Progressive’s 30-year telematics bet pays off: now #1 US auto insurer

Market transformations sometimes take decades to materialise completely. This is what just happened in the US insurance market.

Progressive Insurance has won the number 1 position in the US personal line auto insurance market. According to S&P Global Market, the carrier wrote more direct premiums in the 12-month period ending 31st March 2026 than any other auto insurer.

The Cleveland, Ohio-based carrier has finally overtaken State Farm, which led the consumer auto insurance market since World War II.

Telematics is the main engine behind Progressive’s fabulous growth

This is in our view a reflection of Progressive’s pioneering lead in telematics and more broadly, digital insurance. The company has constantly taken measured risks to move towards a fairer and more efficient way to price and deliver insurance. Thanks to 30 years of continuous efforts, more than half of the company’s policyholders are now UBI customers, making it the most advanced in America.

In December 2025, we ranked the carrier as the global leader in our ranking of Usage-Based Insurers, ahead of Italian company Unipol and US competitor Allstate.

Progressive has revolutionised the US personal UBI market with a succession of ground-breaking innovations:
• It trialled telematics insurance with a black box, Autograph, in 1996
• With TripSense, it was the first US carrier to launch « Usage-Based Insurance » (UBI) commercially in 2004, using an OBD (on-board diagnostics) dongle
• In 2014, with Snapshot, it was the first to launch the roll-over device model in telematics, reducing thereby the unit cost of collecting data and overcoming privacy issues of some customers
• In 2014, it was the first to introduce surcharges for unsafe drivers, in addition to the discounts that were already applied to the safe drivers
• In 2016, it was slightly behind State Farm in launching a smartphone Snapshot UBI app
• In 2022, it offered its customers the choice for Snapshot to start continuous monitoring, giving the possibility of improving their discounts
• In 2023, it was also one of the first to migrate the Snapshot UBI programme to its main corporate app
• In 2023, it also introduced automatic accident response, based on the app’s detection of a crash, for all of its customers – fast becoming the largest eFNOL programme in the world

To help the global insurance industry understand the reasons by Progressive’s phenomenal lead gained with telematics, we offer our readers our in-depth profile of Progressive.

This analysis is an abstract of the UBI Global Study, the most comprehensive assessment & forecast of the world’s connected insurance market.

To download the 16-slide profile of Progressive Insurance, please fill the form below.