How citations work on this page: Every superscript number (e.g., 1) links to the Primary Source Directory at the bottom of this page, where you'll find the direct URL to the official federal statute, state regulator page, or court ruling behind the claim. Sources labeled “Secondary” are trade or consumer references used for context, not as the primary factual authority.
Three Overlapping Timelines, Not One
The consumer assumption is that an accident “falls off” insurance the way a late payment falls off a credit report — on one fixed date, after which it is simply gone. Auto insurance does not work that way. An accident lives inside three separate systems at once, and each system purges, stops penalizing, or reclassifies the event on its own independent schedule.
The first system is the national claims-history database — primarily C.L.U.E. and A-PLUS — which any insurer can pull when you apply for a new policy. The second is your state Motor Vehicle Report, maintained by the DMV and focused on citations and license points rather than claims. The third, and the one that actually determines your bill, is the carrier's own lookback window — the specific number of years its pricing algorithm looks backward when deciding whether to apply a surcharge. An accident can vanish from the third system years before it vanishes from the first.
The C.L.U.E. and A-PLUS Databases
When a claim is filed — even a phone call to ask whether a scrape exceeds the deductible — the carrier reports the event to a centralized claims exchange. The property-and-casualty industry relies on two dominant repositories for this: the Comprehensive Loss Underwriting Exchange, or C.L.U.E., operated by LexisNexis Risk Solutions, and the Automated Property Loss Underwriting System, or A-PLUS, operated by Verisk Analytics.2,3C.L.U.E. draws on data from more than 99% of U.S. auto insurers, and A-PLUS aggregates loss history from over 900 companies covering roughly 95% of the personal auto market — together they function as the industry's shared memory of who has filed what, and when.4
Each report entry records the driver, the vehicles involved, the policy number, the date of loss, the type of loss, and the dollar amount paid.4 Critically, an entry is created whether or not the insurer ultimately pays the claim and whether or not the driver was found at fault — the mere act of opening a claim file is what triggers the report, not the outcome of that claim.4
The Seven-Year Statutory Limit Under the FCRA
Because C.L.U.E. and A-PLUS compile and distribute data used to make consumer eligibility decisions, both are legally classified as consumer reporting agencies and are regulated by the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA).6 Under 15 U.S.C. § 1681c, the statute caps how long a consumer reporting agency may include most adverse information in a report at seven years from the date of the event.1 To comply, both LexisNexis and Verisk retain and report personal auto claims history for a maximum of seven years — eighty-four months — from the date of loss.2,3 Once an accident crosses that threshold, it automatically ages out of the consumer-facing report and can no longer be transmitted to an insurer for underwriting or pricing purposes.6
Key finding: Seven years — eighty-four months from the date of loss — is the absolute federal ceiling on how long any accident, at-fault or not, denied or paid, can remain visible to insurers through C.L.U.E. or A-PLUS. No carrier lookback period runs longer than this federal limit, because the underlying data simply is not there to see anymore.
A separate, harder-edged system runs in parallel and is not subject to this seven-year purge. ISO ClaimSearch, also maintained by Verisk, is the industry's fraud-detection platform — a database of more than 1.5 billion claim records used to flag suspicious patterns and organized fraud rings rather than to price individual policies.5Because it is used for back-end investigation rather than direct consumer underwriting, its retention schedule is governed by internal data-governance standards rather than the FCRA's seven-year rule — but carriers cannot legally use that older archived data to take an adverse action against a specific policyholder without triggering the same FCRA obligations.5
Your Rights: Adverse Action Notices and Disputes
Because claims-history reporting falls under the FCRA, policyholders carry the same statutory protections that apply to credit reporting. If a carrier uses a C.L.U.E. or A-PLUS report to deny coverage, cancel a policy, or raise a premium, that decision is legally an “adverse action” under 15 U.S.C. § 1681m.6 The insurer must then send a formal Adverse Action Notice disclosing that the claims report affected the decision and providing contact information for the reporting agency that supplied the data.6 Receiving that notice triggers a federal right to a free copy of the specific report within sixty days, and separately, every consumer is entitled to one free C.L.U.E. or A-PLUS report every twelve months regardless of whether an adverse action occurred.6
If a report contains an error — an accident coded as at-fault when police records say otherwise, or a mismatched payout amount — the consumer can dispute it directly with LexisNexis or Verisk, and the agency must investigate, typically within thirty days, and correct or delete unverifiable data.6 The stakes for ignoring these notice obligations are not trivial: in Safeco Insurance Co. of America v. Burr, the U.S. Supreme Court held that a company can face statutory and punitive damages for willfully violating the FCRA's notice requirements with “reckless disregard” for the law.7
Motor Vehicle Report vs. Claims History
A Motor Vehicle Report (MVR) — maintained by a state DMV — and a claims-history report track completely different events, and the two do not mirror each other. A minor parking-lot scrape that generates an insurance payout will sit on a C.L.U.E. report for seven years even if police were never called and no citation was issued. A speeding ticket, by contrast, will show up on the MVR and add license points but generates no C.L.U.E. entry at all, because no property-damage claim was filed.4
| Data Source | Managing Entity | Primary Focus | Standard Retention |
|---|---|---|---|
| C.L.U.E. / A-PLUS | LexisNexis / Verisk | Vehicle claims, payouts, loss dates | Up to 7 years (FCRA limit)1 |
| Motor Vehicle Report | State DMV | Traffic tickets, points, convictions | 3–5 years (10+ for severe offenses) |
| ISO ClaimSearch | Verisk (industry-wide) | Fraud detection, cross-referencing | Internal data-governance policy5 |
Standard retention periods for the three data sources that determine how long a driving or claims event stays visible to an insurer.2,3,4,5
Carrier Lookback Periods and Surcharge Step-Down
Federal law sets the outer limit on visibility, but the number that actually shows up on a bill is the carrier's lookback period— the specific window a company's pricing algorithm scans when calculating tier placement and surcharges.20 In most jurisdictions, that window runs thirty-six to sixty months, or three to five years.20Within that window, insurers typically front-load the penalty: the surcharge is heaviest at the first renewal after the accident and then “steps down” a little each accident-free year until it fully expires.
Nationwide data compiled by the industry indicates a single at-fault accident raises a driver's premium by an average of 40% to 44%, a penalty that can add up to thousands of dollars across a three-year surcharge window.20Switching insurers does not erase this clock — the new carrier pulls the same C.L.U.E. report and applies its own lookback window, which may run longer than your old carrier's. A driver whose previous insurer used a three-year lookback and had already zeroed out a surcharge can still get re-penalized at a new company running a five-year window on the exact same four-year-old accident.
Property Damage vs. Bodily Injury: Why the Type of Claim Changes the Timeline
Not every accident carries the same financial weight, and the surcharge duration tracks that difference closely. Property damage claims are objective and mathematically finite — a repair estimate settles the number quickly, and insurers typically retire the surcharge at the standard three-year mark. Bodily injury claimsare open-ended, carrying the risk of prolonged litigation over medical treatment, lost income, and pain and suffering — a category of exposure that routinely pushes a surcharge to the full five-year edge of a carrier's lookback window, or beyond, regardless of the state's typical average.
Claim frequency matters independently of severity. A single comprehensive claim for a cracked windshield or hail damage rarely moves a premium at all, since it reflects weather rather than driving behavior. But multiple comprehensive or not-at-fault claims filed within a short thirty-six-month span can still cause an insurer to flag the policy as high-risk, resulting in lost claims-free discounts or a shift to a less favorable pricing tier even without a single at-fault accident on the record.
Not-At-Fault Protections — and Their Limits
Several states bar insurers from surcharging a driver for an accident someone else caused. Oklahoma Statute Title 36, Section 941 prohibits an insurer from assigning points, canceling a policy, refusing to renew, or raising a premium solely because the insured was involved in a collision for which they were not at fault.16 Delaware Title 18, Section 609 imposes a nearly identical bar on surcharging a named insured for a not-at-fault claim.17 Uninsured-motorist claims get similar treatment in states like Georgia and Maryland, where a driver forced to file against their own coverage after being hit by an uninsured driver cannot be penalized for using it.18
“Not-at-fault” is not the same as invisible, though. Even where a state bars an active surcharge, the claim itself still populates the C.L.U.E. report for the full seven-year federal window.2The base rate cannot legally rise because of it, but the presence of the claim can still cost a driver a “claims-free” or “safe-driver” discount at renewal — a real, if smaller, dollar impact that a not-at-fault statute does not reach.
How Five States Regulate the Surcharge Window
Insurance is regulated state by state, not federally, which means the surcharge rules that actually govern a specific driver's bill can look very different depending on where the policy is written.
| State | Rule | Typical Window |
|---|---|---|
| New York | No surcharge unless aggregate property damage exceeds $2,000; loss-of-use costs excluded from that threshold.8 | 36-month experience period9 |
| Pennsylvania | Statewide, CPI-adjusted claim-cost threshold under a mandatory surcharge disclosure plan; threshold rises to $2,350 on July 1, 2026.10,11 | 3-year aggregate claim window10 |
| Massachusetts | Point-based Safe Driver Insurance Plan; a minor at-fault accident ($1,000–$5,000 paid) adds 3 points, each worth a 15% coverage increase.12,13 | 6-year policy experience period12 |
| California | Proposition 103 bars surcharging a driver found 50% or less at fault; accident-forgiveness programs are effectively prohibited.14 | 3-year rating schedule14 |
| North Carolina | Effective July 1, 2025, surcharges for violations of 4+ penalty points extended from 3 to 5 years; inexperienced-operator surcharge now runs 8 years.15 | 5-year lookback (up from 3)15 |
Selected state accident-surcharge statutes and regulator guidance, current as of the verification date on this page.8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15
SR-22 and FR-44: When the Clock Resets to a Decade
Everything above assumes a routine accident. When a crash involves DUI, reckless driving, or driving uninsured, the timeline extends well past the standard three-to-five-year window. Courts or state DMVs in these cases order an SR-22 — a Certificate of Financial Responsibility the insurer files directly with the state confirming the driver carries at least minimum liability coverage — or, in states like Florida and Virginia, an FR-44, which requires liability limits often double the standard minimum.19
| Filing Type | Primary Use Case | Standard Duration | On Lapse |
|---|---|---|---|
| SR-22 | DUI, uninsured accidents, reckless driving | 36 consecutive months | Immediate license suspension |
| FR-44 | Severe DUI (e.g., FL, VA) | 36 consecutive months | Immediate license suspension |
SR-22 and FR-44 filing terms.19 A lapse at any point during the filing period restarts the clock at zero.
The administrative filing typically lifts after three years, but the underlying offense keeps a driver in a high-risk pricing tier far longer than a routine collision — a DUI-related accident can remain visible on a state Motor Vehicle Report for seven to ten years, well past the point where a standard fender-bender surcharge would have fully expired.
The Accident Forgiveness Illusion
The most heavily marketed mitigation tool in the industry is accident forgiveness, under which a carrier contractually agrees to waive the surcharge for a policyholder's first at-fault accident — usually contingent on several years of a clean record and continuous loyalty to that specific carrier.
The program does not erase anything from the underlying record. The accident is still reported to C.L.U.E. and still visible to the entire industry for the full seven-year window. If the forgiven driver shops the market and switches carriers within that period, the new insurer pulls the same C.L.U.E. report, sees the at-fault collision, and applies its own surcharge — with no legal or contractual obligation to honor the previous carrier's internal forgiveness. Accident forgiveness functions as a customer-retention tool, not a true erasure of risk history. If you want to understand the coverage requirement sitting underneath all of this, see our breakdown of the penalties for driving without insurance — and for a look at how insurers weigh a completely different kind of record when pricing a policy, see our research on the separate seven-year rideshare background-check lookback that platforms like Uber and Lyft run independently of standard insurance underwriting.
Because each carrier uses a different lookback window and a different predictive model, the single most effective way to shed a lingering surcharge is deliberate rate shopping once an accident crosses the three-year mark — a company running a strict five-year lookback will keep penalizing a driver in year four, while a competitor using a standard thirty-six-month window will view the exact same C.L.U.E. data and offer a clean, preferred-tier rate on the same policy. For the structural reasons auto premiums run higher than other lines of insurance in the first place, see our report on why car insurance costs more than home insurance.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does the accident disappear the moment the surcharge ends?
No. The surcharge and the underlying database record run on different clocks. A carrier's three-to-five-year lookback determines when the accident stops costing extra money with that specific insurer, but the C.L.U.E. or A-PLUS record persists for the full seven-year federal window and remains visible to any insurer you apply to during that stretch.
Will switching insurance companies make an accident disappear faster?
No, and it can backfire. The new carrier pulls the same national claims-history report your old insurer used. If the new company's lookback period is longer than your previous one, you can actually be re-surcharged on an accident your old insurer had already stopped penalizing.
Does a not-at-fault accident affect my insurance at all?
In states with statutory protections like Oklahoma and Delaware, a not-at-fault accident cannot trigger a direct premium surcharge. It still appears on your claims-history report for seven years, though, and can cost you a claims-free or safe-driver discount even where the base rate is protected by law.
Can I get my C.L.U.E. or A-PLUS report to check what's on it?
Yes. Every consumer is entitled to one free copy of their C.L.U.E. and A-PLUS report every twelve months under the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act, and to an additional free copy within sixty days of receiving an Adverse Action Notice.
Does a DUI-related accident follow the same timeline as a regular fender-bender?
No. A standard property-damage surcharge typically expires around the three-year mark, but a DUI-related accident triggers an SR-22 or FR-44 filing and can remain visible on a state Motor Vehicle Report — and keep a driver in a high-risk pricing tier — for seven to ten years.