Shopping it

Why two quotes for the same driver come back thousands apart

Collect three quotes for an SR-22 policy and they will not be close. People read that spread as evidence that somebody is overcharging. Usually it is evidence of something less dramatic and more useful.

Two costs, and everyone conflates them

The filing fee is what the insurer charges to send the certificate. It is small, it is broadly similar between carriers, and it is frequently a one-time charge rather than a recurring one. It is not what makes this expensive, and comparing providers on it is comparing the wrong number.

The premium is the cost of the policy the certificate points at, priced for a driver with whatever event produced the requirement. That is essentially the entire difference between your quotes.

Anyone advertising “cheap SR-22 insurance” on the strength of the filing fee is advertising a rounding error.

The real constraint is not price, it is appetite

Only an insurer authorized in your state can file the certificate, and no insurer is obliged to. A driver who needs a filing is, from an underwriting desk, a driver with a documented event attached to their record.

Some carriers price that risk. Some decline it outright. Which means the market you are shopping is not the market you see advertised — it is the subset willing to write you at all, and that subset is not published anywhere, does not correspond to brand recognition, and changes as carriers adjust appetite.

That is the whole reason this search exists. Working out which carriers are in that subset, one phone call at a time, is slow, and the spread in your quotes is mostly a measurement of how differently each of them feels about you.

Why there is no average premium on this site

Because we have not measured one, and because the thing an average would have to average is not consistent.

A premium is a function of at least four variables: your record, your state’s statutory minimum, your vehicle, and the carrier’s appetite. The second of those alone varies more than 6-fold across the 37 states whose statutes we have read — Florida’s FR-44 certifies $100,000 of bodily-injury cover for one person; Louisiana’s minimum certifies $15,000. A national “average SR-22 premium” is averaging across products that differ by that much in the only dimension that matters.

When you see such a figure quoted without a sample size and without a source, the question to ask is which of those four variables it held constant. The usual answer is none of them.

The policy behind the filing is not the same product everywhere

The limits are only the start. Several states write coverages into the policy itself, so that a filing in one state carries a different bundle than a filing in the next. Every item below was read in the state’s own statute; none of it is optional in the state that requires it.

Maine will not accept a policy as proof unless, alongside 50/100/25 in liability, it carries $2,000 of medical payments for the driver and passengers and $500 of towing and storage (Me. Rev. Stat. tit. 29-A sec. 1605). Those two lines are part of the proof paragraph, not an optional add-on.

New Hampshire requires any liability policy on a private passenger car garaged there to carry $1,000 of medical payments per person, and uninsured and hit-and-run cover at least equal to the bodily-injury liability amounts, rising automatically if higher liability limits are bought (N.H. Rev. Stat. secs. 264:15 and 264:16).

Alaska requires the owner’s policy to carry uninsured and underinsured motorist cover “in not less than the amounts” of the liability limits, which are 50/100/25 (Alaska Stat. sec. 28.20.440). That is a second set of limits priced into the same policy.

Kansas requires every motor vehicle liability policy to include personal injury protection benefits for the insured, household relatives, drivers, passengers and pedestrians struck (K.S.A. 40-3107). A Kansas policy carrying a filing is not a bare liability policy.

Nebraska requires a certified policy to insure the named driver for the use of vehicles they do not own, at the same limits (Neb. Rev. Stat. sec. 60-535). Louisiana, after a DUI or a refused chemical test, requires proof for every vehicle the person has registered and individual proof as a non-owner, for three years (La. Rev. Stat. sec. 32:896). Colorado requires the policy behind the proof to run for at least three months (Colo. Rev. Stat. sec. 42-7-408(2)).

Put two of these side by side — a Maine filing and a Louisiana filing, say — and the quotes are not two prices for one thing. They are prices for different policies that happen to share a form number. That is one more reason a single national figure tells you very little about your own state.

What to actually compare

Three things, and they are all things you can get in writing.

The limits. Get the three numbers. A quote at the floor and a quote above it are different products, and the difference is what you would actually recover. Property-damage floors are the worst of the three — $10,000 in Washington, $15,000 in California — and the premium gap between the floor and a limit that covers a modern vehicle is frequently smaller than people assume.

Whether they will file. Not “can we do SR-22”, but whether this specific carrier will file for you, at these limits, with your state. That is the binding question and it is worth asking first.

The extra lines your state requires. If your state is one of those above, check that each quote includes the medical payments, towing, uninsured-motorist or personal injury protection cover the statute writes into the policy. A quote that leaves one out is cheaper because it is not the same policy, and a policy that does not meet the proof section will not carry the filing. In Louisiana after a DUI, ask for the owner’s cover and the non-owner cover as two separate lines, because the statute requires both.

The payment structure. A lapse is the failure mode, and the commonest cause of a lapse is a missed installment rather than a decision. If paying annually is possible, the arithmetic usually favors it once you price in what a re-filed certificate costs.

None of that requires you to know anything about insurance. It requires you to know what your state asks for, which is the only thing this site is for.

All notes · What an SR-22 is · SR-22 by state