How Nationwide Rates Auto Insurance

Nationwide is a large, long-established auto insurer, and like every carrier it prices policies from a filed, regulator-approved rate manual rather than a gut feel. We pulled its Arizona personal-auto filing and read the factors directly; below is how several of its most consequential levers actually move a price, every number transcribed from the filing and cited to it.

This one works from the primary document instead of brand impressions. The filing shows exactly which characteristics Nationwide rewards - safety equipment, students who leave the car at home, older vehicles for physical-damage coverage - and by how much, so you can see the mechanics rather than guess from a single quoted price.

Airbags earn a real discount

Nationwide files a Passive Occupant Restraint Discount that rewards factory safety equipment on the physical-damage and injury coverages. A vehicle with full airbags carries a 0.700 factor - about 30 percent off - while driver-side airbags only earn a smaller 0.800, and a passive seat belt alone sits at the 1.000 baseline. It is one of the cleaner safety-equipment credits in the filings we have read, and because nearly every modern car has full airbags, most Nationwide policyholders receive it automatically. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety documents how occupant-protection equipment reduces injury severity, which is the risk difference a credit like this reflects.

Model year swings collision cost dramatically

The steepest lever in the filing is the model-year factor on collision coverage. A current-year (2025) vehicle sits at the 1.000 baseline, but the factor falls fast with age: about 0.657 for a 2015 model, 0.266 for a 2005 model, and as low as 0.090 for a 1990-or-older vehicle. That is not a small adjustment - the collision premium on a very old car can be under a tenth of what the same coverage costs on a new one, because collision pays to repair or replace the vehicle and an old car is worth far less. It is the clearest illustration on this site of why physical-damage coverage gets cheaper as a car ages, and why dropping collision entirely can make sense once a vehicle's value falls low enough. See our car value guide for the general principle.

SmartRide and the rest of the rate

Nationwide's filing also includes SmartRide, its usage-based telematics program that can lower a rate for measured safe driving, alongside the standard chain of driver, vehicle, coverage, and territory factors. As the National Association of Insurance Commissioners notes, telematics and safety-equipment credits are increasingly part of how carriers price risk, and Nationwide files both. The levers we highlighted - airbags, student-away, and model year - are simply the cleanest and most controllable ones a shopper can see and act on. The regulator overseeing these filings is the Arizona Department of Insurance and Financial Institutions.

What the filing does and does not settle

It is worth being clear about the scope of these factors, because a rate manual is deep and this page highlights the levers a shopper can actually see and use. The airbag, student-away, and model-year factors we quoted are filed, verbatim numbers from Nationwide's Arizona pages, and they answer specific, common questions well. What they do not do is produce your premium on their own: your rate also runs through driver-classification factors for age and experience, the vehicle-symbol factor for your specific car, coverage and deductible selections, tier placement, territory, and any telematics result from SmartRide - each a filed factor in its own right. Those other factors are why two drivers with identical airbags and the same model year can still pay very different premiums.

That is also why we treat a carrier page as a map of a carrier's tendencies rather than a personalized quote. The honest use of this data is to understand where Nationwide is structurally strong - safety-equipped and older vehicles for physical damage, households with a student away, drivers willing to try usage-based SmartRide - and then to test whether that translates into a competitive price for your exact profile by running a real quote. A filing tells you how a company thinks about risk; only a quote tells you what it will charge you. Reading both, in that order, is how you shop deliberately instead of guessing from a brand name or a single advertised rate.

The limits of this filed data

Two honest caveats. First, these are Nationwide's Arizona filed values for its General Insurance Company entity; the group files different numbers in every state and across its affiliated companies, so do not read the Arizona factors as national. Second, these are filed rating relativities, not quotes: they show how a factor moves a price relative to the base, but your actual premium depends on the base rates and every other factor in your profile. We do not estimate premiums or present a single filed factor as a market average, and anyone can verify a figure by reading the filing, which is what we did. When Nationwide amends it, the honest move is to re-transcribe the new numbers.