The Small-Fleet
Renewal Gap
Why a clean safety record no longer controls your liability premium, and what still does.
Small fleets are being priced on a loss record they did not create.
In 2024, fleets running 25 trucks or fewer paid 20.3 cents per mile in liability premium. Fleets running 101 to 250 trucks paid 10.4 cents.1 Crash frequency does not explain the difference. Over the same window, industry injury crash rates fell 15.3 percent below their 2019 level and fatal crash rates fell 13.9 percent.2
What changed is severity. The median nuclear verdict, an award of $10 million or more, moved from $21 million in 2020 to $51 million in 2024.3 Inflation-adjusted liability losses per mile rose 33.1 percent between 2021 and 2024.1 Underwriters price the tail of the distribution, and the tail got longer.
For a carrier under 25 power units, that arithmetic produces a renewal conversation a clean loss run cannot win by itself. Insurance now consumes close to 5 percent of asset-based carrier revenue, and one in three fleets has had to assemble additional policy layers simply to hold the limit it carried in 2021.1
This paper does two things. It quantifies the gap between what small fleets pay and what their own safety performance would justify, and it sets out what a small fleet can still control at renewal when it cannot control the severity curve. The framework in Section 04 is not a product. It is a documentation and structure discipline that changes what an underwriter is able to verify, and therefore what an underwriter is able to credit.
Severity, Not Frequency, Now Sets the Price
The commercial auto liability market has been unprofitable in nine of the last ten years.2 That single fact governs every renewal conversation happening in trucking right now, and it is not a statement about any individual carrier's driving.
The underlying shift is measurable. The American Transportation Research Institute found that between 2010 and 2018, the average award in trucking cases exceeding $1 million rose from $2,305,736 to $22,288,000, an increase of 967 percent. Mean awards grew 51.7 percent per year while standard inflation grew 1.7 percent.4 Case volume moved with it: 26 cases above $1 million in the first five years ATRI studied, against nearly 300 in the last five.4
The trend did not stop when the study did. Nuclear verdicts against corporations rose 235 percent between 2011 and 2019, and the median nuclear verdict has since climbed from $21 million in 2020 to $51 million in 2024.3 Roughly one in four motor-vehicle cases producing a nuclear verdict involves a commercial trucking company.5
Commercial auto liability costs are now growing at about 10 percent annually against 7 percent for other cost categories.5 An insurer facing that curve has two levers: raise rate across the book, or restrict capacity. The market has used both.
Where the increase actually sits
The cost growth is concentrated in the upper layers of the coverage tower, which is where a catastrophic verdict lands. Between 2021 and 2024, the $5 million to $10 million layer rose 34 percent to an average of 1.58 cents per mile, the $10 million to $15 million layer rose 45 percent to 1.05 cents, and the $15 million to $20 million layer rose 36 percent to 0.78 cents.1
That distribution matters for a small fleet more than for a large one. A carrier with 500 trucks spreads the upper-layer cost across enough exposure units to absorb it. A carrier with 18 trucks buys the same tower shape against a fraction of the mileage base, and the per-mile figure reflects it.
| Fleet size | Liability premium per mile | Relative to 101 to 250 trucks |
|---|---|---|
| 25 trucks or fewer | 20.3¢ | 1.95× |
| 101 to 250 trucks | 10.4¢ | 1.00× |
| Industry average, all sizes (2025) | 10.6¢ | 1.02× |
The industry-wide figure reached 10.6 cents per mile in 2025, up 3.9 percent year over year and outpacing consumer inflation by 1.2 percentage points.2 Over the decade ending 2024, industry-average commercial auto liability insurance rose 37.8 percent.1
This is a forty-year arc, not a recent spike
Treating the current market as a cycle that will correct misreads the history. ATRI's baseline figures go back to the 1980s: the median trucking litigation award between 1985 and 1989 was slightly more than $100,000, and it rose 90 percent over the following five years to $190,000.4 Set that against a 2024 median nuclear verdict of $51 million and the direction is unambiguous across four decades.3
Two structural forces sustain it. The first is the scale of what is at stake: trucks move more than 70 percent of US freight, which puts commercial carriers in the path of a large share of severe motor-vehicle litigation, and roughly one in four nuclear verdicts in motor-vehicle cases involves a trucking company.5 The second is capital. Third-party litigation finance is now a global industry valued at approximately $400 billion, which funds cases through timelines that would previously have forced an early settlement.4
The aggregate cost of nuclear verdicts across all industries had reached $529 billion by 2022, and analysis presented by the U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform and The Brattle Group estimates that every $1 million change in commercial auto tort costs produces a $2 million impact on GDP.5 These are not figures any individual carrier can influence. They are the environment the renewal happens inside.
What the Gap Costs a 25-Truck Operation
The per-mile numbers are easy to read past. Converted to an annual figure on a real fleet, they stop being abstract.
Take a 25-truck operation running 100,000 miles per truck per year, a common long-haul benchmark. That is 2.5 million miles. At the small-fleet rate of 20.3 cents per mile, liability premium runs $507,500 a year. At the 10.4-cent rate paid by fleets of 101 to 250 trucks, the same mileage costs $260,000.
That is the size of the structural disadvantage before a single claim is filed. It is not a penalty for poor safety performance. It is what the market charges for buying a coverage tower against a small mileage base in a severity-driven environment.
The costs that do not appear on the premium invoice
Premium is the visible number. Three others are not.
Coverage erosion. One in three fleets, 33.3 percent, had to purchase additional individual policy layers just to maintain the total limit they carried in 2021.1 The same protection now requires more paperwork, more carriers on the tower, and more cost, without any increase in coverage.
Capital displaced from the operation. When ATRI surveyed carriers on how they absorbed rising insurance costs, one-third reported cutting wages or bonuses and 22 percent reduced investment in equipment and technology.6 Those are the two budget lines that determine whether a small fleet keeps its drivers and keeps its equipment current.
Share of revenue. Insurance now consumes close to 5 percent of total asset-based carrier revenue.1 On the margins most small carriers run, a line item at that scale competes directly with owner compensation.
Insurance against the rest of the cost sheet
ATRI's operational cost analysis put the industry's average marginal cost at $2.336 per mile in 2025, a record, with liability and cargo insurance premiums at roughly 11 cents of that.6 For an average carrier, insurance is therefore about 4.5 percent of the cost of running a mile.
Apply the small-fleet rate instead. At 20.3 cents per mile against the same cost base, liability alone approaches 9 percent of marginal operating cost. The line item roughly doubles as a share of the cost sheet purely as a function of fleet size, on a cost sheet that has been setting records during a multi-year freight recession.
Clean carriers absorbed increases too
The most uncomfortable finding for a well-run small fleet concerns what safety performance actually bought during the hardest years of the market. ATRI's expert surveys reported annual premium increases of 8 to 10 percent for low-risk carriers, against 35 to 40 percent for average-to-marginal carriers.4
Read that carefully. The spread is real and substantial, which is the argument for running a tight operation. But the low-risk figure is still 8 to 10 percent per year, compounding. Excellent safety performance did not produce a flat renewal. It produced a smaller increase than the alternative. A carrier that has held a clean record for five years and watched premium climb anyway is not misreading its own file. That is what the data says happened.
ATRI's research is direct about the endpoint: nuclear verdicts are rarely the immediate cause of a carrier's failure, but the increased insurance cost that follows them is a primary reason carriers close.4
Why "Run Clean and Shop the Market" Stopped Working
The conventional small-fleet renewal strategy has two moves: maintain a clean loss run, then take the file to more markets. Both are still worth doing. Neither is sufficient anymore, and the reason is structural.
A clean record answers the wrong question
A loss run demonstrates frequency. Frequency is not what moved. Industry injury crash rates are 15.3 percent below 2019 and fatal crash rates 13.9 percent below, while premiums rose through the same period.2 An underwriter looking at a clean five-year loss run on an 18-truck fleet is not evaluating whether that carrier has crashes. They are pricing what happens if it has one.
This is the core mismatch. The carrier brings evidence about frequency to a conversation that has become entirely about severity.
Shopping the market reaches a smaller market
Nine unprofitable years in ten have thinned the field of carriers willing to write small-fleet trucking risk, and the ones remaining have tightened appetite. The evidence shows up in the tower: when a third of fleets must stack extra layers to reproduce their prior limit, capacity, not price alone, has become the constraint.1
The submission has not kept pace with the underwriting
Underwriting practice has changed faster than the average small-fleet submission. Logan Payne of Lockton Companies described the shift plainly: five years ago the question was whether a carrier had safety data. Now, "it's a dynamic, real-time conversation. They don't just want to know if you have the data; they want to know what you are doing with it to coach drivers."3
A submission built the old way, loss runs plus a summary of written policies, answers a question underwriters stopped asking. That is a documentation problem, and unlike the severity curve, it is one a small fleet can fix before its next renewal.
Waiting for the market to turn is not a strategy either
There is a fair counterargument to everything above: rate increases are moderating. Renewal rate increases moderated from 10.4 percent to 5.8 percent, and the average premium increase projected for the first quarter of 2026 is 3.9 percent.2 The gap between mid-size and mega-fleet rates also narrowed, from 4.8 cents per mile in 2024 to 3.1 cents in 2025.2 The market is not accelerating the way it was.
Moderation of the increase is not a reduction of the level. A 3.9 percent increase applied to 20.3 cents per mile still raises the bill, and it raises it from a base that already reflects a decade of 37.8 percent cumulative growth.1 The small-fleet penalty has also proven durable across studies rather than being an artifact of one hard year: ATRI's 2022 analysis found small fleets paying more than three times the per-mile premium of very large fleets, and the 2024 data still shows nearly a two-to-one gap against mid-size carriers.6
A carrier waiting for the market to hand back the difference is waiting on something the last forty years of data does not support.
A Framework for the Renewal File
A small fleet cannot change the severity environment. It can change what an underwriter is able to verify about its own risk, and it can change how much risk it hands over versus holds. Those are the two levers that remain, and they organize into four steps.
Separate your record from the industry's
The premium quoted to a small fleet carries an industry-severity component the carrier did not generate. The first task is to make the carrier's own performance legible as a distinct thing, in the terms underwriters currently price: exposure-adjusted frequency, severity distribution of what claims exist, and the trend line across three to five years rather than a single snapshot.
Presenting a loss run is not the same as presenting an analysis of one. A file that shows frequency per million miles, trended, with the operational change that follows each claim, gives an underwriter something to credit. A file that shows a blank claims history gives them only the absence of information, which they will fill with book-average assumptions.
Document the technology, then document the coaching
ATRI's 2024 analysis identified six in-cab safety technologies with a statistically significant correlation to lower per-mile liability losses: forward collision warning, lane departure warning, collision mitigation, automated emergency braking, blind spot detection, and adaptive cruise control.1 Installed equipment is the first half of the argument.
The second half is what happens with the output. The underwriting question is no longer whether the data exists but what the carrier does with it. That means the file needs the coaching cadence, who reviews events, on what interval, what triggers an intervention, and what documented change followed. Weston Dickson of Samsara framed the economics bluntly: "A 3% premium increase versus a 12% increase can essentially pay for your camera investment."3
Price total cost of risk, not premium
ATRI's guidance is to evaluate all safety-related expenses together as a total cost of risk rather than optimizing the premium line in isolation.6 The practical version of that is deductible structure. Chad Krueger of Central Analysis Bureau put the mechanism simply: "If you self-retain a higher deductible amount, your premium decreases," or at least it rises more slowly.1
The data supports the trade. Fleets retaining roughly 10 percent of risk through higher deductibles or self-insurance minimized total cost of risk, and every fleet surveyed in the 501 to 1,000 truck band was self-insured on its primary layer.1 A 20-truck carrier is not going to self-insure a primary layer. It can still model where its own retention threshold sits, which requires knowing its actual claim distribution, which requires Step One.
Structure the tower deliberately
Because upper-layer cost is rising fastest, tower structure is now a live decision rather than a renewal formality. ATRI's 2024 data shows what each direction produced: carriers that reduced purchased coverage per mile saw combined risk costs fall 2.4 percent, carriers holding coverage flat saw them rise 4.8 percent, and carriers increasing coverage saw them rise 6.1 percent.1
That is a description of a trade, not a recommendation. Reducing limits lowers cost and raises the exposure that matters most in a severity-driven environment, and contractual or filing requirements may remove the option entirely. The point is that the decision should be modeled against the carrier's own claim distribution and contractual obligations, before renewal, rather than defaulted to last year's structure.
| Coverage decision | Change in combined risk costs |
|---|---|
| Reduced purchased coverage per mile | −2.4% |
| Held coverage unchanged | +4.8% |
| Increased coverage | +6.1% |
What Implementation Actually Requires
The framework fails in predictable ways when it is treated as a paperwork exercise. Four realities govern whether it produces anything at renewal.
The work starts 90 to 120 days out, not at renewal
A trended safety file is retrospective by definition. A carrier that begins assembling one three weeks before expiration has a folder, not a record. The coaching documentation in Step Two is the slowest piece, because it has to show a pattern over months.
Documentation discipline cuts both ways
The same file that supports a renewal can surface in litigation. ATRI's Alex Leslie has warned specifically about the language safety managers use in internal records, noting that a careless admission such as "didn't stop on time" can concede the defense outright.3 Records should be factual and complete. Conclusions about fault belong to the process that determines fault, not to an internal event log.
Someone has to own it
At 15 to 40 trucks, there is usually no full-time safety director. The work lands on an owner, a dispatcher, or an office manager who already has a job. The realistic answer is a named owner, a fixed monthly interval, and a template, rather than an aspiration to do it continuously.
The agent has to be able to carry the file
A carrier's analysis only produces a pricing benefit if it reaches the underwriter intact. That requires an agent who submits the analysis rather than summarizing it, and who can speak to retention modeling and tower structure. If a carrier is investing months in the file, the submission relationship is part of the framework, not separate from it.
What the Evidence Supports, and What It Does Not
A paper making claims about underwriting outcomes should be explicit about the strength of each one. Three of the four framework steps rest on published correlation data. None of them rest on a promised percentage.
| Step | Evidence | Strength |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Separate your record | Underwriter practice reported by brokers; no published quantification of the pricing benefit | Practitioner testimony |
| 2. Technology and coaching | Six in-cab technologies statistically correlated with lower per-mile liability losses, 2024 | Correlation, ATRI dataset |
| 3. Total cost of risk | Fleets retaining ~10% of risk minimized total cost of risk; self-insurance prevalence by fleet band | Correlation, ATRI dataset |
| 4. Tower structure | Combined risk cost change by coverage decision, 2024 (Table 2) | Correlation, ATRI dataset |
The honest limitation: correlation in a cross-sectional dataset does not establish that installing a camera lowers a specific carrier's premium. Fleets that deploy safety technology and document coaching tend to differ from those that do not in ways the data cannot fully separate. What the evidence does support is that these variables track with lower liability losses across the industry, and that underwriters price against them.
The cost side of the argument does not depend on correlation at all. The 20.3-cent versus 10.4-cent per-mile spread is a measured figure. So is the 33.3 percent of fleets stacking layers to hold their 2021 limit, and the movement of the median nuclear verdict from $21 million to $51 million in four years. Those numbers describe the environment a small fleet is renewing into regardless of what it decides to do about them.
The Gap Is Structural. The Response Is Not.
A small fleet paying nearly twice the per-mile liability rate of a mid-size fleet is not being punished for its driving. It is absorbing the industry's severity curve across a small mileage base, in a market that has been unprofitable in nine of the last ten years. That will not be argued away at renewal.
What remains controllable is narrow but real. A carrier can make its own frequency record legible instead of blank. It can document not just the safety technology on the truck but the coaching that follows the alerts. It can decide what risk to retain rather than transferring all of it by default. And it can treat tower structure as a modeled decision rather than a renewal formality.
None of that closes a 247,500-dollar structural gap. It changes what an underwriter can verify, in a market where the alternative is being priced on book averages. For a carrier under 25 trucks, that is the available margin.
Have your renewal file reviewed before you need it
Brindley Transport Risk reviews small-fleet renewal files against the four-step framework in this paper and returns a written gap assessment: what an underwriter will be able to verify, what they will have to assume, and which of the two is costing you.
The review takes about a week and requires your last three years of loss runs, your current tower structure, and whatever safety documentation you have.
Request a Renewal File ReviewSources
- American Transportation Research Institute data on 2024 liability premiums, coverage layers, deductible retention and safety technology, as reported in "Why Safe Trucking Fleets Are Paying Record-High Insurance Rates," Commercial Carrier Journal.
- American Transportation Research Institute, 2025 premium and crash-rate findings (Alex Leslie, Senior Research Associate), as reported in "Why Truck Insurance Premiums Rose in 2025 Despite Fewer Crashes," Commercial Carrier Journal.
- "Trucking Leaders Sound the Alarm on Nuclear Verdicts, Surging Premiums," Commercial Carrier Journal, May 2026. Includes remarks from Alex Leslie (ATRI), Logan Payne (Lockton Companies) and Weston Dickson (Samsara).
- American Transportation Research Institute, Understanding the Impact of Nuclear Verdicts on the Trucking Industry, 2020.
- U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform and The Brattle Group findings on nuclear verdicts and commercial auto tort costs, presented at the American Trucking Associations Management Conference & Exhibition, 2025.
- American Transportation Research Institute, The Impact of Rising Insurance Costs on the Trucking Industry, 2022, and Analysis of the Operational Costs of Trucking.
All figures in this document are drawn from the sources above. The annual premium comparison in Section 02 is arithmetic applied to published per-mile rates at a stated mileage assumption, not an observed result at a specific carrier.