Key Takeaways
- If you have both auto and homeowners coverage with different carriers, a bundle discount of 5% to 15% is likely available — at $2,697 average annual full coverage, a 10% discount saves $270 per year.
- The average shopper now pulls 3.5 quotes, a record. If you got one quote at your last renewal, you’re shopping well below the current behavioral norm in a market where carrier pricing still varies widely.
- Usage-based insurance enrollment is highest among recent switchers (34%), not the overall market (20%) — if you’re a low-mileage safe driver and haven’t looked at telematics programs, you’re leaving a price lever unused.
The auto insurance pricing crisis has cooled, but the shoppers it created haven’t gone back to passive renewal. JD Power released its 2026 U.S. Insurance Shopping Study on June 4, and the defining number is 3.5, the average number of quotes drivers pulled per shopping trip, the highest figure in the study’s 20-year history. The study is based on 12,437 customers who requested an auto insurance quote between January 2025 and January 2026.
The headline shopping rate actually fell, from 57% last year to 53%. That decline makes sense: auto insurance prices rose 11.57% nationally in 2023 and 17.13% in 2024 before easing to 7.56% in 2025. When premiums stop compounding, the urgency to shop cools. But the drivers who are still shopping aren’t doing it casually, 3.5 quotes is deliberate comparison, not a quick sanity check.
Half the Market Has Gone Digital
48% of new auto policies were purchased digitally during the study period, up from 36% five years ago. That’s not a residual pandemic effect. It’s the new default for how people buy car insurance, and it’s continuing to climb. Nearly half of all new policies are now closed without a phone call.
JD Power also found that shoppers who used AI tools in their insurance journey were more likely to switch carriers and more likely to feel confident in their final decision. Stephen Crewdson, JD Power’s managing director for insurance intelligence, described the shift as moving “from a crisis-driven market to a digital- and AI-driven market.” His interpretation is that AI tools explain coverage trade-offs more clearly than traditional agent interactions, which, if accurate, is a significant structural challenge for carriers whose competitive advantage relied on the complexity of the product being hard to compare.
Embedded insurance is showing early traction too. 36% of recent shoppers said they’d be interested in auto insurance sold through a car dealer or manufacturer, with that interest skewing younger. Carriers that aren’t thinking about point-of-sale distribution are watching a new channel develop without them.
The Cross-Sell Gap Is the Study’s Real Story
45% of active auto insurance shoppers in the study currently have a homeowners policy. Only 20% of them received a homeowners quote while shopping for car insurance. That’s a 25-percentage-point gap between the bundling opportunity and what’s actually being offered.
From my years at the agency desk, I know exactly why this gap persists. The auto quote workflow is built for speed. A customer calls or clicks through, you gather drivers, vehicles, and coverage preferences, and you run the numbers. The system doesn’t prompt you to ask about home. If the auto quote is competitive, the customer is ready to close and the moment for a home conversation passes in about 90 seconds. If it isn’t competitive, as Crewdson noted, the customer doesn’t stick around to discuss anything else. Most carrier systems treat auto and home as separate product workflows rather than a unified household view, and that structure is costing carriers the bundle discounts they could be offering while locking customers into single-product relationships that are easy to break at the next renewal cycle.
For you as a driver, the math is concrete. Current average full coverage auto insurance runs $2,697 per year, according to Bankrate’s 2026 data. A bundle discount typically runs 5% to 15% depending on the carrier. At 10%, that’s $270 a year off your auto premium, plus a comparable reduction on the homeowners side. If your auto and home policies are currently with separate carriers, you’re almost certainly paying more than the bundle price. Getting a combined quote from your current auto carrier, or your current home carrier, takes one phone call or one online session.
Telematics Is Growing Where It Matters Most
20% of all auto insurance customers are currently enrolled in a usage-based insurance (UBI) or telematics program. The more informative number is where enrollment is highest: 34% among people who recently switched to a new insurer, and 30% among all recent shoppers. Telematics adoption isn’t spreading uniformly across the market. It’s concentrating among the most price-motivated segment, drivers who compared 3.5 quotes and chose the carrier willing to offer a behavioral discount.
44% of those who recently shopped said UBI was an important factor in their process. If you drive fewer than 10,000 miles per year and don’t have aggressive braking habits, telematics programs tend to work in your favor. The monitoring data is used to adjust your rate, and low-risk driving profiles typically see reductions at the first review point, usually 90 to 180 days into enrollment. Read the program terms before opting in: some programs lock your rate for the full policy period based on the initial monitoring window, while others reassess each renewal.
What This Means If You Haven’t Shopped Lately
3.5 quotes is the behavioral norm right now among shoppers. If you got one quote at your last renewal, you’re operating below the current standard in a market where carrier pricing still varies significantly for identical driver profiles. The rate easing in 2025 didn’t create uniformity, it just slowed the pace of increases at different speeds across different carriers and states.
Pull your current declarations page, note your exact coverage limits and deductibles, and use those numbers as the basis for comparison. Changing limits to make quotes look cheaper defeats the exercise. Car insurance rates vary enough between carriers that a genuine apples-to-apples comparison can find meaningful savings. The best car insurance options for your profile depend on your state, driving history, and vehicle, but the JD Power data makes one thing clear: the drivers getting the best outcomes are the ones who put in more than one quote.
