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Feb 07, 2024

Understanding Auto Insurance Rate Increases: The Impact of Vehicle Theft Trends

A common question we receive from our clients and prospective customers is, “Why has my rate gone up?” Your insurance rate may adjust due to personal factors like changes in driving activity or address, but another factor is an overall trend of increased claims that insurance companies have experienced in recent years. One of these claims is for the theft of a motor vehicle, and I would like to take some time to review these trends with you by using federal crime statistics available from the FBI at both a national and state level.

 The statistics tracked by the FBI are based on information received from participating law enforcement agencies. The most recent year that they have data available for is 2022, but the FBI has data going back to 1985 for vehicle thefts. The rate that they provide is related to the number of incidents per 100,000 people. For this post, I want to focus on the numbers that are available for the years 2012 through 2022. This information is available to the public online at CDE (cjis.gov).

The first chart here is for the United States as a whole. As can be seen here, the motor vehicle theft rate remained relatively stable from 2012 (230.4 per 100,000) through 2019 (220.8) before seeing an increase year over year through 2022 (282.7). This is about a 28% increase over the last three years of available data. This change can be seen more dramatically by looking at numbers by the individual states. Unfortunately for our clients in Washington and Oregon, our home states happen to be among the worst in the country for motor vehicle theft, but we will start in the worst state, which is Colorado.



The grey line in this chart is for the nationwide rate, same as the first chart. The blue line is tracking the rate for the state of Colorado. Back in 2012, Colorado’s rate of vehicle theft was almost the same as national rate at 233.2 per 100,000. There was then a steady increase through 2019 before we see the spike again for the years 2020 through 2022 ending at a rate of 785.7 per 100,000 or almost 3 times the national rate of motor vehicle theft. 



The next state represented on the chart above is the second worse state in the country for motor vehicle theft, Washington. Again, the national rate is represented by the grey line while the state of Washington is represented in blue. Washington is different from Colorado in that it began 2012 with a rate already above the national rate, and Washington actually experienced a decrease from 2012 (386.7 per 100,000) through 2019 (325.5 per 100,000). However, we see the same spike in the years 2020 through 2022 where Washington ended with a rate of 639.3 per 100,000, greater than twice the national rate of 282.7. The tale is not much better for Oregon.



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