Property damage paid claim frequency, the category that includes the vehicle damage repaired at collision shops, fell 12.6% over the past two years, according to an analysis CCC Intelligent Solutions published Aug. 6. Over the same period, bodily injury claim frequency rose 4%, and bodily injury claims overtook physical damage claims in total dollars paid for the first time, accounting for 52.3% of combined dollars paid across both categories in 2025, up from 44.4% in 2022.
The 7.9 percentage point shift in bodily injury's dollar share occurred over three years, a pace CCC's analysis describes as roughly five times faster than the longer-term rate of change. Bodily injury claims accounted for approximately 45% of combined dollars paid across both categories 15 years ago, reaching about 53% by 2025.
Most of that increase occurred between 2022 and 2025, when bodily injury's share of dollars paid grew by an average of approximately 2.6 percentage points per year, compared with roughly half a percentage point annually over the longer historical period. The average personal auto bodily injury claim payout increased 21% over the same two-year period.
Decline tied to claims behavior, not fewer accidents
Asked whether fewer accidents or more consumers choosing not to file claims is behind the frequency decline, Erik Bahnsen, CCC's director of casualty industry analytics, pointed to claims economics rather than a drop in crashes, in an interview with Autobody News.
Policyholders across collision, comprehensive, and self-pay liability claims may face "a disincentive to file a claim if there’s worry about implications on policy premiums," he said. Bodily injury claims, by contrast, can carry a financial incentive to file, which Bahnsen said explains why "we have relative frequency going the opposite direction" between the two claim types."
Bahnsen said the decline has recently leveled off. "The biggest, most aggressive policy premium increases came in 2023 and 2024. Those have largely flattened out to zero as of 2026, so on the back of that, we've seen the paid claim frequency decreases slowing," he said.
He added that broader economic pressures, including tariff policy and oil price volatility tied to geopolitical instability, could push paid claim frequency in either direction going forward, calling the outlook "very difficult to predict."
Reflecting on the broader data set, Bahnsen described the current trends as unusual over his career. "... I'm going back 20 years in the insurance casualty sector, and we haven’t before seen some of the numbers we've seen," he said, citing the bodily injury claim ratio, now roughly one in four property damage claims, compared with less than one in five for most of that period.
Generative AI cited as a contributing factor
CCC's analysis attributes the broader bodily injury shift to a convergence of factors, including increasing numbers of uninsured and underinsured motorists, healthcare inflation, changing treatment patterns, greater attorney involvement, rising social inflation, more sophisticated claim narratives, and the introduction of generative AI technology.
Bahnsen described how generative AI has changed the process of preparing a bodily injury claim. Assembling a demand package once involved significant manual work that, depending on a case's severity or complexity, "could take days," he said. "But with generative AI, what used to take days ... condenses down to hours." He attributed the shift partly to how far behind the personal injury and broader legal industries had lagged on technology adoption before AI tools arrived.
CCC cited a Thomson Reuters survey conducted in 2026 that found 41% of law firms reported using generative AI, up from 28% in 2025.
Bahnsen said carriers are adopting AI as well, though more cautiously than plaintiff firms, using a mix of homegrown tools and outside vendor solutions. Insurers face greater regulatory exposure than personal injury firms when deploying AI, he said, which has made adoption within the insurance world "more conservative in general.”
Broader industry context
A separate May 2026 report from LexisNexis Risk Solutions found bodily injury costs rose from less than 20% of total claims dollars in 2022 to more than 26% in 2025, alongside a 57% increase in distracted driving violations since 2022.
CCC's analysis comes as state regulators separately examine how insurers use AI to make claims decisions. A 12-state pilot reviewing insurer AI use in total loss and claims payout determinations began in March 2026 and is scheduled to run through September.
