Every so often a research report comes along that confirms what every fleet manager already suspected in their bones but could not prove in a meeting. The American Transportation Research Institute delivered exactly that on June 8, publishing new research showing that trucking liability insurance costs rose 18.6% from 2021 to 2024, reaching 10.2 cents per mile.

Now, rising costs are hardly news in this industry. Everything costs more, from drivers to tires to the coffee that keeps both running. What elevates this particular finding from “annoying” to “genuinely absurd” is the second half of the sentence: over roughly the same stretch, heavy-duty truck-involved crash rates fell 2.6% industry-wide.

Let that marinate. The industry got measurably safer. Premiums went up almost 19% anyway, outpacing consumer inflation by 5.4 percentage points. If you did your job better this year and your boss responded by docking your pay, you would have questions. The trucking industry has questions.

The Excess Layers Are Where It Gets Truly Spicy

If the primary coverage numbers made you wince, wait until you see what happened upstairs. ATRI found that per-mile premium costs for the $5 million to $10 million excess coverage layer jumped 34% to 1.58 cents per mile. The $10 million to $15 million layer did even better, climbing 45% to 1.05 cents per mile.

These are the layers most fleets buy specifically because of nuclear verdicts, the runaway jury awards that have turned courtroom outcomes into a lottery where the ticket costs eight figures. Insurers price that terror into the excess layers, and carriers pay for it whether or not they have ever been within a hundred miles of a courtroom. Your reward for a spotless decade of operations is a smaller rate increase than the fleet down the road with three settlements. That is the whole prize. Congratulations.

And here is the twist worth remembering the next time your underwriter plays the sympathy card: the premium surge is happening even as many insurance providers themselves report underwriting losses in commercial auto. Everybody in this arrangement is unhappy. It is the rare business relationship where both parties lose money and the meetings continue anyway.

The Part of the Study You Should Actually Act On

Buried in the doom is a finding with real strategic value. ATRI’s data shows that fleets carrying more retained risk in their primary layer, meaning higher deductibles or self-insured retentions, experienced lower combined liability losses and premium costs. And this held true regardless of fleet size, so it is not just a mega-carrier trick.

Even more interesting: fleets that reduced their total purchased coverage saw an average 2.4% reduction in combined liability losses and premium costs the following year, after adjusting for inflation.

The logic is not mysterious. When your own money is on the line for the first chunk of every claim, safety stops being a poster in the break room and starts being a line item someone actually defends. Skin in the game concentrates the mind wonderfully.

Before anyone sprints off to slash their coverage, the obligatory adult supervision: retained risk only works if you have the balance sheet to absorb a bad month and the safety program to make bad months rare. A small carrier that self-insures its way into one uncovered claim has not optimized anything except its own going-out-of-business sale. Talk to your broker, model the scenarios, and be honest about your loss history. This is information, not a dare.

What This Means at Renewal Time

The practical takeaway is that your renewal conversation should be a negotiation, not a reading of the verdict. Walk in with your telematics data, your driver training records, your crash and violation trends, and this ATRI study under your arm. Insurers reward documented safety investment reluctantly, but they do reward it, and they respond even better to a carrier that clearly understands its own risk profile.

Because here is the uncomfortable truth the 18.6% number makes plain: nobody is coming to fix this for you. The market is not softening out of kindness, and the verdicts are not shrinking. The fleets that will pay less are the ones treating insurance as a system to be managed rather than a bill to be absorbed. Might as well be you.

Source: American Transportation Research Institute