Following a rocky 2023 for the personal auto insurance business in the United States, early data released by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) suggests that auto insurance company GEICO is losing ground to its larger competitors State Farm and Progressive.
State Farm has held the top spot for many years in the US
While it’s no big news that State Farm is still the largest auto insurance company in the United States according to preliminary NAIC data. In fact, this makes the insurer the leader in the country based on premiums written for at least a quarter of a century.
What was interesting about this data is that it showed that only a year after Progressive managed to take GEICO’s spot in second place, it has now managed to expand the lead over its rival. Last year, when it became the second largest car coverage underwriter in the US, Progressive’s lead was only a small one. Since then, the gap has grown.
The data shared by NAIC was based on last year’s filings from 95.75 percent of individual property and casualty filers that were expected for the year. What it showed was that Progressive wrote about $48.26 billion in direct personal auto premiums last year. Comparatively, Berkshire Hathaway’s subsidiaries in the United States wrote closer to $38.97 billion.
Of Berkshire’s written premiums during the first three quarters of last year, 99.9 percent were from GEICO and its affiliates.
As a result of the preliminary NAIC data, it appears that the market shares for the three largest insurers in the United States are State Farm at 18.4 percent, Progressive with 15.3 percent, and Berkshire with 12.4 percent.
As this is only early data, it is more than likely that as additional filers are included in NAIC’s figures, the market share percentages will change. Moreover, S&P Global Market Intelligence has yet to independently verify the results, so nothing is considered to be official at this point.
Furthermore, the percentages of market share for last year in the NAIC data can’t necessarily be compared to the prior years’ of data shared by S&P Global market Intelligence because there is a chance that different methodologies were used and that the numbers aren’t comparable from 2023 to previous years because the filers don’t exactly match.
Still, this preliminary auto insurance market data could be a curious indicator of a trend among the top three.
