What Do You Need to Apply for Car Insurance?

Personal and Household Information

The foundation of every application is the personal profile of the principal driver: legal name, residential address, age, gender, and marital status.^[1] Address matters beyond simple record-keeping — the physical address, called the garaging location, sets the local risk environment an insurer prices against, since regional traffic density, weather hazards, and vehicle theft rates all attach to the applicant’s ZIP code.^[5]

Insurers also require the details of every other driver living in the household — spouses, newly licensed teenagers, soon-to-be drivers, and college students who still claim the home as their primary residence.^[1] This exists to account for “permissive use” — the risk that another household member takes the wheel. Leaving a household driver off the application carries a real consequence: if that unlisted driver later causes an accident, the insurer has the legal right to charge retroactive premiums, cancel the policy, or refuse to renew coverage.^[3] Readers weighing whether a teen driver needs a separate policy or a spot on an existing one should see our companion report on whether a teenager can get their own car insurance policy.

Two of those fields carry extra weight because of what they unlock. The Social Security Number is used behind the scenes to access consumer credit reports and prior insurance claims histories — the two data sets central to the rating decision. The driver’s license number does double duty: it is the key that unlocks state motor vehicle records, and it is also sensitive enough that consumer protection agencies rank it nearly as valuable to an identity thief as an SSN plus a date of birth, since it is the credential most retailers and institutions accept to confirm identity over the phone.^[1] That risk is not hypothetical: after a minor collision, nearly 38% of drivers surveyed believed they should hand their license number to the other driver, and one in six said they would let that driver photograph it — a practice regulators actively warn against.^[1]

The Credit-Based Insurance Score

In most states, the SSN on the application also feeds a Credit-Based Insurance Score (CBIS) — a scoring model introduced by the Fair Isaac Corporation (FICO) in the early 1990s and now used by roughly 95% of auto insurers where the practice is legal.^[11] A CBIS pulls the same raw credit-report data as a traditional credit score but for a different purpose: instead of predicting whether someone repays a loan, it predicts the statistical likelihood — and probable size — of a future auto insurance claim.^[7]

A CBIS model is legally barred from considering race, color, national origin, religion, gender, or marital status, and generally does not factor in age, income, occupation, ZIP code, or medical-industry collection accounts.^[7] An applicant who lacks a credit history entirely cannot be denied coverage on that absence alone.^[11] Even so, the practice is heavily regulated: 47 states have enacted laws governing CBIS use, and most follow a 2002 model act from the National Conference of Insurance Legislators that forbids insurers from using a credit score as the sole reason to deny, cancel, or refuse to renew a policy.^[13] Industry data shows why insurers fight to keep it: loss costs run roughly 33% higher for the worst insurance scores and 19% lower for the best.^[13]

Washington State’s experience during the pandemic shows how contested this factor can get. In 2021, the state’s insurance commissioner adopted an emergency rule temporarily banning CBIS use, arguing that federal CARES Act payment accommodations had made credit reports an unreliable proxy for driving risk.^[15] The insurance industry sued, and in 2022 a Washington court overturned the ban, ruling the commissioner had exceeded his statutory authority even though he had acted in good faith.^[17] Washington still requires insurers who raise a premium after a CBIS-driven renewal to give the policyholder a clear, specific written explanation of what changed.^[14]

Vehicle Information: What the VIN Tells the Underwriter

The application is not only about the driver. Rather than asking the applicant to manually describe every feature of the car, insurers rely on a single 17-character string: the Vehicle Identification Number (VIN).^[19] NHTSA and the Society of Automotive Engineers mandated the current standardized 17-character format in 1981, and it is typically found on the lower-left corner of the windshield or on a label inside the driver-side doorjamb.^[19] Readers unsure whether a vehicle even needs to be currently registered before it can be insured should see our companion report on whether a car needs to be registered to get insurance.

Off-road vehicles such as ATVs, dirt bikes, and snowmobiles fall outside NHTSA’s jurisdiction, so the Society of Automotive Engineers built a parallel 17-character Product Identification Number (PIN) system so insurers can still track and underwrite those vehicles the same way.^[20] The ninth character, the check digit, is mathematically derived specifically to catch a mistyped VIN before it corrupts a state or insurer database.^[21]

Decoding the VIN also lets the underwriter verify factory-installed safety technology that can lower a premium. Electronic Stability Control (ESC), mandated under Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard No. 126, uses automatic, computer-controlled braking of individual wheels to help a driver keep control in a spin, and NHTSA crash data shows it reduces single-vehicle crashes by 34% for passenger cars and 59% for SUVs.^[22] Insurers also check the VIN against federal recall databases to confirm the vehicle does not carry an open, unrepaired safety recall.^[23]

Increasingly, applicants are also asked whether they will enroll in a Usage-Based Insurance (UBI) program — telematics tracking delivered through a smartphone app, a plug-in OBD-II device, or an embedded manufacturer system that monitors miles driven, time of day, hard-braking events, and sometimes location, in exchange for a discount tied to actual driving behavior rather than demographic averages.^[4] Roughly half of consumers offered a UBI option choose to enroll.^[4] For a closer look at one specific telematics hardware format, see our companion report on what a beacon is for car insurance.

When a Policy Isn’t the Only Option

State and federal law does not strictly require purchasing a traditional insurance policy to satisfy financial responsibility requirements. High-net-worth individuals and large fleets may instead post alternative collateral directly with the state.^[18]

Commercial fleet self-insurance requires the corporation to submit CPA-audited financial statements proving a net worth capable of absorbing potential losses, and federal contractors seeking to self-insure under FAR 28.308 must additionally prove geographic dispersion of assets, so a single catastrophic loss cannot deplete the company’s capital.^[31] For nearly every individual driver, though, a standard insurance policy remains the only practical path, which is why the underwriting data described above — not a cash deposit or a bond — is what almost every applicant will actually need to provide.