Ticket vs. Accident vs. DUI: What Raises Your Rate Most?

Drivers often lump "tickets and accidents" together as the thing that raises insurance, but a rate manual treats them as very different events with very different prices. An auto insurer does not react to a violation with a general sense that it is bad; it runs the event through a filed schedule that assigns it a specific number of rating points, and then multiplies your base rate by a factor tied to that point count. Two facts fall out of that structure. First, fault matters: an accident that was not your fault can carry zero points and change nothing. Second, severity is ranked: a minor moving violation, an at-fault accident, and a DUI are assigned progressively more points, and the factor climbs steeply with each one.

This page compares those events using real filed numbers rather than averages. We read Mercury Casualty Company's Nevada personal-auto filing and paired its violation-to-points schedule with its points-to-factor table, so you can see exactly how a ticket stacks up against an at-fault accident and a DUI at one carrier. Every figure here is a value we read in the filing on file with the state, not an estimate.

Not every violation is equal, and fault is the first fork

The single most important distinction in the table is fault. Mercury assigns a not-at-fault accident zero points, which means an accident that was genuinely the other driver's fault does not, by itself, move this factor at all. That matches how the coverage works: your insurer expects to recover from the at-fault party, so a crash you did not cause is a weaker predictor of your future claims than one you did. It is also why keeping good documentation after a wreck matters, because the difference between "at-fault" and "not-at-fault" on your record is the difference between 3 points and 0. One important caveat: a not-at-fault accident adds no points, but Mercury files a separate prior-claims factor that a no-fault claim can still raise, so "no points" is not always "no effect."

Once fault is established, the schedule ranks events by severity. A minor moving violation, the category that covers ordinary speeding and similar tickets, is 2 points. An at-fault accident is 3 points, one step worse than a ticket because a claim demonstrates realized loss, not just risky behavior. And the most serious events, reckless driving and driving under the influence, sit at the top at 4 points each. The ranking is intuitive, but the filing makes it precise: it tells you not just that a DUI is worse than a ticket, but exactly how much worse in rating terms.

The first point is the costliest, so a clean record is worth defending

The points-to-factor curve is front-loaded, and the numbers make the case better than any warning. In Mercury's filed Nevada table the factor runs 1.00 at zero points, then jumps to 1.52 at a single point, 1.63 at two, 2.12 at three, and 2.24 at four, continuing on to 2.36 at five and 3.00 at six. The single largest step in the whole schedule is the first one, from a clean record to one point, which alone is about a 52 percent increase. Every point after that adds less in relative terms than that opening jump.

The practical lesson is blunt: the most valuable point on your record is the one you never get. Because the first chargeable event is the steepest single increase, defensive driving that keeps you at zero is worth more than almost any discount you could chase. If you already carry points, the same curve works in your favor over time, because insurer points age off after a set look-back period, and as they drop your factor steps back down the curve it climbed.

The limits of this data

Two honest caveats. First, these are Mercury's filed Nevada values for a first occurrence off a clean record. Points stack when events combine, the factors differ for the property-damage and physical-damage columns, and every other carrier files its own violation-to-points schedule and its own points curve, so do not assume a competitor charges the same 2.24 for a DUI or counts a ticket as 2 points. Second, a filing is a snapshot; Mercury can amend these tables in a later Nevada filing, and other states carry different numbers.

What travels beyond this one filing is the structure and the ranking. The structure is that violations enter your rate as a filed point count that maps to a steep multiplier, with fault as the first fork and severity setting the rest. The ranking, not-at-fault accident cheapest, then minor violation, then at-fault accident, then DUI and reckless driving, holds across most carriers even when the exact numbers differ. Nevada drivers can confirm a carrier's filed rules and their own rights through the Nevada Division of Insurance, which regulates the personal-auto filings these factors come from.