After 2020 premium give-backs, the market swung into the sharpest hard-rate cycle in decades. Weighted rate impacts peaked in 2023 at +8 pts in the West and +7 pts in the East, before easing as supply-chain inflation and used-car prices moderated.
Implication: A one-size-fits-all national program risks over-pricing Tier-2 (Midwest/South) books while leaving Tier-1 (West/East) still short of adequacy.
Top filings now target exposure and repair-complexity signals over blanket base-rate hikes:
- Mileage & Model Year - appear in ~80 filings; carriers seek >20% relativities to capture post-pandemic driving rebounds and ADAS repair costs.
- Demographics (Age, Marital Status, Gender) - still powerful severity predictors but under rising advocacy scrutiny; filings must include disparate-impact tests.
- Portfolio-level levers (Base Rate, Overall % Change) reveal residual adequacy gaps that blunt factor-level refinements alone cannot bridge.
1. Region-Tuned Pricing Glide Paths - Keep filing momentum in West/East; pivot to loss-adjustment-expense discipline in Midwest/South.
2. Data-Rich Justifications - Pair large mileage relativities with telematics evidence; consolidate duplicate factor labels to avoid regulator re-work.
3. UBI as Differentiator - Continuous-mileage discounts correlate with lower 2024-25 impacts; accelerate data-science pipelines to prevent adverse selection.
4. Capital & Cat Strategy - Deploy surplus toward under-priced Tier-1 territories; raise cat attachment points in price-soft Tier-2 books where incremental premium is thin.
Regulators are signaling fatigue with broad hikes, yet loss-trend uncertainty (jury-awards, secondary-peril cats) persists. Expect a pivot from blanket increases to surgical, data-driven filings and heightened emphasis on cost containment. Carriers that blend robust analytics with transparent policyholder-impact modeling will secure faster approvals - and better defend the hard-won margin recovery of the post-COVID era.