How Much Do Driving Record Points Raise Your Rate?

Of all the things that move an auto-insurance premium, your driving record is among the ones you most directly control, and among the ones insurers weight most heavily. Carriers do not price your record with a vague sense that accidents are bad; they translate it into a specific, filed number. Progressive assigns each policy a driving-record point count under its own rules, and then multiplies the base rate by a factor tied to that point count. A factor of 1.00 is the clean-record baseline; every point above zero pushes the factor higher, and the increases are steep.

This page walks through the exact filed factors, what actually earns a point, why the first point costs so much, and what you can do about a record that already carries points. Every number here is a real value we read in Progressive's Arizona rate manual on file with the state, not an estimate or a national average.

What actually counts as a driving-record point

This is the most misunderstood part, so it deserves care. The points in this table are Progressive's own filed point count, not your state DMV license points. The two are related but not the same. A state motor-vehicle department assigns license points under its own schedule for the purpose of suspending licenses. An insurer assigns rating points under the rules it files with the state, for the purpose of pricing. A driver can carry insurer points without any active DMV points, and the counts rarely match one-for-one.

In broad terms, an insurer's driving-record points come from chargeable events on your motor-vehicle and claims history, principally at-fault accidents and moving violations such as speeding, and the more serious or more recent the event, the more it tends to weigh. The precise assignment of points to specific events is set in the carrier's rules, which is why two drivers with the same ticket can land on different point counts depending on the rest of their record. What the table above tells you with certainty is the price of the result: whatever combination of events lands you at three points, the filed bodily-injury factor for three points is 1.34.

The full curve, point by point

Here is the complete set of confirmed filed bodily-injury factors from Progressive's Arizona Driving Record Points Factor Table, each paired with its real point count:

• 0 points (clean record): factor 1.00, the baseline.
• 1 point: factor 1.20, a 20 percent increase off clean.
• 2 points: factor 1.26.
• 3 points: factor 1.34.
• 4 points: factor 1.52, roughly half again above baseline.
• 5 points: factor 1.71.
• 6 points: factor 1.80, about 80 percent above a clean record.

Read the ends against each other. The worst confirmed factor, 1.80, divided by the clean-record 1.00, means the most heavily pointed driver in this set pays about 1.8 times as much on the bodily-injury portion of the rate as an identical clean-record driver. On a bodily-injury component that would otherwise be 600 dollars, that is the difference between 600 and 1,080 dollars, an illustrative figure to show the ratio, not a Progressive rate.

How long points stay and how tenure interacts

Points are not permanent. Insurer rating points generally age off after a set period once the underlying event passes its look-back window, which means a record improves on its own if no new chargeable events are added. That is why the single most reliable way to lower a pointed rate is often simply time plus clean driving: as older events fall out of the look-back, the point count drops and the factor steps back down the same curve it climbed.

The filed table also carries a company-tenure dimension alongside points, but within this classification the points factors are stable across the tenure bands we read, so the point count itself is the dominant lever. In other words, the price of a given point count does not soften just because you have been with the carrier longer; what changes it is the record itself. That puts the control back where drivers can act on it, on avoiding new events and letting old ones age off.

The limits of this data

Two honest caveats. First, these are Progressive's filed Arizona values for one rating classification, the bodily-injury column at the base company-tenure band. The property-damage column runs slightly lower at each step, other coverages carry their own columns, and every other carrier files its own point schedule and its own factors, so do not assume a competitor charges the same 1.80 at six points, or counts points the same way. Second, a filing is a snapshot; Progressive can amend these factors in a later Arizona filing, and other states carry different numbers.

What travels beyond this one filing is the structure and the lesson. The structure is that driving-record points enter your rate as a filed multiplier that climbs steeply, with the first point the costliest single step. The lesson is that a clean record is one of the most valuable and controllable assets in your rate. Because personal-auto rate manuals are public records governed by Arizona Revised Statutes Title 20, you never have to guess at the price of a point; you can read it, as we did here.