More Americans switched personal lines insurers in Q3 2026 than at any point on record, and the rate of switching is still rising, even as the shopping surge that preceded it has largely cooled. The latest JD Power Signals Intelligence for Personal Lines Insurance Quarterly Report, produced with TransUnion, finds that the dynamic playing out across auto, home, and renters insurance carries a specific implication for agents and brokers: a customer who shops is now more likely than ever to leave.
Auto insurance switching hit 5.1% in the third quarter, up 0.6 percentage points both quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year. Shopping, meanwhile, held at 13.2%, flat compared to the same period in 2025 and up 0.6 points from Q2. Monthly data shows switching reached a record high of 5.3% in August before easing to 5.0% in September, matching the prior record set in July. Among those who switched carriers, the median premium moving to a new insurer exceeded $3,300. That compares to more than $3,200 reported in the Q1 2026 edition of the same report, when shopping growth was already starting to slow.
The report’s most pressing finding is the divergence between shopping and switching. Shopping growth has been flattening since early 2026, but switching has continued to accelerate on a separate trajectory. Auto shopping fell to 12.6% in the second quarter before rebounding, suggesting consumer behavior has begun to level off after two years of elevated activity. Since 2021, the 30-day auto switching rate has climbed 35% on a year-to-date basis, from 3.4% in 2021 to 4.6% through Q3 2026, according to the JD Power report. Shopping over the same period rose 15%. The gap shows that the pool of clients actively comparing options may be stabilizing, but those who do compare are converting to new carriers at a higher rate.
The report’s loyalty tracker, which is based on carriers with more than 200 responses per quarter, shows which firms are holding customers and which are losing ground. In auto insurance, NJM, Erie, and USAA rank among the higher-loyalty carriers, while Nationwide, Alfa, Direct Auto, Root, and National General fall in the lower-loyalty tier.
In home insurance, NC Farm Bureau, NJM, and State Farm lead on retention, while Nationwide, National General, Alfa, Liberty Mutual, and The Hanover rank among those seeing higher defection rates. State Farm generated the highest volume of home insurance quotes to bundlers and the highest new business from bundlers. That is a strong indicator of where multi-line households are gravitating.
Renters insurance showed a more mixed pattern. The switching rate rebounded to 3.9% in Q3, up 0.5 points from Q2, but remains 1.1 points below where it was a year ago. Lemonade, Erie, State Farm, Travelers, and USAA rank among the higher-loyalty carriers in the renters segment, while Nationwide, CSAA, American Family, ACSC, and Liberty Mutual appear in the lower-loyalty grouping. Shopping reached 6.5%, up marginally quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year.
Home insurance showed the most notable year-over-year shopping increase of the three segments, with the 7.7% shopping rate up 1.1 points from Q3 2025, the highest recorded in the report’s data series. Switching rose to 3.0%, up 0.5 points from Q2 and 0.2 points year-over-year. August recorded the highest single-month home shopping and switching rates in the series, at 7.7% and 3.2% respectively, before switching eased in September.
The report flags an emerging variable that could alter these trajectories: AI-powered shopping agents. JD Power specifically names Meta’s Muse as a potential accelerant of both shopping and switching activity. Muse is a personal AI agent Meta launched on September 8, 2026, that can navigate websites, collect quotes, and compare coverage on a consumer’s behalf.
The industry’s response has been divided. Insurify blocked Muse from its comparison platforms. “A quote without its context is not a fair comparison. It is a number,” said Giorgos Zacharia, co-founder and co-CEO of Insurify, in a published statement. Kin, which sells directly to consumers, took the opposite position, opening its platform to Muse and positioning AI-assisted shopping as an opportunity to attract additional traffic.
The stakes, however, run deeper than distribution strategy. Analysts at Autonomous Research, in a report published October 20, 2026, found that while Muse does not yet outperform an insurance agent, it showed the ability to summarize quotes and compare coverage options during testing. The firm flagged increased price transparency as a longer-term risk for carriers and warned that agentic AI could also raise the rate of legal involvement in claims, an outcome with direct loss-cost implications.
Regardless of how quickly AI agents affect shopping volumes in the near term, the JD Power data suggests the comparison-shopping behaviors established during the hard market cycle of 2023 and 2024 are not unwinding. As LexisNexis Risk Solutions noted in its Q2 2026 U.S. Insurance Demand Meter, published in May, loyalty may now be what separates temporary wins from sustainable growth, a point the Q3 switching data makes concrete. Agents and brokers who built books during the elevated-shopping period now face a market where retention requires active management, rather than just incumbency.
