Car insurance prices are up for drivers nationwide. And many of the reasons why are out of your control, like the increasing number of fatal car accidents on the road or the frequency of natural disasters and their impact on auto insurance claims. But you can minimize the impact on your bank account if you compare car insurance rates to find a policy that fits your budget.
Comparing car insurance rates is the best way to ensure you’re getting the best price on something you’re probably required to have. But while most insurers look at the same factors to determine pricing, each one has their own “secret sauce” when it comes to setting rates. That’s why two companies can charge wildly different rates for the same driver.
Why you can trust NerdWallet: Our writers and editors follow strict editorial guidelines to ensure fairness and accuracy in our writing and data analyses. Our data analysts take stringent measures to eradicate outliers and inaccuracies in pricing data, including rates from every location in the country where coverage and data are available, so you can rely on the prices we present. When comparing rates for different coverage amounts, ages and backgrounds, we change only one variable at a time, so you can easily see how each factor affects pricing. Read our methodology.
Compare car insurance rates
It’s hard to determine which factors have the most impact on your car insurance rate. As we mentioned earlier, the formulation of rates is a lot like the “secret sauce” that most restaurants put on burgers and sandwiches — the ingredients may be the same, but the mixtures are always a little different. We can tell you what most of those ingredients are, but there’s no way to know which one is most important with a particular insurer.
Each insurance company evaluates personal factors in its own way and keeps its methods as hidden as possible. But to help you find the best price for the insurance you want, we can show you average annual rates for minimum and full coverage car insurance. To help narrow it down even further, we’ve shared average rates for drivers with various driving experiences and credit histories in every state and for every major auto insurance company.
Although it’s one of the largest insurers in the country, Liberty Mutual is not included in our rates analysis due to a lack of publicly available information.
Compare car insurance rates by age
Your age can have a big effect on your car insurance rate. For example, you might already know teen drivers have some of the highest car insurance rates on average, but they aren’t the only ones. Although your rates will likely decrease once you hit your thirties, most drivers tend to see higher rates once they reach their 70s.
Below are the average costs of full and minimum coverage, by age, for drivers with good credit and a clean driving history.
| Age | Average cost of full coverage | Average cost of minimum coverage |
|---|---|---|
| 20 | $4,196 | $1,450 |
| 30 | $2,220 | $704 |
| 35 | $2,148 | $685 |
| 40 | $2,090 | $672 |
| 50 | $1,940 | $634 |
| 60 | $1,867 | $621 |
| 70 | $2,052 | $709 |
Drivers around the age of 20 typically get higher car insurance rates because they are more likely to get into accidents than older drivers, on average. NerdWallet recommends comparing auto insurance rates to find the cheapest option available, even if it may not be as affordable as other age groups.
To get more insight into how your age affects your car insurance, we compiled average annual rates from nine of the 10 largest private passenger auto insurers in the country based on market share data from the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. Data for Liberty Mutual was not available.