Commercial auto has become an outlier in an otherwise softening US insurance market, leaving brokers under growing pressure to prove why individual fleets deserve better treatment.
Commercial auto premiums increased an average 4.5% in the second quarter of 2026, according to The Council of Insurance Agents & Brokers, second only to umbrella among the major lines. Across all account sizes, commercial P&C premiums fell an average 2%. The Council specifically pointed to nuclear verdicts arising from commercial auto accidents as a continuing source of pressure on both auto and umbrella capacity.
Underlying results help explain the divergence. Commercial auto produced an underwriting loss of approximately $1.9 billion in 2025, according to AM Best, despite improving substantially from the $4.9 billion loss recorded a year earlier. The line still posted a 103.5 combined ratio, with liability losses continuing to offset profitable physical damage results.
That environment is changing what brokers need to bring to the renewal table, according to Justin Foa (pictured), Alera Group's National Property and Casualty (P&C) practice leader.
“Telling a good story is just not going to work,” Foa told Insurance Business. “The logs, the procedures, the maintenance records, all of those things shouldn't be hard to provide and give underwriters a sense that you're running a quality operation.”
Foa said underwriting outcomes are increasingly diverging according to operators' ability to demonstrate strong safety controls. Clients with “great safety programs,” good drivers and well-maintained vehicles that can substantiate those practices are seeing flat or even slightly reduced rates.
Recent trucking data reinforces why insurers remain selective even as the wider commercial market loosens. American Transportation Research Institute research released in May found that motor carrier liability insurance costs increased 18.6% between 2021 and 2024 to 10.2 cents per mile, outpacing consumer inflation by 5.4 percentage points.
Yet heavy-duty truck-involved crash rates actually declined 2.6% during the period. The bigger problem was severity: among fleets studied, per-mile liability losses increased an average 33.1%.
Excess insurance became more expensive still. ATRI found per-mile premium costs for the $5 million to $10 million layer increased 34% between 2021 and 2024, while costs for $10 million to $15 million of coverage rose 45%.
The squeeze is happening against an already difficult operating environment. ATRI's latest operational-cost study put the average cost of running a truck at a record $2.336 per mile in 2025, up 3.4% year over year.
Foa told Insurance Business that he’s increasingly see premiums for some distressed tractor-trailer risks reach $30,000, $40,000 or even $50,000 per unit.
The data increasingly available to insurers is making it harder for operators with weak records to hide behind a polished submission.
Underwriters can examine DOT records, vehicle inspections, driver violations and maintenance history alongside information generated by telematics and camera systems. They can also ask for logs from driver-facing cameras or other systems to determine whether alerts are being generated and, crucially, whether fleet managers are responding.
That level of scrutiny pushes renewal preparation further forward, particularly for brokers working with fleets whose safety records leave room for improvement. Waiting until the submission is being assembled may leave too little time for clients to implement controls and produce a track record showing that they work.
“I think having an early discussion and starting to talk about what safety measures can be implemented immediately, how you can document and track those so that underwriters believe you… are starting to run an active safety culture within your company,” Foa said.
The strongest fleets can still have leverage in the market. But as underwriters gain access to more information about how vehicles and drivers are actually being managed, preferred treatment increasingly depends on whether brokers and their clients can prove they belong in that group.
