From 2026, Insurers Must Report Whether Your Claim Was Digital, Hybrid or Non-Digital
Short answer: an insurer filing the Private Passenger Auto Market Conduct Annual Statement must sort every physical damage claim from the 2026 data year into digital, hybrid or non-digital, and must name the vendors whose data and algorithms settled the digital ones. The split applies to collision, comprehensive, property damage and uninsured motorist property damage, and to none of the injury coverages listed on this page. Nothing has been filed yet: the reporting period runs to 31 December 2026 and filings are due 30 April 2027.
The data call is the NAIC's. The duty to file it is a state's, and that is where a citation exists at all. Washington puts it in statute:
Each entity subject to the provisions of this chapter shall file a market conduct annual statement or successor product, in the general form and context, in the time frame required by, and according to instructions provided by the NAIC, for each line of business written in the state of Washington.
RCW 48.37.040(2)(a), read first-party at app.leg.wa.gov on 23 August 2026. Other states impose the same filing under their own market conduct authority and we have not read all of them, so what follows describes the NAIC instrument, version 2026.0.0, and not any one state's rule.
The three definitions, which are stricter than they sound
Digital Claim. The settlement determination was accepted by the insured or claimant without adjustment, and the whole thing ran without human intervention in the loss appraisal, the settlement determination, or the production of the initial offer. Only digital information, through one or more automated loss algorithms. Then this sentence, which is the one that does the work:
No human inspection or appraisal of the damaged property is conducted by the insurance company, independent adjuster, or other person relied upon by the insurance company during the life cycle of the claim.
Note "during the life cycle of the claim", not "before the offer". One human appraisal at any point takes the claim out of this bucket entirely.
The instructions name the kinds of digital information they mean: photos taken by a claimant or insured, photos taken by a plane or a drone, and data from in-vehicle or in-property sensors.
Hybrid Claim. Began as a digital claim, and then at some point in its life cycle required human resources in the loss appraisal, the settlement determination, or the production of the initial or a subsequent offer. If you pushed back on a photo estimate and somebody came out to look at the car, that is a hybrid claim.
Non-Digital Claim. Anything else.
It applies only where a car gets repaired
This is the part worth noticing. The three-way breakdown does not apply to every coverage. It applies to these:
| Coverage | Digital breakdown |
|---|---|
| Collision | Yes |
| Comprehensive/Other Than Collision | Yes |
| Property Damage | Yes |
| Uninsured and Underinsured Motorists Property Damage (UMPD) | Yes |
| Bodily Injury | No |
| Medical Payments | No |
| Combined Single Limits | No |
| Personal Injury Protection | No |
Every coverage that carries the split is a physical damage coverage. Every coverage that does not is an injury coverage. The dataset being built is specifically about the claims where a vehicle is estimated, valued and repaired.
And insurers have to name the vendors
Two of the interrogatories at the front of the filing sit together:
1-24. Does the company use digital claim settlement? Yes or no.
1-25. If yes, list the names of the vendors providing third-party data and algorithms used in the digital claim settlement process.
That second one is unusual. Photo estimating and automated valuation are vendor products almost everywhere, and this asks the insurer to put the vendors' names on a regulatory filing it attests to. It pairs with the NAIC's AI model bulletin, which makes an insurer answerable for third-party AI systems rather than able to point at the supplier.
What sits alongside it in the same filing
The digital split is not collected on its own. It lands next to numbers that make it legible.
Aging, in both directions. Claims closed with payment and claims closed without payment, each bucketed 0-30, 31-60, 61-90, 91-180, 181-365, and beyond 365 days. A fast digital claim and a fast denial look identical in a headline and different in these buckets.
Below-deductible closures get their own line. The number of claims closed without payment because the amount claimed was below the insured's deductible is reported separately, so it does not sit inside the general denial count.
Median days to final payment, with an "All" breakout as well as the digital, hybrid and non-digital splits.
Lawsuits, including the ones the consumer won something from. Lawsuits opened, closed, and closed "with consideration for the consumer", which the instructions define as a court order, verdict or settlement giving the claimant more than the insurer had offered before the suit was brought.
Telematics. Whether the company uses telematics or usage-based data, and how many in-force policies are enrolled in such a product.
And the filing is attested by two named people, one of whose five certifications is that the company can trace the reported data back to its source and recreate the results as filed.
What we are not saying
We are not saying this will be published company by company. These are collection instructions. They say what insurers must report; they say nothing about what any regulator publishes. Market conduct data is frequently aggregated or treated as confidential under state law, and we have not established what any state will make public or at what level. Until that is answered, nothing here supports comparing one insurer to another.
We are not saying the data exists. The reporting period is calendar 2026 and the filing deadline is 30 April 2027. Nothing has been filed.
We are not claiming digital claims are worse. The three categories describe how a claim was handled, not how well. A high digital share is a fact about process, and the aging and lawsuit columns beside it are where a question about outcomes would have to be answered.
We are not describing any state's own rules. This is the NAIC's data call. Several states have their own AI or claims-handling requirements and those are separate.
Why it matters if you repair cars for a living
A shop has always been able to say that photo estimates come in low and get supplemented later. What has never existed is a national number.
From the 2027 filings onward, three things become measurable in principle, per company and per state: what share of physical damage claims were settled without anyone looking at the car, how the aging of those differs from claims a person handled, and which vendors' algorithms produced them.
The hybrid bucket is the interesting one. A claim only becomes hybrid because something forced a human into a process designed to run without one. That is, more or less, the supplement.
Sources
- Property & Casualty Market Conduct Annual Statement, Private Passenger Auto Data Call & Definitions, version 2026.0.0 (updated 05/01/2025), approved draft. All sixteen pages read on 18 August 2026 from content.naic.org. Reporting period 1 January to 31 December 2026; filing deadline 30 April 2027.
- Twenty-five insurance regulators have adopted the NAIC AI bulletin
- AI is grading your auto claim
- How to read a repair estimate
- When insurance will not pay for a proper repair
General consumer information: not legal, insurance, or financial advice. Requirements, coverage, and practices vary by state, policy, and manufacturer.
Cite this dataset
This dataset is published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. You may republish it, including commercially, in whole or in part. The licence asks one thing in return: credit the source and link to it. Copy the line below.
"What insurers must report about touchless auto claims from the 2026 data year", The Autobody Directory (Quorum Industries LLC), 2026. Licensed CC BY 4.0. https://theautobodydirectory.com/guides/digital-hybrid-non-digital-auto-claims
- Page to cite and link: https://theautobodydirectory.com/guides/digital-hybrid-non-digital-auto-claims
- Machine-readable copy: https://theautobodydirectory.com/api/register/mcas-digital-claims.json
- Questions, corrections, or a figure you want checked before you publish it: see Press. We would rather be corrected than cited wrongly.