Progressive auto insurance review 2026
The second-largest auto insurer and the most aggressive discounter, with the deepest published savings list of any national carrier — and the lowest claims-satisfaction score in our review.
- Market share
- 16.7% of U.S. auto
- AM Best rating
- A+
- Availability
- All 50 states and D.C., direct and through independent agents
A national average is not a quote. Compare Progressive against 50+ insurers on your own ZIP, vehicle, and record.
How Progressive scores
Each category is scored against a published figure, then weighted into the overall score. Where a figure is not published, we say so rather than estimate one.
Sources: average premiums from NerdWallet's August 2026 rate analysis (Quadrant Information Services), for a 35-year-old driver with a clean record and good credit in a 2023 Toyota Camry LE at 12,000 miles a year, 100/300/50 limits with $1,000 deductibles — national average $2,356. Claims satisfaction from the J.D. Power 2025 U.S. Auto Claims Satisfaction Study (segment average 700). Complaint record from NerdWallet's analysis of NAIC complaint data, 2022–2024. Financial strength from AM Best. Discounts and app data from each carrier's published pages and the Apple App Store / Google Play, retrieved August 2026. Updated August 2026.
Strengths and trade-offs
What Progressive does well
- Sixteen published discounts, with average savings actually stated rather than hidden
- Snapshot works as an app or a plug-in device, so it is available where phone-only programs are not
- Loyalty Rewards tiers add real features over time, including a lifetime renewal guarantee at 20 years
- Deductible Savings Bank cuts $50 off your deductible per claim-free period
- Sold both direct and through independent agents, so you can shop it either way
Where it falls short
- Lowest claims-satisfaction score in this review, 27 points below the segment average
- A large share of the published discounts are unavailable in California
- Snapshot can raise your rate — Progressive says about 2 in 10 drivers see an increase
- The loyalty programme is unavailable in Hawaii, Alaska, North Carolina and California
The full review
Progressive has spent three decades building a company around the assumption that customers will shop. It sells direct and through independent agents, publishes the average value of most of its discounts instead of hiding behind 'savings vary', and built the first mainstream telematics program in the U.S. In 2024 it wrote $60 billion in private passenger auto premiums, second only to State Farm and closing.
What it costs
The base number — $2,062 a year for full coverage on our benchmark profile — is unremarkable, about 13% under the national average and statistically indistinguishable from State Farm. What makes Progressive cheap for many drivers is the stacking. It publishes sixteen discounts and says 99% of its auto customers earn at least one. Safe drivers buying direct pay an average of 33% less than customers with accidents or violations; Snapshot participants average $328 in savings; bundling home and auto averages over $1,000 for new customers.
A striking number of Progressive's discounts are unavailable in California: Snapshot, paperless, pay in full, automatic payment, continuous insurance, teen driver, good student, and the sign-online discount are all excluded, and the loyalty program does not operate there either.
If you are shopping in California, the discount list that makes Progressive attractive elsewhere largely does not apply to you.
How claims go
Progressive scored 673 out of 1,000 in J.D. Power's 2025 claims satisfaction study. The segment average is 700, and Erie — the highest-ranked insurer — scored 743. That is the lowest score of any company in this review, and it is not a marginal gap. Progressive's NAIC complaint record is better than its size would predict, which suggests the problem is dissatisfaction rather than disputes serious enough to escalate, but a 27-point deficit against the average is still the single most important thing to know about the company.
Snapshot, and whether it is worth it
Snapshot is the most mature telematics program on the market and one of the few offered as both a phone app and a plug-in device, which means it is available to drivers whose states or phones rule out app-only programs. The trade is explicit and Progressive states it plainly: your rate can go up. The company says roughly 2 in 10 drivers see an increase. Sign-up alone averages $164 in savings; completing the monitoring period averages $328.
Who it suits
Progressive suits the active shopper — someone who will work through a discount list, enroll in telematics, bundle policies, and re-quote at renewal. For that driver it is frequently the cheapest credible national option. It suits the driver who wants to buy once and forget about it considerably less well, and it suits anyone who weights claims handling heavily least of all.
Progressive is the best-designed shopping experience in car insurance and one of the weakest claims experiences in it. If you are the kind of driver who compares quotes every renewal and rarely files, the discount stack is genuinely hard to beat. If you expect to use the policy, the 673 claims score is a real number and deserves real weight.
Compare Progressive head-to-head
Every pairing gets its own side-by-side breakdown across the same six categories.
Progressive questions, answered
The things people actually ask before switching.
Where Progressive sits in the market
No published rate data, so no honest position on the horizontal axis: Liberty Mutual, NJM, Clearcover, Elephant, Lemonade, Root, Texas Farm Bureau. Below the J.D. Power study’s size threshold, so no position on the vertical axis: Kemper, Shelter, Chubb, COUNTRY Financial, MAPFRE, Plymouth Rock, The Hanover. That study samples only the largest insurers, so these carriers will not appear in a future wave either. Premiums from NerdWallet’s August 2026 analysis; claims scores from the J.D. Power 2025 U.S. Auto Claims Satisfaction Study. USAA is scored but not ranked in that study because it serves the military community only.
Not plotted, because no public rate data exists for them: Liberty Mutual, NJM, Clearcover, Elephant, Lemonade, Root, Texas Farm Bureau. Complaint bands from NerdWallet’s analysis of NAIC complaint data, 2022–2024 (2021–2023 for Liberty Mutual and Mercury). We show the band rather than a numeric complaint index on purpose — the per-carrier indexes published by different compilers contradict each other badly enough to be unusable, because the index is reported per underwriting subsidiary and most sources do not say which one they used.
Progressive by state
Progressive writes in all 50 states, but discounts, telematics and coverage features vary state by state. Pick yours to see what actually applies.
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