What is price walking in car insurance?

The practice of gradually raising a policyholder's renewal price over successive years, faster than a new customer would be quoted for identical coverage, on the assumption that a customer who hasn't shopped around won't notice or won't bother switching.

Is price walking illegal in the United States?

No. The United Kingdom's Financial Conduct Authority banned the practice for UK home and motor insurers in 2022. No equivalent federal or state ban exists in the US as of this writing, so the practice isn't restricted here the way it is in the UK.

How do I know if it's happening to my policy?

The only reliable way is to actually get a competing quote at renewal. If a new customer, same insurer, same coverage, same profile, would pay less than your renewal price, the gap is your answer.

Loyalty doesn't get rewarded here. It gets priced.

Staying with the same insurer for years isn't a discount. For a lot of drivers, it's the opposite.

What actually happens at renewal

A new customer's quote is priced to win the business, insurers know that price gets compared against competitors before anyone signs. A renewal price faces no such test unless the policyholder actually goes and gets one. Left unchecked, that gap tends to widen a little more each year the policy just rolls over, a pattern the industry has an actual name for: price walking, or the loyalty penalty.

It's not universal, and it's not usually dramatic in any single year

Not every insurer does this, and not every renewal increase is loyalty pricing, claims history, inflation in repair and medical costs, and broader rate filings all move premiums too, for new and existing customers alike. The loyalty penalty specifically is the extra slice on top of those legitimate factors, the part that exists only because you didn't check. In any single year it can be modest enough to miss. Compounded over five or six years of auto-renewing without comparing, it adds up to a real amount of money for no better coverage.

The UK banned it. The US hasn't

In 2022, the UK's Financial Conduct Authority required home and motor insurers to offer renewing customers a price no higher than an equivalent new customer would pay, effectively outlawing price walking there. No such rule exists at the federal level or in any state we're aware of in the US. That means the burden here sits entirely on the driver: nothing structurally stops an insurer from letting a renewal price drift upward, and nothing requires them to flag it if it does.

The only real check is a competing quote

There's no way to know your specific renewal is inflated without something to compare it against. That's the practical case for shopping every year rather than treating a stable-seeming premium as proof it's fair, a number that hasn't dropped isn't the same as a number that's still competitive. See how to lower your rate for what to actually do once you've confirmed there's a gap, and consider setting a renewal reminder here so the comparison happens automatically instead of depending on memory.

Check where your city's spread sits today on the rate calculator, or read when to actually run that comparison.

Why we built a rate spread tool instead of another quote form.

About us

Open Rate Index started from a simple annoyance: every car insurance site collapses a whole city's worth of pricing into one round number, then asks for a phone number before showing anything more specific. We wanted to see the actual range, insurer by insurer, without handing over contact details first. So we built a database of publicly filed rates instead of a quote engine, and a bracket tool instead of a form. No lead gets sold to an agent when you use this site, because we're not set up to sell leads at all. We're not an insurance agent, broker, or carrier, and we never will be.

Methodology

Every number on this site is labeled one of two ways. Filed means it comes from a real per-carrier rate filing for that specific city. Estimated means we don't have that per-carrier filing yet, so we spread a statewide average across a handful of insurers instead, clearly marked so it's never mistaken for a filed number. Credit tier and driving record are always modeled adjustments layered on top of a filed or estimated base rate, built from published industry-typical multipliers rather than any one carrier's private rating plan. Data is refreshed as new filings arrive, and every rate row carries the month it reflects. Full breakdown on the methodology page.

States and cities

We currently track 105 cities across 51 states, and 124 insurers, and that list grows every month as new filings get imported. Some markets already have a full per-carrier picture, others run on a labeled statewide estimate until a real filing lands. Every change is logged month by month on the changelog, so you can see exactly what moved and when, city by city.

Read the longer version on the About page, or the line-by-line breakdown on Methodology. Questions or something look wrong? Get in touch.