August 15, 2026
45% of auto liability and medical claims resolved last year closed without any payment, against 35% a decade ago, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of claims reported to regulators. The carrier detail is where the finding gets specific: Liberty Mutual moved from 29% to 54% between 2016 and 2025, State Farm from 26% to 47%, Farmers from 19% to 39%, Progressive from 35% to 46% and Allstate from 46% to 54%.
The largest increases belong to the carriers that started lowest. Allstate rose 8 points from an already high base while State Farm rose 21 and Liberty Mutual 25. Travelers, at 13% to 20%, and American Family, at 22% to 28%, remain well below the group. What looks like an industry moving together is closer to a group converging upward on the practices of its most restrictive members.
Auto damage claims did not follow. Roughly one in four collision claims closed without payment, little changed over the decade. The divergence isolates the pressure to third-party liability and medical coverage, which as the Journal notes are more complex, more likely to involve attorneys, and more expensive per claim than physical damage.
Insurers told the newspaper that no-payment tallies reported to regulators include claims paid by the other driver’s carrier, claims withdrawn by the customer, claims outside policy terms and claims below the deductible. That is a legitimate qualification and it belongs in any honest reading of the figure. It does not by itself explain why the same reporting definition produced 35% in 2016 and 45% in 2025 unless the mix of those categories also shifted.
Claim economics give the carriers a real problem to point at. CCC data shows bodily injury claim frequency up 11% over two years, with cost up 10.3% last year and 32% over three years. GEICO’s pre-tax underwriting earnings fell about 45% in the second quarter, attributed partly to bodily injury and collision frequency and severity, with bodily injury frequency up 5% to 7% and severity up 10% to 12% against property damage frequency up 3% to 5% and severity up 0% to 3%.
Bodily injury payouts have now passed auto physical damage payouts for the first time on record, a crossover that reframes what an auto insurer is. GCBC’s reporting on the ADAS paradox in collision repair described the physical damage side of this: fewer low-speed crashes, higher cost per repair. The remaining claim pool skews toward severe crashes, and severe crashes are where injury claims live.
Body shops and dealer fixed operations sit downstream of the same squeeze in a different form. Partial payments and subrogation recovery pressure push cost onto the customer rather than closing the file outright, which is a category the Journal’s no-payment data does not capture at all. A shop manager asked the Collision Industry Conference in February to examine subrogation recovery for exactly that reason.
State Farm began issuing cash-back dividends this month after doubling its 2025 profit, a sequence GCBC tracked through the turn in the insurance cycle. Profitability restored while the denial rate climbed is the pairing regulators will be asked about, and Illinois signing a right-to-appraisal bill this month suggests the question has already reached statehouses.
