New Progressive discounts may lower your car insurance bill

Progressive Insurance has some changes coming to their car insurance policies that may lower your car insurance bill. Drivers will now be rated by averaging the driver risk across all the vehicles on your policy rather than on a specific vehicle. The changes include:

• Household Averaging Driver Assignment – This change means drivers are averaged across your vehicles instead of rating a specific driver on a specific vehicle. Occassional driver status will be taken into consideration when factoring these rates.
• Occasional Operators – Drivers age 25 or less who drive your vehicles less than 50 percent of the time will get a lower rate as long as they are not rated as a principal operator on any vehicle on your car insurance policy.
• Minor Child Discount – Drivers on your policy for at least 12 months who are 19 years or younger and children of the named insured will receive this discount.
• Distant Student Discount – Students who live at a school more than 100 miles from home and do not have regular access to your insured vehicles will get this discount.

Progressive is making some significant changes in their car insurance rates with these discounts, so to prevent major rate adjustments at a single renewal, Progressive will enact a rate stability program which applies the discounts and policy changes over a period of time rather than at the same policy renewal.

You may not qualify for all the discounts, but the driver averaging feature may impact your car insurance rates if you own multiple vehicles or have multiple drivers. Other companies have gradually been adopting driver averaging, and Progressive is following suit with the Household Averaging feature.