Governor Hochul Rallies with Leaders and Advocates to Highlight Auto Insurance Reform Proposals as Support Grows

New Yorkers pay some of the highest car insurance rates in the nation — totaling just more than $4,000 annually on average, nearly $1,500 above the national average. Car insurance rates are driven up by a combination of fraud, litigation, legal loopholes, and enforcement gaps, with staged crashes and associated insurance fraud inflating everyone’s premiums by as much as $300 per year on average, according to some estimates.

Increasingly sophisticated actors stage elaborate accidents, designed to allow for “jackpot” payouts from insurance companies or jury awards, and these scams are becoming more prevalent. In 2023, there were 1,729 staged crashes in New York State, which ranks second highest in the nation for incidents of staged fraud. In total, insurance carriers reported 43,811 incidents of suspected motor vehicle insurance fraud to the New York State Department of Financial Services (DFS) Insurance Frauds Bureau in 2025. This is up from 24,238 incidents of suspected motor vehicle insurance fraud from 2020, an 80 percent increase in five years.