Car Insurance Prices Revealed by Your State

As well as being the definitive source of state insurance regulations, you state insurance commissionaire may the best sources for company and agent licensing information, agent recommendations and fraud alerts.

You may be able to ask your state insurance department specific questions about a provider:

• Whether or not the company is properly licensed;
• The length of time for which the company has been licensed;
• Statistic, regarding the number complaints brought against a company;

There's information available on these sites that may be valuable to persons living out of the states, including guides to getting the best prices and complaint statistics. More than 30 states provide insurance rate comparisons for various sample driver profiles, though some of the companies, and the location specific prices may not apply to you, these rate tables are still valuable indicators of 'the going rates', some rate differences between providers are as high as 4-1. Some states providing rate comparisons include: Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Montana, Louisiana, Texas. and New York State some data tables are online, others are in down-loadable insurance guide .pdf documents.

For more location specific information, find your State's Insurance Department here:

In addition to getting online quotes in order to find the best price for your auto insurance, consider researching the quality of service provided by the insurer. The consumer has access to customer complaint statistics and reports on the financial stability of insurance companies, provided by independent agencies that monitor car insurance suppliers.

The National Association of Insurance Commissioners has used an aggregated database of information provided by individual state insurance commissioners to produce various reports available to the consumer. A part of the site particularly useful for consumes is a search-able complaints database. The graph below shows the number of complaints, by company, scaled to a national average complaint level of 1.0. The sample data is for providers operating in California.

(Some providers have multiple division, each with separate complaint data. These figures may not always be all that statistical precise, for example GMAC online, which provided .01% of U.S. market share, had a total of just 14 complaints.)

An exhaustive examination of an insurer may include a look at the financial condition of the company, as recommended by some state insurance Comissioners, although rare, along with te recent failings of financial institutions, insurance companies do fail on occasion. Several private rating companies will provide a limited number of reports over the phone free of charge, or on their web sites.

TheStreet.com makes their ratings available for no charge on their web site.

A.M. Best will provide up to 3 ratings per call at (908) 439-2200 ext. 5742.

Fitch provides free ratings for up to five companies per call at (800) 893-4824.

Moody’s will provide free ratings for up to five companies per call at (212) 553-0377.

Standard & Poor’s also provides up to 5 free ratings per call at (212) 438-2400. Reviews may also be requested from S&P via email