You don’t have to be Kate Gosselin (or have 8 kids) to sense that divorce almost always sucks. On top of the immense emotional toll, personal belongings have to be divided, accounts must be settled. Getting divorced is neither easy nor inexpensive.
And now here’s this: your car insurance rates will also increase after you get divorced, though just a little bit.
That’s right, all other factors equal, getting divorced means that your auto insurance will go up, on average, 1.21%.
Here’s our methodology. We created several different personas and controlled for every single factor, except marital status. In other words Josh 1 was the same as Josh 2 in every way -- vehicle make and model, zip code, occupation, etc -- except for marital status. In this example, Josh 1 was married while Josh 2 was no longer betrothed.
We set up numerous such pairings in different states, with different vehicles, education levels, driving records, etc. Next we ran the profiles through our platform to get real insurance rates from up to 10 carriers per state. And the result was that average divorced person paid $2.40 more per policy relative to those individuals able to keep their marriage going.
The best guess for why this is the case is that carriers prefer married folks who tend to have more children, which tends to lead to safer driving.
We looked only single-driver policies, meaning we didn’t use the average price of a joint policy for the married couple simply cut in half. In an [earlier post](http://coverhound.com/blog/post/married-save-car-insurance) we showed that getting married can save you up to 29% on car insurance; and in that case we used half the group rate to the find the number because people were entering a joint policy, rather than needing to find a new solo plan.
Of course you could stay in a group policy with your ex-, though we understand that could be tricky...
Here's a good, related article on [divorce insurance](http://coverhound.com/blog/post/divorce-insurance).
