of doing business. That is a structural tax on being small, levied by an industry that invited the bad actors in and is now splitting the cleanup bill across everybody.
S&P Global projects the combined ratio hits 106.3% by 2029. Rate hikes — the industry's only lever — have already slowed to 2.9% as of Q4 2025, and that lever is running out of travel.
Premiums climbed 8.3% annually between 2017 and 2025. Crash rates fell. The math is not broken because you drove poorly.