How to get ready for your commercial truck insurance renewal

Why truck insurance renewals have gotten harder

Every truck insurance renewal seems to cost more than the last, and the trend has not turned. ATRI put insurance premiums at 10.6 cents a mile in 2025, up from 10.2 cents the year before and a growing share of your trucking cost per mile,¹ and its early 2026 figures showed premiums up another 6.4% in the first quarter.²

From 2021 to 2024, liability premiums rose 18.6% while crash rates for heavy trucks fell 2.6%. Over the same years, per-mile liability losses went up 33.1%, so the cost of claims rose much faster than the number of crashes.³ Litigation is part of it. In one ATRI analysis of truck crash cases, non-medical awards were more than ten times the medical awards in 17.8% of cases.⁴

Across the market, commercial auto premiums rose 4.5% in the second quarter of 2026, according to the Council of Insurance Agents and Brokers.⁵ What you can control is how your fleet looks to the underwriter and how early they see it.

What underwriters look at

Every insurer weighs things a little differently, but the same questions come up again and again.^{6, 7}

• Your loss history. Five years of loss runs from every insurer you had, showing each claim, what was paid, and when it happened.
• Your drivers. Age, years of experience in similar equipment, accidents and violations on their motor vehicle records, training, and how often drivers turn over.
• Your safety record. Inspections, out-of-service orders, and crashes. Long waits at docks play a part too: a federal audit linked longer detention time to a higher crash rate.²¹ HUB International, an insurance broker, notes that carriers far over the thresholds in Unsafe Driving or the Crash Indicator can face non-renewal or struggle to find an insurer at all.⁸
• Your operation. Where the trucks run, how far from home, what they haul, and how old the equipment is and how it is maintained.
• Your safety program. Written policies, drug and alcohol testing, accident reviews, and in-cab cameras or telematics, especially when someone actually coaches drivers on what they show.

Telematics data matters more than it used to. Some newer insurers, HDVI and Nirvana among them, review the last 90 days of a fleet’s telematics before they quote.⁹ Discount programs come and go, though. Progressive stopped taking new enrollments in its Motive dashcam program on July 1, 2026.¹⁰ Ask your broker which data their markets will actually use this year. The same telematics and ELD data can also help you spot fuel card fraud.

Since the FAST Act, FMCSA has kept property carriers’ SMS percentiles off its public website, though inspection, crash, and registration data are still public.¹¹ An insurer reads those raw records, so it pays to make sure they are complete and accurate.

Fix the record before they read it

Start with your own FMCSA data. Look at every inspection and crash on your record for the last few years and check that each one is really yours, correctly coded, and complete.

• Wrong or incomplete records. Challenge them through DataQs, FMCSA’s system for disputes about inspection, violation, and crash data. Carriers use it a lot: in 2024 it received 63,548 requests about inspections and violations and 8,314 about crashes.¹²
• Crashes you could not have prevented. Eligible crash types can go through FMCSA’s Crash Preventability Determination Program. A crash found not preventable comes out of your Crash Indicator, though it stays on your public record.¹³
• Driver files. Federal rules already require you to pull and review every driver’s motor vehicle record at least once every 12 months and keep a note of the review.¹⁴ If any are overdue, pull them now. Underwriters will ask for recent ones anyway.

Write down what changed in the last year as you go: new safety rules, cameras you installed, drivers you let go, lanes you dropped. That becomes the story you send with your numbers.

Build a complete renewal package

An incomplete submission is the easiest one for an underwriter to set aside. One wholesale broker lists what a complete trucking submission includes.⁶

Leaving trucks or drivers off the schedule to lower the price tends to backfire. Premium audits are built to catch units and drivers that were never reported, including trucks someone assumed didn’t count because they were in the shop.¹⁶

A 120-day timeline

Brokers have been starting earlier. One large agency moved much of its renewal work to 120 to 150 days before expiration, because the last month leaves too little time to approach several insurers. Starting early only helps if the file is good, though. Another broker warned that a weak submission sent to the market can simply get “a quick no.”¹⁷

1. 120 days out. Talk to your broker about last year, what changed, and what this year’s market looks like. Request loss runs from every insurer.
2. 90 days out. Review your FMCSA records, file DataQs challenges and preventability requests, and catch up on any overdue driver files.
3. 60 days out. Pull fresh motor vehicle records, finish the vehicle and driver schedules, write the narrative, and send the full package.
4. 30 days out. Compare quotes on the same limits and deductibles, read what each one excludes, and confirm your new policy will be filed with FMCSA and that certificates go to the brokers you haul for.

Check your limits while you compare. The federal minimum for for-hire general freight in interstate commerce is $750,000,¹⁸ but large brokers ask for more. C.H. Robinson and TQL both require $1,000,000 of auto liability and $100,000 of cargo coverage to haul their freight.^{19, 20}

Keep the dates in view all year

Most truck insurance renewal problems start months earlier: a driver record nobody pulled, a truck added without telling the agent, a claim nobody followed up on. Moonin keeps coverage, renewal dates, and insurance deadlines in your daily brief, and tells you when trucks are about to lose coverage, so the renewal starts from a clean file. If you want to see it with your own policies and trucks, book a call.