The most common car insurance claims and their cost

ISO / III 2024 • Collision • Comprehensive • Liability

Car insurance claims are not one pile of wrecks. They are four different products fighting four different bills. Collision is the fender you folded. Comprehensive is hail, theft, a deer, a rock in the windshield. Property-damage liability is the other person’s car. Bodily-injury liability is the hospital. The most common files are not the most expensive. That mismatch is why a $500 deductible argument over a bumper can hide a $30,000 injury sitting in the same intersection.

The cleanest national snapshot still comes from ISO data published by the Insurance Information Institute for calendar year 2024. Those are average paid claim severities — what insurers actually paid on closed files — plus how often each coverage produced a claim per 100 insured car-years. Your Texas file will not equal the average. Sensors, ADAS calibration, pickup beds, and DFW hail will shove you off the mean. The averages still tell you which drawer the money lives in.

The 2024 scoreboard

Read frequency and severity together. Collision happens often and costs mid four figures. Injury happens seldom and costs five. Comprehensive happens almost as often as collision and looks inexpensive until you split glass from stolen trucks. CCC Intelligent Solutions’ 2026 Crash Course put the 2025 average total cost of repair on repairable vehicles around $4,818, with newer cars (six years and under) near $5,721. Parts, labor, and calibration — not the size of the dent — are why last decade’s “it was only a scratch” is this decade’s four-grand estimate.

Collision: the everyday wreck

Collision is first-party coverage on your own vehicle after you hit something, or something hits you, in a crash. Fault does not have to be yours for the chapter to pay. The deductible does. ISO’s 2024 average paid collision claim was $5,489, with about 4.2% of collision policyholders generating a claim that year.

That average mixes $1,200 bumper covers with $28,000 total losses. A modern compact with radar in the grille is not a 2008 Civic. Recalibrating cameras after a windshield or bumper swap is a line item now, not a courtesy. If the repair approaches actual cash value, the carrier totals the car and pays ACV minus deductible and minus the salvage value they keep. That settlement math is in the Texas claim process and in comprehensive vs. collision.

At-fault collision is also the claim that follows you on the next three to five renewals. Industry quote studies often show a 25–50% premium jump after one at-fault accident, with the exact hit depending on the carrier. A $1,800 repair against a $1,000 deductible is sometimes cheaper as cash than as a rated event. A $9,000 repair is not a debate. Run the napkin: repair minus deductible versus years of surcharge. Then file or don’t.

Comprehensive: one coverage, five different bills

Comprehensive — other-than-collision — pays theft, vandalism, fire, flood, falling objects, animals, and weather, including hail. ISO’s 2024 average paid comprehensive claim was only $2,306, with frequency near 4%. That number is a blend. Highway Loss Data Institute work on recent model years is the decoder: glass made about 70% of comprehensive claims but only about 20% of the paid dollars. Theft was a sliver of claim count and a much larger sliver of money. Average glass severity in that HLDI slice sat near $663. Average theft severity sat near $14,000.

So “comprehensive claims are cheap” is true if you mean windshield chips. It is false if you mean a stolen F-150 or a DFW hail cell.

Glass

Rock chip, cracked windshield, side glass from a break-in. Many Texas policies waive or shrink the deductible for glass repair (not always for replacement). A $400 windshield against a $1,000 comprehensive deductible is a cash job unless the form treats glass differently. Ask before you assume the chip is “free.”

Hail

Texas specialty. Industry write-ups put a typical auto hail claim around $4,000 to $5,000 — closer to a collision file than to the blended comprehensive average. Hood, roof, and trunk can total a car when panel replacement plus paint exceeds ACV. Comprehensive pays it. Liability does not. Filing rules, photos, and “should I claim this dent” live in hail on Texas home and auto policies. Comprehensive claims from weather often move rates less than at-fault wrecks, but they still sit on the loss history. Cosmetic dings under the deductible are not a claim. A roof that looks like a golf ball is.

Theft

NICB counted a sharp drop in U.S. vehicle thefts into 2025 after the Kia/Hyundai wave cooled — on the order of a 20%+ year-over-year decline in recent NICB tallies — and comprehensive theft volume followed. The average theft check is still a total-loss number, not a bumper number. Catalytic-converter theft may be a partial comprehensive claim. A whole pickup is ACV. Park it like someone wants it.

Animals

A deer is comprehensive, not collision, on a standard personal auto policy. That surprises people who think “I hit it, so it’s collision.” You hit an animal; the form files it under OTC. Severity tracks the vehicle: plastic cover versus aluminum body versus a motorcycle. Rural Texas corridors in fall are not theoretical.

Vandalism, flood, fire

Keyed doors and broken mirrors are comprehensive. Flood is comprehensive on the auto form if you bought the chapter — it is still excluded on the homeowners form, which is a different contract. Fire follows the same OTC path unless the investigation says otherwise.

Property-damage liability: the other guy’s car

When you cause the wreck, your PD limit pays their vehicle and other property. ISO 2024 average paid PD claim: $6,770. Frequency: about 2.5% of liability policies. Texas statutory minimum PD is $25,000. The average file still fits. A new Tahoe plus a light pole does not. Hit two cars in a chain and you are sharing one $25,000 bucket. That is why 30/60/25 is a license to drive, not a settlement strategy. The thin-policy problem is unpacked in liability-only cost and coverage and in how limits work.

PD does not fix your car. Collision does. Mixing those two at the scene — “just go through my liability” when you also need your own bumper repaired — is how files stall.

Bodily injury: rare, then enormous

ISO 2024 average paid BI liability claim: $28,278. Frequency: 0.80 per 100 insured car-years — fewer than one policy in a hundred that year. CCC and LexisNexis trend work into 2025 pointed still higher: third-party injury outcomes in the high $20,000s to around $29,000 per injured person in some 2025 cuts, with paid BI severity up on the order of 10% in a single recent year. Medical inflation, attorney involvement, and longer treatment are the engine. Frequency can fall while severity eats the combined ratio. That is the last few years in one sentence.

Texas minimum BI is $30,000 per person / $60,000 per accident. The national average paid claim is already hugging that per-person cap. One person with surgery is not a $30,000 story. Excess above the limit is personal assets, wages, and a possible judgment. UM/UIM is the chapter that pays you when the at-fault driver brought 30/60/25 to a $90,000 injury. PIP pays your medical and wage loss on a no-fault basis up to the PIP limit you bought. Neither is “extra collision.”

National Safety Council economic-cost scales still run from a few thousand dollars for a no-visible-injury crash into six figures for a disabling injury and seven for a fatality. Insurance averages sit below those social-cost totals because policies cap what they will pay. The gap is the part that lands on households.

What a “common claim” costs you besides the check

The paid claim is not the household cost.

• Deductible. $500 or $1,000 off the first-party check, immediately.
• Rate effect. At-fault collision and BI tend to reprice you for years. Weather comprehensive often reprices less, not zero.
• Diminished value. A repaired late-model car can be worth less than an unhit twin. First-party policies in Texas do not always volunteer that check.
• Rental. Transportation expense on many forms is a small daily cap unless you bought a real rental endorsement.
• Time. Two weeks without a car is not in the ISO severity table.

If the estimate is under or barely over the deductible, paying cash is often the cheaper three-year decision. If the car is undrivable or the other party is injured, you are past that decision. File, document, and read the next letter. When a carrier stalls, the path is in how to file a TDI complaint.

How to use the numbers without worshipping them

Set collision and comprehensive deductibles you can write a check for this afternoon. If $1,000 would bounce, you bought the wrong deductible. Keep liability above 30/60/25 if a $28,000 average BI claim would empty you. Keep comprehensive on a financed car and on any car you could not replace after a Texas hail week. Photograph the car twice a year so a prior-damage argument does not eat half the estimate.

Frequency says you are more likely to chip a windshield or crease a bumper than to injure someone. Severity says the injury file is the one that changes a life. Buy coverage for both sentences. The ISO table is a map of which sentence is which.

Most claims are collision and comprehensive nickels. Most of the money, when it leaves the building, is injury. Know which claim you are filing before you argue about a deductible. The $2,300 comprehensive average will not pay a stolen truck, and the $5,500 collision average will not pay a lumbar fusion. Those are different products. Price them that way.