Yes, new insurance companies will look at your five-year claims history. It’s very important to be open with them about claims as well as tickets.
Yes, a new insurance company will look at your five-year claims history, and the smartest thing you can do is be open about it before they pull the report themselves. Hicks’s short answer above lays it out plainly, but it is worth understanding what that lookback actually consists of, why disclosure protects you, and how tickets factor into the picture alongside accidents and property losses.
When you apply with a new carrier, they are not relying on what you tell them. They are running reports. On the auto side that means an MVR (your motor vehicle record from the state) and a CLUE auto report (a five-year history of auto claims reported under your name or address). On the home side, they pull a CLUE property report tied to the address and to you personally. Some carriers also pull a credit-based insurance score. None of this is hidden — it is standard practice for almost every company we work with, and the information goes back about five years. The takeaway is simple: there is no real way to hide a claim from a new carrier, so the only question is whether you tell them yourself or let them find it. If you want a clearer picture of how those claims affect your ability to switch, that is worth a separate read.
Honesty on the application is not just an ethics issue — it is a pricing issue. Carriers re-rate or cancel policies when they discover undisclosed claims, and the cost of getting caught is always higher than the cost of being upfront.
Tickets matter just as much as claims for auto pricing. Speeding citations, reckless-driving charges, and at-fault accidents all show up on the MVR. If you have a ticket that has not yet appeared on your record, mention it — we can usually still place the policy correctly, but only if we know. The same applies to claims that are still pending. Filing while a claim is open is a separate conversation, and we cover that under whether you can switch in the middle of a claim. Before you start any of this, you can get the ball rolling with a personal insurance quote and we will pull everything together from there.
We hear this story often: a customer leaves off a small ticket or a claim under their deductible, hoping the new carrier will not notice. The carrier pulls the report sixty days later, finds it, and re-rates the policy at a higher premium — or non-renews. That is a much worse outcome than just placing the policy correctly the first time. As an independent agency, we have access to many carriers, and each one weighs claims and tickets differently. A history that one company will not touch might be perfectly fine at another. Our job is to match your real history to the carrier most willing to work with it, but we can only do that if we know what we are working with. The same logic applies on the business side — if you have commercial losses, we will look at your loss runs together so we can place you correctly with our commercial insurance markets. To start that process, use our commercial insurance quote form and mention any open or recent claims when you do.
To make the review go smoothly, have these things in hand: your current declarations page, the dates and types of any claims in the last five years, copies of any tickets, and any letters from your current carrier about renewals or rate changes. The more accurate the picture you give us, the more accurate the quote will be — and the less likely you are to see a surprise re-rate down the road. If you want to understand how the rest of the switching process works once we have that information, our guide on switching without missing anything walks through the steps.
Give us a call today and we can help.
Website Made By Aelieve Digital Marketing
