By Shaina Cole | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice
Last November, Governor Jared Polis stood before cameras and announced a Roadmap to Reduce Auto Insurance Premiums. Colorado had the fifth-highest auto insurance rates in the nation. His administration had a plan. Eight months later, the state has hit most of its targets — and Colorado is still fifth.
Polis built the roadmap around enforcement, education and infrastructure — plus legislation he had already signed. What it doesn’t do is ask the legislature for anything new. There would be a public dashboard so Coloradans could watch it happen. Most targets were met. The ranking hasn’t moved.
What the roadmap doesn’t address is a separate question, one that insurance industry analysts say explains why Colorado pays more than its neighbors.
The problem is real
According to Insure.com, Colorado is the fifth most expensive state in the country for full coverage car insurance, at $3,222 a year, nearly 28 percent above the national average. Between 2020 and 2025, premiums jumped 57 percent, the fourth-largest increase of any state, according to U.S. News & World Report.
When Polis launched the roadmap in November, he set a target: get from fifth most expensive to tenth by June 30, 2027. Eight months in, the roadmap’s five focus areas still don’t include three statutes that insurance industry analysts say are compounding the problem regardless of how much theft falls or how many cameras go up.
What the roadmap doesn’t mention
The roadmap’s five focus areas are road safety, auto theft, uninsured motorists, repair costs, and severe weather. Nothing in the press release asks the legislature to act. None of the five areas touch the three Colorado laws that insurance industry analysts say are pushing premiums above what neighboring states pay.
Mark Hillman, executive director of the Colorado Civil Justice League, laid them out in a January piece on the organization’s website.
The first is a 2008 law, House Bill 1407, that created a claim, separate from common-law bad faith, letting vendors and auto body shops sue an insurer for unreasonably delaying or denying benefits, not just policyholders, with a penalty of twice the covered benefit plus attorney fees and court costs. Under that exposure, Hillman argues, insurers often settle claims they might otherwise contest.
The second is Colorado’s prejudgment interest rate: under C.R.S. § 13-21-101, personal injury plaintiffs collect 9 percent annual interest, running from the date of the injury and compounding each year from the date the suit is filed. The rate has not changed since 1975. Hillman argues it rewards delay in settlement.
Third is what the industry calls phantom damages: Colorado juries hear the original billed amount for medical treatment, not the lower amount insurance actually paid. Hillman writes that the billed amount is sometimes two, three or four times the final payment.
Hillman isn’t alone.
In a 2023 analysis, the Rocky Mountain Insurance Information Association, the industry group whose members write policies in Colorado, identified three of the same pressure points: the 9 percent prejudgment interest rate it says creates incentive to file lawsuits rather than settle; vendor lawsuit exposure, which it calls “astronomical litigation costs” passed on to consumers; and phantom damages, which it says can result in jury awards that “result in a windfall to the plaintiff at the cost of the insurance consuming public.”
The National Association of Insurance Commissioners tracks what a policy carrying liability, collision and comprehensive coverage costs per insured vehicle, built from what insurers file with regulators rather than from quoted rates. By that measure, Colorado’s 2023 premium was $1,655. Wyoming’s was $1,180. Colorado paid 40 percent more.
Wyoming borders Colorado, shares its mountain climate, and has lower vehicle theft rates. Hillman’s argument is that hail and car thieves don’t account for the full gap.
None of those three laws appears in the governor’s roadmap, his press release, or the dashboard milestones.
Theft is down. Rates aren’t.
Colorado was the worst state in the nation for vehicle theft per capita in 2021 and 2022. The rate peaked at 713 stolen vehicles per 100,000 residents in 2022.
A new analysis by the Common Sense Institute, working from FBI data, puts the 2022 peak at 47,248 thefts. Measured per 1,000 registered vehicles, Colorado’s rate that year ran more than 3.6 times the national average.
That same CSI analysis estimates that elevated theft levels cost Colorado households about $201 million more per year in premiums, roughly $84 per household.
Thefts fell 34 percent in 2025 compared to 2024. Per-capita thefts dropped to 271 per 100,000, below the 358 Colorado posted in 2019 before the surge.
SB23-097, signed in 2023, scrapped the old penalty structure. Before it passed, theft charges were tied to the value of the stolen vehicle. Fixed felony tiers replaced the old value-based scale.
Cale Gould of the Colorado Auto Theft Prevention Authority told the Denver Gazette the new law, combined with increased funding and enforcement focus, has been key in bringing theft down. “It wasn’t one thing that changed, but collectively everything,” he said. Prosecutions bear that out: CATPA-funded auto theft prosecution activities hit 3,767 against a dashboard target of 1,900.
The dashboard runs its own count. It tracks auto thefts against a baseline of 352 per 100,000, sets a target of 253 by June 30, 2027, and shows the current rate at 229.83 — already below the mark. Colorado’s rate is still sixth worst nationally.
The theft problem is improving. It isn’t solved. And premiums haven’t moved with it.
The uninsured rate and what the roadmap did about it
An estimated 19.7 percent of Colorado drivers had no insurance in 2023, ninth-highest in the nation, according to the Insurance Research Council. The national average that year was 15.4 percent.
Insurance Commissioner Michael Conway acknowledged the connection in the roadmap’s own press release. “We know that many Coloradans are struggling with the cost of auto insurance, and high costs contribute to our uninsured motorist rate,” Conway said. “We are looking at all possible solutions to bring costs down and our insured rate up.”
The roadmap’s uninsured-driver strategy had two measurable targets.
The dashboard shows each was met: the state generated 2,425 impressions through a media and social media campaign against a target of 1,500, and connected 67 law enforcement agencies to a database that lets officers check insurance status in real time, against a target of 50. Whether those efforts moved the uninsured rate isn’t measurable yet.
The Insurance Research Council’s data runs only through 2023, before either milestone was in place.
What’s next
The roadmap’s overarching goal has a firm deadline of June 30, 2027, about 11 months away.
Most of the dashboard’s intermediate milestones came due last month. Twelve were met. Eight were not.
The widest gap is in road safety. The roadmap’s traffic safety goal aims to cut fatalities and serious injuries 13.5 percent below fiscal 2023 levels. The governor’s dashboard shows them running 5.5 percent above it in November 2025.
That was one of eight misses. The state held eight DUI checkpoints against a target of 12. Impaired driving media impressions, which the state set out to raise from 3 billion to 3.66 billion, fell to 1.6 billion. High-visibility impaired driving enforcement hours reached 9,644 against a target of 26,908. Vulnerable roadway user safety projects delivered $9.6 million against a $13 million target. DUI enforcement public relations campaigns reached 12 against a target of 15. Emergency alerting trainings reached nine against a target of 10. The goal of a 20 percent theft reduction in 10 high-risk areas reached eight.
Six of the eight are road safety and impaired driving.
The dashboard describes the target as moving Colorado from fifth to tenth for “average comprehensive coverage premiums.” A tooltip on the same chart says the baseline comes from Bankrate.com, a consumer comparison site, using rates quoted on September 8, 2025 for a 40-year-old driver with a clean record and good credit.
Bankrate’s methodology fills in the rest. The figure models a driver of a 2023 Toyota Camry with a five-day commute, and applies bundling and paperless billing discounts. It is what one hypothetical Coloradan would be quoted, not what Coloradans pay.
On that page, archived the day the state used it, Colorado ranked fifth at $3,233 a year, 21 percent above a national average of $2,671. That is the fifth place on the governor’s chart.
Bankrate no longer publishes it. As of July 2026, the site’s car insurance rankings are not reachable from its navigation, and the page the state cited redirects to Bankrate’s home page. RMV could locate the state’s baseline only in the Internet Archive.
Colorado’s ranking can move on Bankrate’s scale without a single Colorado premium changing.
The state’s own Division of Insurance collects premium filings from every insurer operating in Colorado and reports them to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. The dashboard isn’t using that data.
The press release that launched the roadmap promised Coloradans regular updates on the state’s progress and pointed them to the dashboard.
RMV asked the Division of Insurance which measure the goal tracks, why the benchmark comes from a commercial rate-quote site rather than state filings, and where the public can see the current reading. The Division did not respond before publication.
Polis built his dashboard to show progress. It does show progress on the goals he set. What it can’t answer is whether those were the right goals to move the ranking or lower insurance premiums.
RMV asked the Governor’s Office whether the administration has any plans to pursue legislative changes to the three statutes insurance analysts identify as cost drivers. The Governor’s Office did not respond before publication.