Maryland law requires drivers to have insurance. If you are driving without insurance, you risk fines, fees, and possibly jail. Yet Maryland’s insurance is some of the most expensive in the country.

While other states have taken steps to lower the cost of insurance, Maryland has failed to make any changes even though working people saw their rates increase every year since 2020 – including 29% in 2022 and 24.3% in 2024.

With your help, we may be able to change this same tired story. Please send an email to Marie Grant, Commissioner of the Maryland Insurance Administration, and members of the Work Group on Auto Insurance Affordability today!

Our Executive Director was appointed to a work group to look at the affordability of auto insurance in Maryland. The work group is made up of highly paid corporate lobbyists for the insurance industry–and our ED.

Alone, her voice and recommendations can be ignored, but with your help, we have a chance to make a change.

Economic Action Maryland Fund is pushing for four key recommendations to lower the cost of insurance:

• Create a low-cost auto insurance plan. Our required limited liability insurance is some of the most expensive in the country. California established a ‘skinny insurance policy’ that covered low-income drivers who had not had an accident. The average cost of insurance in this program is $400 per year. It does not cost the state any money and 93% of drivers in the program were uninsured before enrolling.
• Eliminate the use of credit to rate auto insurance. The use of credit is used to predict whether a driver will file a claim, not whether they are a risky driver. Having poor or moderate credit will increase your auto insurance rate by 40%. Low-income drivers and drivers in Black and Brown communities tend to have lower credit scores. In effect, using credit has a disparate impact on Black and Brown drivers as well as low-wage workers. Maryland bans ratings based on race or income but credit serves as a proxy with similar outcomes. Several states either prohibit the use of credit to rate auto insurance, or proscribe what factors insurers can use to rate policies and do not include credit
• Reduce the use of zipcodes to rate auto insurance. Our study with the Consumer Federation of America found that zip codes that have a majority African American population pay significantly higher premiums compared to zip codes where the majority of the population is white. Several states have either drawn territories more broadly than at a zipcode level in order to smooth disparities or weighted this factor in a way that mitigates some of its harm.
• Stop paying for high wages of corporate CEOs. While Maryland drivers were struggling to pay rising auto insurance costs, insurance companies were giving their CEOs $1 million dollar raises and charging us for these millionaires to make more. Maryland pays for CEO salaries and bonuses, lobbying costs for corporate lobbyists to block progress, and attorneys to fight against discrimination claims. Several states have taken action to limit the ability for these costs to be passed onto drivers.

Being poor isn’t a crime, but Maryland’s insurance laws punish working people who can’t keep up with high rates which insurance companies use to lobby against progress and give CEOs millions more.

Take action to make insurance affordable!

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