Ask ten commercial auto writers whether they have a telematics program and ten will tell you yes. Ask what it does to premium at renewal and the answers stop lining up.

One of them can move a fleet's rate by 173 points. Another one, by design, cannot raise a rate at all. Both are filed as telematics programs. Both get counted the same way in most competitive summaries.

If you price commercial auto, or you build the briefs for the people who do, that gap is a problem you have probably already run into without naming it.
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The number everyone benchmarks is the one that stopped mattering

Here is how the benchmarking usually goes. You pull a competitor's telematics filing, find the participation credit, write down "5%," and move on to the next carrier.

The trouble is that nearly everyone lands on 5%. State Farm, AmGuard, Progressive, The Hartford, and Sentry all file their first-term participation credit at 5%. GEICO and Cincinnati file theirs at zero. That is the whole range. The entry discount converged some time ago, and it now tells you almost nothing about how a competitor thinks about telematics.

Everything that separates these programs happens at the first renewal, once there is a term of driving data to price against. That number is harder to find, it sits deeper in the filing, and it is where the real strategy shows up.
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Local and small fleets: the same label, very different products

These programs serve last-mile fleets running from distribution centers to storefronts, utility fleets, and small businesses with three to ten vehicles working an intrastate footprint. Most of these operators already run telematics for their own fleet management reasons, so the carrier is buying access to data the insured is generating anyway.

Start with The Hartford. FleetAhead cannot surcharge. The worst filed outcome for a participating fleet is a 5% credit and the best is 15%, which makes it a retention and data acquisition tool. The carrier is paying to get the data flowing and accepting that the pricing comes later.

Cincinnati is running a different play entirely. RideWell Fleet files a range from a 35% credit to a 138% surcharge, which is a full rating plan. GEICO sits nearby at ▼30% to ▲90% with no participation credit at all, and it asks for the widest data set in the group: GPS and trip paths, speed, harsh driving events, engine and sensor data, and driver and administrator identity.

Two details in this segment are easy to miss and worth passing to your product team. Progressive's Snapshot ProView is the only program here that supplies its own device and fleet management software rather than asking the insured to bring one. And Cincinnati files alternative pricing for Azuga hardware that takes the fleet's cost from roughly $25 per vehicle down to $8, which is adoption subsidy handled outside the rate.
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Long haul: the ELD mandate already solved the hard part

Long-haul programs start from a better position. FMCSA rules already require an electronic logging device on most interstate operations, so the data exists and the carrier's job is getting permission rather than driving adoption.

The gap is the 150 air-mile short-haul exemption. Drivers who stay within 150 air miles of their work reporting location and are released within 14 consecutive hours fall outside the mandate. That exemption is exactly why last-mile and local fleets need programs of their own.
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The MGAs: the score is the rating plan

Look at the mechanism column and the difference from everything above becomes clear. There is no telematics credit bolted onto a conventional plan here. The score is the plan, and mileage multiplies base premium rather than adjusting it at the edges. Both file credit-only participation ranges, which reads as an acquisition posture: get the fleet onto the platform first, then let the score do the pricing.

That structure is worth watching right now. Federated Mutual closed its acquisition of HDVI on August 1, 2026. HDVI writes in 26 states through more than 100 agencies, and MGA premium written on its behalf through Spinnaker grew from $41.9 million in 2023 to $72.2 million in 2025. Nirvana passed $100 million in premiums under management in early 2025, roughly double the year before. A mutual now owns a score-based commercial auto rating plan, and whether that plan gets filed more broadly is a reasonable thing to keep an alert on.
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The plumbing decides what you can actually use

One more layer sits underneath all of this, and it constrains program design more than most competitive summaries acknowledge. Carriers rarely touch raw device output. It travels from a telematics provider through an aggregator that normalizes it into something a rating engine can consume, and sometimes through a second aggregator before it arrives.

The aggregator layer is thin: SambaSafety, Cambridge Mobile Telematics, Octo, TruckerCloud, and LexisNexis Risk Solutions. Sentry is a useful example of how much it matters, because it sources exclusively through TruckerCloud rather than integrating with providers directly. When you evaluate a program partner, the aggregator relationship governs what you can ingest more than the provider brand does.

Most providers compile a 1 to 100 safety score on a monthly basis. Fleet managers use it to rank drivers and target coaching, and carriers can use the fleet-wide figure as a behavioral factor. Geotab leads on feature breadth today, including automated driver rewards, automated claims documentation, 12-month contract terms against a 36-month standard, and open marketplace integration.
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What this means for your next benchmark

Three things are worth carrying into the next competitive review.

The participation credit is settled and no longer diagnostic. The ongoing range is not settled, and it currently runs from a program that can only give money back to one filed to surcharge 138%. And the mechanism, whether the data arrives as a telematics factor, a mileage factor, schedule rating, or a proprietary score, determines how much room a competitor's underwriters actually have.

All three live in the filings. Access was never the constraint here, because every number above came out of rate manuals and actuarial memoranda that are already public. The constraint is that the answer to "how does this carrier apply telematics data" sits on exhibit 14 of a 300-page attachment, and pulling it takes twenty minutes per filing. Do that across a dozen competitors and you have spent a day getting to the starting line.

That is the problem we built Insuraviews to solve. Ask for the telematics factor table in a specific filing and get the reconstructed exhibit back, not a page reference to go read yourself.

If you want to see how your competitors are pricing telematics, log in and pull one of the filings above, and as always, let us know what you'd like to see next. Not yet a customer? Schedule a demo and we'll walk through your markets with you.

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