Progressive Stock

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us, and welcome to The Progressive Corporation Third Quarter 2026 Investor Call. I will now hand the conference over to Julianna Paterra.

Good morning, and thank you for joining us today for Progressive's third quarter investor event. I am Julianna Paterra, Director of Investor Relations, and I will be moderator for today's event. The company will not make detailed comments related to its results in addition to those provided in its annual report on Form 10-K, quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, and the letter to shareholders, which have been posted to the company's website.

Although our quarterly Investor Relations events often include a presentation on a specific portion of our business, we will instead use the 60-minute schedule for today's event for introductory comments by our CEO and Chief Personal Lines Officer and a question-and-answer session with members of our leadership team. These introductory comments were previously recorded.

Upon completion of the previously recorded remarks, we will use the balance of the 60-minute schedule for the event for live questions and answers with members of our leadership team. As always, discussions in this event may include forward-looking statements. These statements are based on management's current expectations and are subject to many risks and uncertainties that could cause actual events and results to differ materially from those discussed during today's event.

Additional information concerning those risks and uncertainties is available in our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2025, as supplemented by our Form 10-Q for the third quarter of 2026, where you will find discussions of the risk factors affecting our business, safe harbor statements related to forward-looking statements and other discussions of the challenges we face. These documents can be found via the Investor Relations section of our website at investors.progressive.com.

To begin today, I am pleased to introduce our CEO, Tricia Griffith, who will kick us off with some introductory comments. Tricia?

Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us. We delivered another strong quarter with continued growth and healthy underwriting margins. These results reflect the outstanding work of our people and their continued focus on executing our strategy. For the third quarter, net premiums written grew 4% to $22.3 billion. And at quarter end, we had approximately 40.5 million policies in force.

While year-over-year PIF growth moderated slightly to 6%, we feel very good about that level of growth given the size of our customer base. Of course, we want units to increase. So we continue to create plans for growth in both our Personal Lines and Commercial Lines segments, and we'll advertise to maximize growth as long as that spend remains efficient. Even as growth moderates, our relative performance remains strong, underscoring the resilience of our business. I'm really proud of these results and more importantly, of how we're achieving them.

We will be diligent and focused on what we've always believed is important, growing as fast as we can while maintaining our underwriting discipline. We feel really good about where we are. Maintaining that momentum over the long term also requires us to keep evolving how we compete. Innovation has long been central to how Progressive competes. We have consistently developed and applied technology to make insurance easier to understand, buy and use. And we have invested in digital experiences that help customers engage with us easily and confidently.

Over many years, we have been early developers and adopters of tools such as chatbots and predictive AI to enhance pricing, underwriting, marketing, customer retention and the accuracy and efficiency of claims handling. That foundation has been an important contributor to our performance, particularly over the past decade. We are now in the next generation of technology, including generative and agentic AI with the same long-term mindset. We believe these capabilities have the potential to influence nearly every part of our business over time, including growth, customer experience, underwriting, claims and operating efficiency.

Our goal is to study, learn and grow, considering opportunities across the short, medium and long term while remaining focused on measurable improvements in outcomes. To support that learning, we have made generative AI tools broadly available across the organization. We already have dozens of advanced AI initiatives in production that are delivering meaningful results with a clear line of sight to significantly more value.

We also established an AI Strategy Council to evaluate the longer-term opportunities and implications of these technologies. While we do not plan to discuss specific applications that we believe are competitively sensitive, we want to be clear that this work is active, enterprise-wide and grounded in practical business outcomes. At the same time, we are mindful of the risks associated with advanced AI and are taking a disciplined and responsible approach.

Consistent with our core values, our responsible AI governance and risk management program draws on talent from across the enterprise and is designed to support the responsible use of AI for our customers, claimants, consumers, employees, job applicants and other constituencies while meeting our compliance obligations.

AI is also considered through our enterprise risk management process and our Board, including its technology committee oversees technology-related risks and opportunities. We believe this combination of innovation, strong governance and a focus on measurable outcomes positions us well to capture the long-term potential of AI while managing its risks thoughtfully.

Generally, when customers shop more, we win. Recent history has underscored that. In both 2024 and 2025, we captured over 40% share of shoppers while holding less than 20% in market share and took over 1 point of share in 2024 and nearly 2 points of share in 2025. And from what we can see so far year-to-date, we continue to take more than our fair share of shoppers. Regardless of the shopping environment, we're comfortable losing new business volume when competing against rates that we believe are underpriced.

Over the long term, this discipline has proven to generate market share gains for Progressive. Looking at where we stand today, we are leaning in by testing and researching agentic technology ourselves. Customers appear to be doing the same, though at a very small scale. Over the last few weeks, we estimate we received agentic inbound interactions representing a rounding error relative to our overall volume.

Activity we see today suggests much of this usage reflects experimentation rather than true shopping intent. While the usage seems limited today, we believe there is a high likelihood that agentic AI changes some aspect of consumer shopping behavior. And historically, when shopping behavior has changed, we've been at the forefront of that change.

Lastly, I want to take a moment to thank Pat Callahan for his hard work and dedication in both preparing and executing on our IR calls over the past decade. Your insights and steady leadership have played a significant role in our success, and your contributions have been deeply appreciated by everyone in this room, and I'm sure on this call.

While you will certainly be missed in this setting, I'm pleased that we'll still have the opportunity to work closely together as you take on several strategic initiatives. I know you will bring the same level of commitment, creativity and excellence to those efforts, and I look forward to seeing the impact you will make. Thank you again for everything you've done, and I wish you well in your retirement from PL President and look forward to working beside you in this new capacity.

Now I'll hand it over to Lori to introduce Jim Curtis.

Thanks, Tricia. I've been fortunate to work beside Pat for over a decade in various roles, and I've learned a great deal from him. I know the same is true for Jim Curtis, who was recently named our next Personal Lines President. Jim has been with Progressive for 31 years. He joined in 1995 as a customer service representative when we were roughly a $2.5 billion company. Since then, he's led a wide range of business functions, including auto pricing, product management and our Progressive Advantage Agency.

Most recently, Jim served as our Personal Lines Controller and then our national auto leader, where he was responsible for shaping the strategy and growth of our largest product line. Over the past 5 years, Jim helped steer personal lines through the pandemic and the inflationary period that followed.

He has seen this business from more angles than most Progressive people. Jim brings the depth and continuity that's critical in this role, but he's also just a great example of the talent and succession strategy at Progressive, having started his career as a call center consultant and now leading our largest business.

And now we can open it up for questions.

This concludes the previously recorded portion of today's event. We now have members of our management team available live to answer questions. [Operator Instructions].

Your first question comes from the line of Josh Shanker with Bank of America.

If I look at the policy count growth of the company, it's been decelerating and even declined in the direct channel during 2 different months of this past year. But when I look at the 10-Q and see new policy applications, the growth demands are about the same, and really we're talking about a decline in retention. Over the past 20 years, Progressive has made huge strides in retention.

The first question, I guess, is do you think that this is merely cyclicality and that retention should go up in the future as shopping behaviors subside? Or, b, are we in a new market where shopping is a permanent feature of consumer behavior? And what does that mean for the amount you're paying in terms of ad spend to generate that business?

Wow, Josh, that's like 5 questions in one, so I may have to get some help here. I'll talk a little bit about policy growth on the commercial line side. I'll have Lori talk about it on the private passenger auto side, and then Jim and I will tag team on the retention piece. So one, we're extremely proud that we grew 263,000 PIFs this quarter, especially on the base of how large we are. So we continue to be proud of that.

One piece of data that gets to your question on, do you think the shopping will continue, which, of course, we don't know, is there's a demand meter that LexisNexis puts out. And the quarter 2 results would say that 47% of policies were shopped in the trailing 12-month period, which seems pretty high. In addition, we have our own data that says over -- we've been quoted over 50 million times on the auto alone. That seems like a lot of shopping.

So I think shopping has really increased based on affordability across -- not just insurance, but fuel prices, grocery prices, et cetera. So I do think shopping has been at an all-time high, and we're seeing it kind of level out, albeit really high. So our focus will continue to be -- to grow. When you think about retention, and you go back to sort of after COVID, at all the volatile years, the retention has gone up and down, really depending on mix on shopping.

And some of it's just a timing thing, not that we don't care deeply about retention, but if you look at our post-COVID period, in that time, that was so volatile up and down with inflation and then us getting rate, giving rate, and we added more than 12.5 million PIFs, doubled our premium by 38 -- added $38 billion, and that translated to 5 points of market share. So in these volatile times, that's really where we prevail. Again, we are still pushing the envelope on growth and balancing growth and profitability.

So Lori, why don't you give a little bit about the policy growth on the private passenger auto side? And then, Jim, why don't you add in some on retention?

Sure. Josh, as your question implies, September was a softer month. The month-over-month decline in auto PIF was driven primarily by new direct applications, which follows historical seasonality that includes a decline in the second half of the year. I would say these month-to-month variances may start to be more pronounced now that our growth rate is down from the historical highs that we've experienced over the last few years.

But overall, competition is intense in both channels. Carriers are trading margin for growth with rate reductions, increased advertising, higher agent commissions. And in direct, we're spending more, too. And so competition is driving up acquisition costs, but we're going to stay disciplined and only acquire customers within our targets.

In the agency channel, specifically, we're benefiting from some of the investments that we've made in agent compensation and incentives. We're benefiting also from new relationships with independent agents and agency networks. And then there's the continual shift of business from captive to independent agency channel that's benefiting us as well. Conversion is up from a year ago, which is being led by direct. And so it tells us we remain competitive when shoppers come to us.

Tricia put our growth into perspective. I think it's worth noting that the last industry reporting, which is for the second quarter, it reflects our growth of almost $800 million in premiums over the prior year, while our 9 largest competitors lost $1.1 billion between them. So despite the competitive environment, we continue to outperform the industry. But I would make no mistake about it. We're very focused on growth right now in both channels and with all of our products.

Thanks, Lori. And as it relates to just general retention, I'd point out that our current PLE comparison is to a period of unprecedented volatility, which drives changes in both mix and market condition. But we believe our current level of PLE is simply reverting to a more normalized level. And in that regard, we look at our new business conversion as a primary means to understand our competitiveness.

And it's worth noting that, that remains elevated across a comparison to recent years. As it relates to current retention efforts, we certainly have a playbook and tactics in play that help our customers maintain competitive rates on their policies. And lastly, I would leave you with, aside from our PLE performance, we also just gauge renewal acceptance. And in any given month, we have data that would show that roughly 90% or greater of customers will accept their renewal offer.

I think I blew through commercial lines. I got excited to talk about private passenger. But Commercial Lines really contributed significantly on the growth in premium for sure, 9% net premium written growth, 5% PIF growth and new business applications are up 11% and retention looks good on both the trailing 3 and trailing 12. So we're excited about where we're at in commercial. We've taken a couple rate decreases in very specific segments where we had the margin to do so in the states to do so, and we feel very bullish about our growth opportunities on the commercial lines side.

Your next question comes from the line of Bob Huang with Morgan Stanley.

So just given the higher interest rate and investment yield, as you're thinking about rate filings, would regulators push back on any rate increases as ROE naturally drifts higher due to higher interest rate environment? Do you need to resubmit any rate filings due to the fact that investment yield is changing?

No, those 2 typically are bifurcated. That's very much on our investment side and regulators look to make sure that rates are adequate, not excessive and actuarially justified.

Okay. Really appreciate that. And then just given that the agentic environment is obviously being slowly introduced into the distribution system. Do you see agentic AI or any type of like automated shopping capabilities potentially change the lead gen world? Or would that be something that impacts Progressive?

Yes, I'll let Lori take a deeper dive on that. But here's how I would start that, Bob. I would say that we've had a strategic pillar. We've had 4, but one specific one for a long time, and that is broad coverage. So we are going to be where, when and how customers want to shop and be serviced for their insurance. So -- and years ago, we started in the independent agent channel and no one thought anyone would buy insurance over the Internet. We saw that coming in '95. We were out there selling auto on the Internet.

And then we've continued to evolve, whether it's our AutoQuote Explorer, BusinessQuote Explorer, or HomeQuote Explorer. We feel the same way about agentic, and we're doing a lot of testing internally as well, but we see the same way. If that's how consumers want to shop, we will be there for them, and we will be there to make sure that they get what they need in the right way, the right coverage, et cetera.

Lori, do you want to talk a little bit about what you're seeing since CRM follows under your purview?

Sure. Yes. I mean historically, when shopping increases, Progressive gains market share. And agentic shopping, as Tricia said, we believe, creates the potential for elevated and sustained levels of shopping. And so that's why we see this as an opportunity. Tricia mentioned in her opening comments that the level of shopping that we're seeing today is really a fraction of our direct quote volume. But it's still very early.

We're monitoring closely, and we're preparing, assuming that agentic shopping has the potential to become an important acquisition channel for us. So, we look at a number of factors when we analyze shopping behavior. And if or when is more likely, customer behavior changes, our intent is going to remain to make Progressive easy to find, easy to quote and easy to buy.

Your next question comes from the line of Gregory Peters with Raymond James.

So I'll just ask one question in 2 parts. And I was looking at the letter and you talked about the non-acquisition expense ratio improving. And then in your previous answer, you mentioned how commission, there might be some upward pressure on commission. So, I was wondering if you could just comment on those 2 variables, give some more color.

Yes. So we consider commission and acquisition expense. So the non-acquisition expense are all other expenses. And those are just us getting more efficient, making sure as we roll out new technologies, we get more efficient. We look at a bunch of different internal data on that. As an example, our PIFs per FTE, per full-time equivalent are up over 10%. So we're excited about the efficiencies we're gaining as we see more technology solutions, more process solutions.

So our non-acquisition expense ratio, we will always focus on. In fact, we've reduced that 0.5 point a year over the last 15 years, and we'll continue to put pressure on that because we know that equates to giving more competitive rates in the system. On the overall expense ratio, we will spend efficiently both on the direct side and the agent side to spur on growth. And that's where we'll give commissions for business that we think is important, as an example, bundled auto, home, et cetera, and that's really where that comes from.

Your next question comes from the line of Elyse Greenspan with Wells Fargo.

My first question, I wanted to go back to just what you were talking about with September, right, and new business in direct, right, trending negatively. And I think you guys mentioned that there was some seasonality in the back half of the year. So how do we think about, I guess, the remaining quarters of the Q3 and into the Q4 as you think about -- I'm sorry, the remaining months of the Q3 and then into the Q4, as you think about just the level of new business on direct and how that could triangulate into PIF on the personal auto side. And I'm not sure if you can give us a sense of how things have trended in October.

Yes. I can't give you anything that we haven't published. Well, obviously, and Lori said this, we'll continue to push for growth and we'll spend while it's efficient. So there is some seasonality to growth, which sometimes people find unusual, but there's some seasonality. I will say that we've seen a lot of the direct competitors sort of get off the bench and start to be in the auction environment, which makes acquisition costs a little bit more competitive.

Now we'll continue to push, again as long as it's competitive. We have seen some competitors spend beyond what we would think we would spend for those policies. And so we're not -- we're okay to lose in that -- for those policies because we're not going to buy business if we don't think it's economically prudent. So I don't know how it will all turn out. Obviously, I have an idea of October, but we're going to keep pushing the envelope, be efficient and treat our customers the way they've come to expect.

And then I guess my follow-up, right, is on the advertising side because obviously, right, we've seen advertising right, continues to be up on a year-over-year basis. As you guys think about just the fourth quarter, and you made comments right, on this call and just in the Q, right, about continuing to spend as long as it's efficient. So how do you -- do you think we'll continue to see elevated ad spend through the fourth quarter and then into 2027 based on just your views of the current -- the overall current environment?

I think we'll just have to see how that plays out in terms of our efficiency. We keep very close tab on our cost per sale versus our targeted acquisition cost. And we always want to write to [indiscernible] lifetime. So that's how we look at it. So if we believe we can get growth and we believe it's efficient, we'll spend. If not, we'll pull back a little bit.

Your next question comes from the line of Mike Zaremski with BMO Capital Markets.

Could you -- switching to the auto insurance loss cost environment. Maybe you can kind of give us any updates on what you're thinking and seeing on the severity side of the equation. We're seeing -- I think your disclosed severity includes reserve movements, which have been great. But is anything changing on bodily injury or personal injury protection? We've seen some of the numbers move around in the Qs.

Yes. Our severity is incurred, so it does include reserving. It's been fairly benign, right around 4%. I would say -- and it's been sort of the same culprits as we've seen in the past in terms of medical cost, more attorney rep claims. I will say we did see an increase in severity on the PIP side. And that has been in the majority, New York and then somewhat New Jersey based on the fact that they had very low PIP severity in Q3 '25. I'll let Andrew give a little bit more detail on that.

Yes. On the severity side, as Tricia said, overall, we feel as though the environment is benign. Our BI severity was a bit lower in the past quarter versus year-to-date. And there are some things that impact that. We report incurred severity, not paid severity like some of our competitors. And so that does include some actuarial adjustments, closure rates, things like that.

But within severity, injury is definitely what we're paying attention to. And we look at the year-to-date number for BI, which is more like 6% severity trend, is a good indication of where things are going. PIP did stick out this quarter. When I think about PIP, I do think about the fact that it's different by state. And so that -- there's a mix between states that's impacting the severity trend in the quarter.

But the Northeast is a place where we do see some higher severity trends. We called out New York in our 10-Q. Florida is a place though where we've seen the trends to be more benign. And so it's a bit of a mixed bag on the PIP side. It depends on the state, and there's definitely some state mix contributions that are there. Overall, though, on severity, we feel pretty good. We're watching the injury side in particular.

Great. And my follow-up, switching gears to personal property home insurance. You did a good job on the last call, explaining to us how you're opening up your appetite. You talked about the new sales environment in the shareholder letter. Curious about the competitive environment there. Do you feel that you could grow meaningfully more in home and it can move the needle on auto as well given the bundled nature? Or is it a very competitive environment that -- so we should be kind of careful about accelerating the growth rate from here?

Yes, I'll open it up and then pass it over to Jim to give more details. But we're excited about laying out what John and Lori did last quarter. And in fact, Pat, Lori, Jim and I had the privilege of meeting with some of our platinum, our top agents that sell auto, home last week at an event and had a lot of conversations, and they're getting very excited that we're more open for business, and they want to do those bundles.

So I think the opportunity is one of our largest opportunities over the next couple of years. I'm excited about it. We're in such a different position, investing in people, processes. I wrote in my letter about our new claims training center out in Phoenix. We're super excited about having hands-on information and training for people that do the property claims. So we're very excited about where we're at. We're on target with our plan. We just want to make sure that we open it up and we don't swing the pendulum. And do you want to talk any more about it, Jim?

Yes, sure. I would just reinforce that Robinsons continued to be a huge opportunity of growth for us. We would estimate that, that segment alone is roughly 40% of the auto and home market. And while it's probably a little too early to evaluate our efforts following on our progress in property, we're pleased with the results. We mentioned in the Q that our homeowner volume -- new business volume was up 22%, and it really just reflects our increased availability and broadening acceptability.

And we're starting to see signs of that within our agency business on increased demand or increased quoting in Robinsons. We start to see an increased demand, you'll see a natural downward pressure on conversion, but certainly within what we would talk about as our expected response, and we continue to be bullish on the opportunity we have in both channels and Robinsons growth.

Your next question comes from the line of Andrew Andersen with Jefferies.

And maybe following up on that last answer there. The agency auto Robinson quote volume seems relatively strong, but conversion and PIF are a bit lighter there. Could you talk about where customers are falling out of the funnel and how much of that is -- reflects the total household proposition versus maybe just the competitiveness of the AutoQuote itself?

I think it's a lot -- and Jim weigh in or actually any of you weigh in. I think a lot of it is sometimes timing of the auto and property quote and when we get those. So we have a program that we're working with on agents to make sure that if they have the auto now, and they haven't had the property, we sync those up. So I think sometimes it's a timing thing. Sometimes it's a discount where some companies might have a deeper discount, sometimes we will. So I think it's really timing.

I think the overall point that Jim made was this is such an opportunity for us, and we will make sure that we are competitive while reaching our target profit margins. And we owe that to our customers, we owe that to our agent partners. And that's really been our approach for this really exceptional opportunity that is in front of us.

And when you talk about the nonacquisition expense productivity gain, how do you view the permanent productivity gains versus maybe temporary leverage from prior year's pricing and premium growth? I guess, how sensitive do you find that nonacquisition expense ratio relative to NPE growth?

I mean I think it's sensitive ratio. Because I think over time, we've gone up and down, and we try to look at it, obviously, on a percentage basis, but we look at an absolute basis as well in terms of how we spend our money. Does it -- are we getting what we want? We are surgical about every technology project, every process project to make sure that it makes us more efficient if that's the reason we're doing it. And we have a 3-year goal that we create every 3 years or a year or 2 into it that we present to the Board on how we can continue to reduce expenses because, again, we want to have our prices competitive.

I'd just add in, Andrew, that the month-to-month, the NAER, the nonacquisition expense ratio, it can be somewhat volatile. But over the years, it has moved pretty steadily. And so the actions we're taking, we feel good that they're translating into lower cost that we can deliver to our customers, which means that we can have lower prices and gain more market share over time. So I don't view these as a blip. I think we're on the right trajectory for long-term lower cost structure for the business.

Yes, Andrew, I would only add the reason that we should have confidence is because both in claims and in our CRM organization, we're investing in technology that helps our customers self-serve easier. And we're seeing some pretty steep increases with customers' willingness to both shop, service and start their claims process themselves and using the technology that we're investing in. So there's real reason to believe that, that's sustainable.

Your next question comes from the line of Tracy Benguigui with Wolfe Research.

No policyholder credit expense was booked in September versus last year. Does that signal no Florida excess profit return in 2027? Or is that simply a change in your cadence of making these estimates? And relatedly, I'm just wondering how much of that $1.3 billion of year-to-date auto favorable reserve releases came from Florida?

Yes. So the reserve development, some came from Florida, but it diminished towards the last part of the year or the second part of the year. And we feel like we're in a good position in Florida from an excess or lack thereof perspective for 2027. But I think the development was kind of across the board and in many different areas.

Yes. I'd just add in on the reserve side, personal auto BI has been a driver of our favorable reserve development. That's across the country. Florida has a contribution, but in general, it's been more BI across the country. And on the Florida credit side, we have not changed our approach there. We evaluate that position every month. We do not believe that an accrual is necessary at this point.

And so, we'll monitor with each month, but we currently don't believe it's probable that we'll need credits or refunds for Florida. And I think we've done a great job adjusting to the Florida environment. We've been able to lower rates for customers and continue to grow that business. And so we feel good about our Florida position.

Excellent. And also about 63% of your year-to-date releases came from the '25 accident year. I'm wondering how that plays into your [indiscernible] loss picks?

Jim, do you want to talk about that?

Yes. What was the -- I missed the last part of the question?

How does the 63% come from prior -- the prior 2 years, '25 and '24. How does it go into our loss picks for '27?

Yes. On our loss picks, I would just share that, and for starters, we evaluate our rate adequacy or loss picks for 2027 at the state level and do so on an accident year basis. In many of the states, we enjoy the benefit of scale -- scale and the ability to look back on shorter durations to set rates. So we would capture the reserve adequacy and the accident period for which it's realized and then evaluate with typical actuarial approach on rate adequacy.

Jim commented on the rate side, which is incredibly important to make sure we get the right rates out on the street. Tracy, on the reserve side, sending reserves for our financials, we have a fantastic actuarial team. They have been working hard to make sure we get our reserves correct. We do it every quarter, but certainly as we approach the end of the year, and so there's been a focus on that. And so we believe we have the right adequate reserves currently, and we will continue to strive to have minimal variation in those reserves as we set them at the end of the year.

Your next question comes from the line of David Motemaden with Evercore ISI.

Just another question just on agentic AI or AI agent. So Tricia, you spoke about how, even though it's limited today that you think that if agentic AI changes consumer shopping behavior, you guys are usually at the forefront of that change and capitalizing on that. Can you just talk about some of the things you're working on to be able to capitalize on this potential change in shopping behavior?

Yes, David. We are working on a bunch of different things. We have a lot of different tests and pilots, and we're involved with many different vendors as we think about this because we do believe it could absolutely change behavior, and we want to be out in front of it. I hesitate to share many details because I really want to do more than tell at this juncture. And that's why I tried to put a little bit of that in my opening comments. What I'll say is when we have a more cogent, solid story to tell you the results of many of those tests, which we believe are very positive, we'll have another deep dive some time in the future.

Okay. Fair enough. For my second question, I'm wondering, there's been some press out there of some of your competitors who are more exclusive agent-focused changing or potentially changing in the future, some of their agent compensation structures. I'm just wondering if you're seeing any impact of that on shopping activity out there, particularly in the bundled market.

I don't think we've seen anything yet, and I hesitate to talk about what companies are doing, but we do believe that is an opportunity for us as more and more companies either sort of changed their compensation or more actually flock to the independent agent channel because we think that is a great channel for choice for customers, and we believe when there's more choices and more competition we win.

Your next question comes from the line of Matthew Heimermann with Citi.

I guess I'd like to better understand some of the technical and legal challenges you think you need to tackle to allow customers to shop and buy with the assistance of the agentic tools?

I think there's a lot. And that's why I think there's a lot to unfold and learn and understand, especially because -- this is a regulated industry. Consumers want to feel comfortable and good that they've picked the right coverages to protect them. They want to make sure it's at a fair price. So there's a lot that goes into this.

So it's -- I think you captured it, Matthew. It's way more complex than just getting a rate for rate because underneath all of the rates that we give, whether in the independent agent channel or the direct channel is there's a lot of variables, a lot of information, a lot of external information that we have to gather. So there will be challenges, but that's not unlike challenges, we see anytime something changes. And so we'll be at the forefront, and we will make sure that whatever we do, we do it in the right way.

More to come there. I guess the follow-up question being changing gears, there's litigation in some states. There's congressional investigations potentially on the horizons around claims handling practices in the industry. I'm curious on the property side, in particular, given that's a capability that you've invested in and now own as opposed to outsource parts of, is there any noticeable differences in kind of your approach and processes and what informs those relative to competitors?

It's hard to say because I don't have their manuals of how they do things. I would tell you how we do because this is sort of where I grew up. We are always going to do the right thing by our customer. if it's -- if we're on a balance of what to do, we always go towards the customer. This is in the moment where they need us most, especially in likely their most expensive thing they'll ever own.

And that's one of the reasons why we invested because we wanted our people there with our customers, and making sure that they have -- that they're spoken to with respect, that they're cared for and that they know that they got what they paid for. So that's why we're investing so much on the property side. We're very proud of our claims service and have been proud for decades of how much we put into our training, and we're doing that, and that's exactly why we decided to do it on the property side. I really can't speak to the competition though.

Your next question comes from the line of Paul Newsome with Piper Sandler.

I probably could write this answer for you. But I think it's worth asking. I think the big fear is that something that you've seen in the increased shopping behavior or the potential for AI changes your history of taking fairly small bites when you try to change prices. So I mean, it's worth reiterating just your approach towards the actual price changes and whether or not -- how we should think about the potential for you or your competitors taking pretty big changes in the future if the environment changes.

I think no matter what the environment, we are going to remain disciplined. And we're not going to -- people want stable rates. Customers want stable rates. And so we're going to do that. And we have so much data that are -- that's our competitive advantage. Our biggest competitive advantage, I believe, with the prices is our industry-leading segmentation, including our UBI, our Snapshot. So we're going -- it will be a different way with which customers want to shop possibly, but we're going to keep our discipline because I'm not going to swing the pendulum. We will always work towards our target profit margins that we've set.

I'd just add on that, Progressive, we have a history of competing in different shopping environments. An example is in the independent agent channel, where with some agents we're shopped on a comparative rater against many other brands. And we believe we compete very effectively there. And in the direct channel, often people come directly to Progressive and get one quote.

Sometimes though, we offer them quotes of other companies. And so we've had a history of being able to both engage one-on-one with customers when they're getting a single quote, but also engage in a competitive environment with many quotes. And so that makes us confident that as the environment changes, we can remain nimble and respond to it effectively.

Yes, I guess one of the things I would...

Hold on, Pat is going to add something real quick.

Yes, just a quick you mentioned a step change in kind of rating, like, unless there's a massive change in acquisition cost, I think our ability to leverage our scale, leverage our data and actually revise rates more frequently and with a smaller magnitude is essential to winning with more frequent shopping that potentially is automated or done by an agent.

So I just challenge your proposition that big changes may come out of this. I think it's the carriers who are equipped to more precisely and more rapidly adjust rates on a small basis to ensure as the machines shop more often, that you've got your best, most competitive, most accurate rate out on the street almost continuously.

Your next question comes from the line of Brian Meredith with UBS.

So for my first question, I'm just curious, Commercial Lines for the quarter, if I look at your, we'll it, combined ratio or loss ratio ex reserving, it's kind of mid-95 or mid-90s combined ratios. Is there something unusual that happened this quarter that really caused it the pop up? Or is this kind of a new level that we should expect?

No, I don't think you should necessarily expect it as a new level. August, there were some combined ratios up due to some higher reserving. In September, we would call out as a month of just some elevated -- it's typically elevated in terms of volatility. So we're watching those closely. But we -- obviously, we're still sub-93 for the quarter, so we feel good about it. But no, I don't think you'd necessarily have that as the new normal because those 2 months were a little bit volatile based on different things.

Makes sense. And then second question, just pivoting over to personal auto. Claims frequency trends continue to be quite favorable for you all and I think the industry. I'm just curious, are you factoring in call it, this favorable claims frequency we've seen for at least the last couple of years into pricing right now? And is maybe there a new outlook that you'll have or your long-term outlook on frequency may be changing given what's going on with ADAS technology and all that stuff for cars?

Yes. We look at all the technology, and we can talk about the pricing. I'll have Jim talk about the pricing. What we're seeing and what we're watching probably more closely is driving behavior and driving is still down about 3%. I'm not sure if that's the new normal. We're seeing a lot of the driving on non-commute miles like travel miles, which have less frequency. So we'll watch those to see if those persist as we think about pricing.

Yes. And I would just reiterate a point I made in an earlier reply that when we think about rate adequacy and specifically future trends, we do so at the state level. So we'll pick up variation across jurisdiction or market. And then while frequency is a portion of what we evaluate when we think about future inflation, there's also certainly correlations and offsets with severity and our mix of business.

So we'll factor in all 3, understand if we see a drop in frequency, but as illustratively, it's a function of technology and there's an offsetting increase in severity, we'll pick that up and then basically look to see with some degree of reasonable accuracy, what we think our best estimate is of future overall loss costs.

Your next question comes from the line of Alex Scott with Barclays.

Wanted to ask on capital deployment and maybe just remind us your priorities, particularly as we're heading into end of the year when sometimes you've done a special dividend?

Yes. I'll have Andrew take that. I'll have him talk -- like you said about how we think about capital and how we think about excess capital.

Yes, Alex. So the -- I'll start by just reiterating our 3 layers of capital that we think about at Progressive. The first layer is regulatory capital. This is the required capital from our regulators. And here, an important metric we think about is our premium to surplus ratio. I'll remind you that 2 of our regulators have allowed us to provide a clearance to move personal auto to a 3.5:1, which is a higher level of operating leverage than we've had historically in those jurisdictions for personal auto.

Other environments and other products have different levels, different thresholds for that same premium to surplus metric. But that first layer is about regulatory capital. The second layer is our contingent capital. There, we try to think about 1 in 200-year events and the impact on our balance sheet and make sure that we have enough capital to withstand those events. Above that is where we -- what we consider to be additional or excess capital, and that's where I think both internally and externally, we're focused on is what that looks like and what we should be thinking about there.

We've had a strong year of profitable execution, and that's resulted in really strong capital generation. And with the capital we generate, our most important use of funds is to fund our core business, which we've grown by $3.5 billion in net written premium so far in 2026. Beyond funding business growth, we take a disciplined approach to that additional capital layer. We try to optimize our balance sheet and maximize shareholder returns.

And we talked about this in the March investor call, and we look at really 3 options for that additional capital. The first one is share repurchase. In 2026, we already repurchased $1.6 billion in stock, which is about $1.5 billion more than we repurchased last year. We still have a quarter left in the year, and so it could certainly go up. While our strong profitability metrics are similar to last year, we have spent considerably more capital on share repurchases than we did last year.

The second bucket of options we look at are around strategic options. We will continue to evaluate strategic options available to our operating business or in our investment portfolio that may require capital. Our final bucket is dividends. Finally, our Board will consider declaring a variable dividend, also taking account the financial flexibility that we want to have as a company. The decision there depends on our other options and opportunities.

And so, dividends are just one aspect of the larger conversation around capital, and we continue to iterate through those 3 options for additional capital to optimize our balance sheet and maximize shareholder value. And so we'll continue to do that as we go towards the end of the year, and our Board, will make a decision on the dividend later in the year.

Your next question comes from the line of Meyer Shields with Keefe, Bruyette, & Woods.

Tricia, your letter mentioned entering California with a BOP product. And I was hoping you could update us on where you are in small commercial in terms of growing as fast as possible.

We're in 47 states. California is exciting because it has so many small businesses. It's obviously very new. So, we don't have a lot of data on that. We are on track with our plan that Karen rolled out some years ago in terms of increasing. And I believe we are continuing to evolve that plan because we think there's even more opportunity. So that's another one of those areas, like I talked about property that I believe, in the next several years, we have a lot of runway to grow. I'm very excited about it.

Okay. And then unrelated follow-up, I guess. When -- or if we assume that there's a lot more shopping and maybe lower conversion rates in an agentic AI world, are there any expenses associated with issuing quotes that require a shift in business model. I'm thinking like paying for credit scores, but I don't know if there's a more broad issue.

Yes, I'm sure there will be. I don't know that we're at that point yet. I mean I think from a conversion perspective, we're excited about that. I'm not sure if I'm answering your question, but yes, there'll be -- there will be expenses related to information we need to accurately quote, but there'll be expenses or savings related to things being more from an agent perspective.

I would add is that, I mean, we feel generally, if shopping increases, that benefits Progressive because that means more consumers are going to see the competitive rates that we have available. So we'll continue to watch that. But that's not one of the not one of the primary things that we're looking at right now.

Your next question comes from the line of Yaron Kinar with Mizuho.

So on your comment regarding advertising to maximize growth as long as that spend remains efficient, are there changes to advertising channels that you're prioritizing when considering normalizing retention?

Yes. I mean we look at that all the time to see what the efficiency is both on a monetary basis and a conversion basis. And we look also what competitors are doing. So as an example, I talked a little bit about not spending in the channels where it's not economically viable or prudent for us. We won't do that across the board, whether it's agency or direct. So yes, that's -- our story is basically we have -- we buy a lot of our media internally. We think that's one of our secret sauces. We understand the conversion rate where -- from where we're advertising. We'll keep trying to capitalize on that given our large budget.

Maybe just one addition there. In addition to optimizing around the conversion, we optimize around the lifetime value of the customers that are coming in. And so -- to your question, retention is already part of that calculation. And so as it changes by advertising channel, we're able to make sure that our lifetime values reflect any dynamics there.

That's very helpful. And then for my second question, if I could shift gears to the investment portfolio. So as the company shifts that portfolio to take on a bit more risk per comments you made, I think, in previous calls. What's the capital impact from this? And I guess what I'm trying to get at is, does it potentially lower your investment leverage or be -- can it become a headwind to your move to extend premium and surplus to 3.5x?

I'll have Andrew start with that. Maybe if you need Jonathan to weigh in on some more details, we could do that.

Yes, I'll start and then Jon can add on. So the way -- so our regulatory capital layer, I talked about the 3 capital layers in the previous question. The first layer is regulatory capital. For that, as we go through the calculations with our regulators around RBC and IRIS ratio, certainly, our investment mix has an impact there. We mostly talk about premium and surplus because that is an IRIS ratio that is most impactful on the amount of capital we need to hold in the regulatory layer, but investments do play a role there.

And then secondly, when we calculate contingent capital layers, we also include our investment mix there and make sure that, as we think about a 1 in 200-year event, it's reflective of our investments. So to your question, yes, investments impact both of those, that being said, they are not driving major changes today, and it doesn't hold us back from doing what we think is right from a shareholder value perspective. And so we do consider the impact on capital when we're making investment choices, but it is not a huge driver today of our investment selection.

Jon Bauer, I don't know if you want to add on anything there.

Yes. The only thing that I would just echo in terms of what Andrew is saying is, the leadership team at Progressive, be it on the investment side, CFO, CEO with Andrew and Tricia, we are always talking about the best way that we could drive long-term shareholder value. And so you can be assured when we think about investment risk that we would take now or in the future, it would only be decided in the realm of this is the right use of capital that would drive overall shareholder returns for Progressive.

So we are all very much focused on how do we have the return on equity and the growth that we're looking for to drive the business forward. So it's a great question, and those conversations are always had, be it any of the realms that Andrew talked about in terms of use of capital for share repurchase, dividends, or strategic or investment risk. Those are all the questions we're asking ourselves and our focus is on driving long-term shareholder value.

Your next question comes from the line of Pablo Singzon with JPMorgan.

Combined ratios in the homeowners book have been very good for some time already with or without catastrophes. Do you think that goes up the more you push into the bundled market? And I guess if you have a 96% target for personal auto, do you have a similar target in mind for homeowners?

Yes. We don't actually share our individual targets for different products, and we are pleased with the combined ratios that we have been enjoying. However, we do want to grow, so that could push it up a little bit. And obviously, catastrophes are a part of it, and we have those typically baked in on a low, but it's been a very low cat year. But -- yes, I mean we're going to grow as fast as we can and that the 70s combined ratio probably isn't long-term strategic if we want to grow. We'll definitely in the aggregate be at or below 96%.

And I would just add, as it relates to our calendar year performance, we are still getting some measure of a tailwind on the rate action we've taken over the past couple of years. And just a reminder that we sell annual policies. So that tailwind will persist longer relative to what we would experience in auto.

This concludes the Q&A session, and this concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.

Good morning, and thank you for joining us today for Progressive's Second Quarter Investor Event. I am Julianna Paterra, Director of Investor Relations, and I will be moderator for today's event. The company will not make detailed comments related to its results in addition to those provided in its annual report on Form 10-K, quarterly reports on Form 10-Q and the letter to shareholders, which have been posted to the company's website.

This quarter includes a presentation on a specific portion of our business, followed by a question-and-answer session with members of our leadership team. The introductory comments and the presentation were previously recorded. Upon completion of the previously recorded remarks, we will use the balance of the 90 minutes scheduled for this event for live questions and answers with leaders featured in our recorded remarks as well as other members of our management team.

As always, discussions in this event may include forward-looking statements. These statements are based on management's current expectations and are subject to many risks and uncertainties that could cause actual events and results to differ materially from those discussed during today's event.

Additional information concerning those risks and uncertainties is available in our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2025, and supplemented by our Form 10-Q for the second quarter of 2026, where you will find discussions of the risk factors affecting our businesses, safe harbor statements related to forward-looking statements and other discussions of the challenges we face. These documents can be found via the Investor Relations section of our website at investors.progressive.com.

To begin today, I am pleased to introduce our CEO, Tricia Griffith, who will kick us off with some introductory comments. Tricia?

Thanks, everyone, for joining us today. At Progressive, one of the areas we really pride ourselves on is creating internal career paths and developing talent. Our ability to move people around the company to expand their experience and deepen their skill set is what helps us build an extremely strong bench. That approach leads to very robust and extensive succession plans that are created years in advance of need.

As we previously announced, Pat Callahan will be retiring in January. So before we begin, I'd like to thank him for his extraordinary leadership and service to Progressive over nearly 24 years. He has certainly made a lasting impact on our business and our people.

As we manage this transition, I've asked Lori Niederst to step into the newly created role of Chief Personal Lines Officer, overseeing both Personal Lines and CRM. Lori's appointment reflects our deep bench, and she brings a wealth of experience having been CRM President, Chief Human Resources Officer and in claims HR. I'm very excited to introduce Lori as she leads Personal Lines into the next chapter.

Thanks, Tricia. Good morning, and thank you for joining us. I recently assumed the role of Chief Personal Lines Officer. And while the title is new, many of our strategic priorities have been in place for quite some time. In fact, during a 2023 IR call, I presented our Robinsons agenda in the direct channel, and you'll get an update on these efforts today.

But before we jump into the details, let me start with the foundation that guides our decision-making. As you know, Progressive segmentation capabilities have enabled us to outperform over the short and long term in a very competitive industry. Ask any Progressive person, and they'll tell you that our objective is to grow as fast as possible at or below a 96 while delivering high-quality customer service.

It's our reverence for data and ability to match rate to risk that have enabled us to grow twice as fast as the private passenger auto industry over the past 10 years at a combined ratio that's 7 points lower. That's a combination that no other carrier has delivered on a consistent basis.

This discipline is supported by our four strategic pillars that have guided us since we formally established them in 2015, and they continue to serve us well today.

First, people and culture. The positioning is intentional as our people and our culture are our strongest and most durable competitive advantage and everything else builds from this foundation.

Second, broad needs. We're focused on serving customers across more of their insurance needs over their lifetime, not just in a single transaction or at a single point in time. This helps us build meaningful customer relationships and improves retention.

Third, our leading brand. The Progressive brand is widely recognized, and we support it with innovative products and experiences that give customers confidence.

And fourth, competitive prices. This reflects the underwriting and operating discipline that is central to how we run the business, including strong segmentation, claims accuracy and organizational efficiency that allows us to offer competitive rates.

Taken together, these four pillars are how we compete in the marketplace, serve customers and position the business for profitable growth. Today, we're focusing on two of these strategic pillars, broad needs and competitive prices, with the goal of having products to meet customer needs throughout their lifetime.

Next up, Pat Callahan, our Personal Lines President, is going to set the stage for a detailed discussion of our auto and home products. John Curtiss will cover home. And because Jim Curtis, our National Auto Leader, couldn't be here today, I'll be back to explain how we're leveraging our strength in auto to create a compelling bundled offering.

Pat, over to you.

Thanks, Lori. Today, we're going to cover three topics. I'll lead off setting up some context on the Robinsons opportunity, then John Curtiss, our National Property Leader, will provide an update on our property business turnaround and how we're working to deliver both broadly available and competitively priced property products to meet the needs of Robinsons customers.

Following John's update on property, we'll go back to Lori for some more details on how Jim's national auto team continues to leverage our scale, breadth of distribution and auto product to create competitive advantage for our bundled home and auto offering.

Let's begin with a quick level set on the incredible strength and momentum of our auto franchise. As Lori highlighted, our continued investment across all four strategic pillars enables us to profitably grow in the highly competitive U.S. auto market. Coming off an incredibly strong 2025 when we captured approximately 75% of the total industry premium growth, we recently achieved the milestone of becoming the largest U.S. personal auto writer in the trailing 12-month period as measured by direct premiums written.

We're thrilled to continue to see how our focus on delivering a broad suite of competitively priced products enables us to help a growing share of U.S. households save money on their protection products by switching to Progressive. Today, nearly 1 in 4 U.S. households trust Progressive for at least one Personal Lines protection product, and we're just getting started.

As you all know, we break down the U.S. personal auto market across four segments: Sam's who are inconsistently insured, which make up about 15% of the market; Diane's who are continuously insured non-homeowners and make up about 24% of the market; Wrights, who are consistently insured unbundled auto home customers and make up about 27% of the market; and Robinsons, who are consistently insured bundled auto and home customers who make up almost 35% of the auto market.

Our #1 position in auto is impressive, but it's even more impressive when you see that we achieved that position while primarily focusing on the Sam, Diane and Wright segments, which represent roughly 2/3 of the total U.S. auto market. We continue to enjoy both strong double-digit market share and PIF growth in those three segments, while our single-digit market share and PIF growth in Robinsons highlights the significant growth opportunity that Robinsons represent.

Going deeper and looking at the segment market share by distribution channel, the opportunity becomes even clearer. Today, the U.S. auto market is about 37% captive or exclusive agent, about 31% independent agent and about 32% in the direct channel.

Focusing on the left side for the direct channel, you'll see we enjoy solid double-digit share and auto PIF growth across segments. We estimate our share of direct Robinsons is roughly half our share of direct rights, demonstrating that the combination of our industry-leading auto product, combined with our direct multi-carrier property offering is meeting the bundling needs of many direct auto customers who own their homes.

However, we still have plenty of room to grow Direct Robinsons share while the direct channel continues to grow share of the overall auto market.

The right side shows the opportunity in Agency Robinsons. 85% of Robinsons auto premiums are sold through agents, roughly 2/3 captive, 1/3 independent agent. And given our auto leadership in the IA channel and customer migration from captive to IA, we see significant tailwinds to the size of the IA Robinsons market.

Our low market share and flat PIF growth in the Agency Robinsons segment reinforces both the growth potential in Agency Robinsons and how recent initiatives to reposition our property business for profitable growth halted Robinsons PIF growth in 2025.

Without stealing John and Lori's thunder, I believe we're investing in the right places to unlock the potential in the Agency Robinsons segment. Beyond being a large and largely unpenetrated segment, the value of our Robinsons household is significantly higher than any other customer segment, generating about 70% higher lifetime premium than monoline rights and fivefold the lifetime premium of a Sam.

In summary, we've become the largest writer of U.S. personal auto while significantly penetrating only about 2/3 of the overall market for the Sam, Diane's and Wrights segments. Our growth in Wrights PIFs across channels and in direct Robinsons demonstrate that our auto product is highly competitive for preferred households.

A key area of focus in agency is having a broadly available, competitively priced property offering, and we're aggressively investing to leverage broader Progressive segmentation, risk selection and distribution strengths to address this opportunity.

For more on where we are and where we're going with property, I'll turn it over to John Curtiss.

As Pat mentioned, my name is John Curtiss, and I'm the National Property Leader in Personal Lines at Progressive. I'm excited to give you an overview of our progress and plans in our property business. Since our last update in 2022, we have made meaningful progress. We have improved profitability, reduced volatility, strengthened core capabilities and positioned the business to better support Progressive's growth in the Robinson bundled home and auto segment.

Property plays a distinct and important role within Progressive's strategy. Our focus is on owner-occupied homes that are bundled with Progressive auto, supported by a broad property product portfolio and partner agents who understand and support our underwriting strategy.

Our objective is to provide broadly available competitive property offerings that help grow Robinson market share while meeting our financial and return objectives. While Progressive broadly manages the business to grow as fast as possible at or below a 96 combined ratio, property is different. Given its greater volatility and higher capital requirements, we manage it to generate an appropriate return on capital while ensuring volatility does not create outsized pressure on Progressive's results.

If we execute well, property can support meaningful bundled home and auto growth while delivering more consistent profitability and allow us to close the market share gap in the Robinsons segment that Pat referenced a few minutes ago.

Since 2015, property direct written premium has grown by 3.7x, and we are now a top 12 carrier in the industry. When ASI was acquired, it was a regional carrier with meaningful concentration in hurricane-exposed states. Since then, we've expanded to 48 states and built a multichannel distribution strategy, selling both through independent agents and as a leading carrier with our Progressive Advantage Agency.

But scale alone is not the only objective. After several years of profitability pressure, we made deliberate choices to slow growth to improve profitability, reduce volatility and enhance our capabilities to manage this business more effectively.

The rest of this presentation is organized around two themes: what we did to restore profitability in our property business and how we are now converting improved health into disciplined growth in support of our mission of becoming more broadly available with competitive offerings.

First, I'll recap the progress we've made since our 2022 update when we outlined three key opportunities: improving profitability, reducing volatility and advancing capabilities. Then I'll shift to where we're headed, including the actions we are taking to become more broadly available with competitive property offerings while continuing to meet our financial objectives. The key message is that this turnaround is substantially complete, and the next phase is about disciplined and targeted growth.

First, profitability has improved meaningfully. In 2022, we acknowledged that property had not achieved its target margin, largely because weather losses were running above expectations. Since then, we've improved results through rate increases, better pricing and segmentation, enhanced risk selection and more disciplined exposure management.

The improvement is summarized in the graph, which shows our net combined ratio broken out into three components: weather and catastrophic losses, attritional losses and expense ratio. Through 2022, the net combined ratio was above 100. In 2023 and 2024, we moved below 100, but we're still above our targets.

In 2025, we delivered a 75 combined ratio, which is a superior result. While 2025 benefited from a mild catastrophe season and favorable prior year development, underlying profitability was in line with our targets even after accounting for these tailwinds. Our strong profitability is continuing into 2026 with a year-to-date combined ratio of 78.

The second opportunity was reducing volatility, and we have materially improved the risk profile of our overall property book. In 2022, we shared our goal to reduce Florida exposure and limit growth in states exposed to heavy cat risk to reduce volatility over time as the total property book grew. Today, we have rightsized our Florida exposure, reduced our exposure to other cat-prone states and improved our portfolio metrics.

The chart in the upper right shows high weather risk states as a percentage of total insured value in 2022 and 2025. During this time, we reduced high weather risk state total insured value mix by 23%. We did this through a series of actions, which included nonrenewals in Florida focused on high-risk coastal properties and properties not compliant with recommended building codes, deliberate growth management in states with high severe convective storm and wildfire risk and growing faster in lower weather risk markets.

The graph on the bottom shows the cumulative change in our portfolio metrics over time. Since 2022, total insured value has increased 30%, while our modeled 1 in 100-year probable maximum loss has declined by nearly 33%. Simply said, we have grown the book while reducing tail risk. This creates a stronger, less volatile portfolio and reduces the likelihood that severe weather events create outsized pressure on our results.

The third opportunity we focused on was advancing our capabilities. Over the last 3 years, we have made meaningful progress building the property capabilities needed to complement Progressive's industry-leading auto position and support our bundled home and auto strategy. In 2022, we acknowledged that while we had invested in organizational capabilities and improved price segmentation, we were not best-in-class yet.

Since then, we have doubled down on the investments needed to bring broadly available competitive property products to market. These investments are focused in six key areas. pricing accuracy, product segmentation with speed to market, risk selection models, cost sharing, exposure management and distribution strategy.

Together, these are helping us strengthen segmentation, manage risk more effectively and support disciplined growth going forward. Across the six capability areas, we have made meaningful progress, and I will quickly highlight our advancements on each. The table on the following slides highlights a key tactic for each capability and the progress we have made deploying them since 2024.

First, we improved pricing accuracy by implementing a by-peril pricing strategy that allows us to price at a more granular level and for differences in peril mix and target returns. This strategy has been deployed in all but one state, up significantly from states representing 39% of Progressive Homes premium in 2024.

Second, we advanced product segmentation and speed to market. In late 2023, we began deployment of our 5.0 product model, which was a significant advancement and included expanded by-peril rate order of calculations and several new variables. Since then, we've introduced our 5.1 product model. And just last month, we launched 6.0, which adds new segmentation such as aerial imagery and predictive auto variables.

We also established a dedicated product model development team to increase speed to market, and we are actively reducing our model upgrade rate revision timelines. Through June, states representing 93% of Progressive Homes premium are on our 5.0 product model or newer.

Third, we deployed a new risk model countrywide to help identify segments we cannot profitably write and policies that require more information before binding coverage. Research on next-generation risk models is in development with plans to deploy later this year.

Fourth, we expanded cost sharing through higher wind hail deductibles and roof material payment schedules where permitted, with a particular focus on severe convective storm states to help reduce volatility in our results.

Fifth, we strengthened exposure management through targeted nonrenewals of wildfire and wind pool exposures where our modeled losses exceeded our risk appetite. This is in addition to the work done to rightsize Florida and reduce our cat exposure to other cat-prone states. These wildfire and wind pool nonrenewals are now 73% complete.

Lastly, we formalized our distribution strategy by removing property appointments from agents whose business models would make it difficult for them to be successful with us given our volume, bundle and other expectations. We're also working closely with many of our agents to make sure they have the resources to achieve our goals. Through June, nearly 92% of this remediation is complete or in progress.

Together, these investments are allowing us to compete more confidently in more markets. The result of this work is a materially healthier homeowners business and a much broader set of markets where we can now confidently pursue growth.

The maps on the right show the shift from May 2025 to June 2026. In May 2025, 18 states were classified as healthy and well positioned for growth. By June 2026, this number had increased to 41 states. This represents a significant expansion of our addressable growth opportunity, more than doubling from 40% to 82% of the property insurance market.

Our green and yellow designations reflect both controllable business factors and external market conditions. Controllable factors include rate adequacy, segmentation, contract and cost sharing terms, risk selection and exposure management. External factors include the regulatory environment and broader market dynamics.

A yellow designation does not necessarily indicate poor performance. It may reflect timing, regulatory constraints or markets where we need to remain more selective. The broader point is that we now have a much larger set of markets where we can pursue growth with greater confidence and control.

So with the turnaround substantially complete, our focus now shifts to disciplined growth. We are working to become more broadly available with competitive property offerings in markets where we have high confidence in the health of the business.

This is an important enabler of Progressive's ability to grow share in the highly attractive Robinson bundled home and auto segment. This phase is about converting improved business health into targeted growth while maintaining the same financial discipline that enabled the turnaround.

As business health has improved, we have deliberately restored availability and expanded distribution in markets where the economics support growth. The chart on the left shows availability, which we define as the percentage of quotes eligible for a policy without additional underwriting review.

During the turnaround, we intentionally reduced availability by requiring more underwriting reviews as a way to carefully control growth and protect profitability. As state health improved, we began restoring availability in a targeted way. Since the third quarter of 2024, availability has more than doubled. We have moved more quickly in lower weather risk states where the lower risk profile gives us greater confidence.

At the same time, we are also slowly expanding in higher weather risk states as our pricing, underwriting and exposure management capabilities mature. The actions supporting this increase are practical and targeted and include enabling quoting and binding where restrictions are no longer needed, retiring obsolete underwriting limitations and expanding appetite where the business case supports profitable growth.

We are also investing in distribution more strategically, such as reopening new agent appointments with a focus on agents with large monoline auto books, expanding our relationships with national agency partners and creating a more efficient appointment process for former captive agents. The point is that growth is being rebuilt deliberately based on stronger business health and more intentional distribution choices.

The second imperative is to improve our competitive position. The actions required to restore property profitability created pressure on both price and nonprice competitiveness. As the business has stabilized, we are focused on rebuilding competitiveness without compromising the pricing, underwriting and exposure management discipline that supported the turnaround.

On price competitiveness, significant rate actions, combined with more competitors returning to the market have reduced our estimated win rate on comparative raters. This trend is shown by the blue line on the graph.

Part of this reflects Progressive taking more rate than competitors to restore profitability, but it also reflects a broader market shift. Since the first quarter of 2024, the average number of carriers returning rates on comparative raters has increased by just over 30%, which naturally lowers expected win rates. This is represented by the gray line.

In that context, our competitiveness appears broadly aligned with market participation levels. These comparisons are directional estimates as carrier settings and defaults vary across comparative raters.

On nonprice competitiveness, our market intelligence shows that some of our actions created friction that reduced agent consideration for certain consumer segments. We are addressing these barriers in a targeted way with the goal of improving the agent and the customer experience without compromising risk discipline.

Our actions fall into three areas: lowering rates where indications support it, continuing to deploy segmentation advancements and reducing agent and customer friction. This includes adjusting cost-sharing mandates in key growth markets, aligning underwriting appetite and processes with market expectations and improving system ease of use.

In closing, we are beginning to see meaningful progress from our disciplined approach to growth. The graph on the lower left shows same-day issued policies on a 4-week average. It reflects the intentional slowdown in new business volume from the actions we took to restore business health in 2024, followed by the flat period while we executed our turnaround tactics and most recently, the volume rebound as we expand availability, strengthen distribution and improve our competitive position.

The three primary takeaways I want to leave with you are: first, the property turnaround is substantially complete. We have improved profitability, reduced volatility and strengthen the capabilities needed to manage this business more effectively.

Second, we are positioned well for disciplined growth. We have materially expanded the number of states that are healthy and growth ready, and we are increasing availability and distribution where we have confidence in the economics.

And third, property is actively working to become a stronger enabler of Progressive's Robinson strategy. By offering more broadly available and competitive property products while maintaining financial discipline, we can help Progressive grow bundled home and auto market share in a more sustainable way.

Thank you for your time, and I will now hand it over to Lori Niederst, who will discuss how the improvements in property will help to enable our broader auto Robinson strategy.

Thanks, John. Building on Pat's framing of the Robinson opportunity and John's overview of the progress we've made repositioning our property business, I'll now complete the picture. I'll cover what we're seeing in the auto marketplace, the progress we've made and discuss how our market position and continued investments support future growth.

I want to briefly come back to the market share view that Pat covered earlier, not to repeat the full discussion, but to reinforce why it's such an important page in the auto opportunity story.

Pat showed how meaningful the Robinson opportunity is across both direct and agency, but Progressive's opportunity differs by channel. In direct, we have solid Robinson share, but it remains well below [ Wrights ], which tells us there's still meaningful upside.

In agency, the opportunity is even greater. Building on Pat's point that most Robinson auto premium is sold through agents, the opportunity is especially important because our relative share remains low. This reflects, in part, the intentional work John just covered, repositioning property for improved business health, profitability and disciplined growth, which creates more visible upside as our capabilities continue to advance.

So the reason to revisit this slide is simple. The Robinson opportunity is large. It exists across our channels and the market is moving in ways that will impact how Progressive pursues it.

The next slide steps back to look at shifts in auto distribution, changes in consumer shopping behavior and the relationship between auto and home premiums that influence how customers think about bundling.

Before we move to Progressive's auto position and our investments to grow Robinsons, it's helpful to step back and look at the market dynamics shaping the opportunity. Starting in the upper right, over the last 10 years, we've seen a shift in industry premium from the combined agency channels towards direct, with direct now representing nearly 1/3 of the private passenger auto market.

In the lower right, we see a second important shift within the channel. Premium is moving from captive to independent agents, which matters because captive carriers have historically held a disproportionate share of bundled customers.

As Pat noted earlier, more than half of Robinsons were still with a captive carrier in 2025. As more of that opportunity becomes reachable through direct and independent agents, the market backdrop becomes more favorable for Progressive.

At the same time, consumer behavior is changing. Shopping has slowed somewhat from recent peaks, but remains elevated with more customers comparing options and shopping annually. We're also seeing older households represent a growing share of shoppers, which is particularly relevant for the Robinson opportunity.

The economics of the bundle also matter. Industry-wide, auto premiums represent roughly half of the combined auto and home premium. That means auto is often a large and highly visible part of the consumer's total insurance cost.

That sets up the next question. When a customer is evaluating both home and auto, how do they think about the shopping experience? And how does Progressive benefit when the experience starts with auto?

This slide brings the market dynamics to life through a simple customer journey. When a household is shopping, the decision is not always a bundle-first comparison. Often, the customer starts with the most visible and costly product. In many cases, that starting point is auto. Auto renewals are more frequent with 6-month policy terms, more visible as they not embedded in escrow and often a meaningful portion of the household budget.

That can make auto a natural lead product when consumers are comparing options, especially when they're motivated by price, ease and confidence in the carrier. When the journey is auto-led, Progressive is starting from a position of strength. Our auto brand competitive position, scale and distribution reach allow us to enter the customers' consideration set early and find opportunities to extend the customer value proposition to the broader household relationship.

The opportunity is to make that bridge from auto consideration to bundled consideration as seamless as possible. This is where property availability, product competitiveness, ease of quoting and channel execution all matter. They determine whether an auto shopping moment can become a Robinson relationship.

Consistent with our business model of being available when, where and how consumers choose to purchase, the point of this journey is straightforward. As more bundled customers become reachable through direct and independent agents, Progressive's ability to lead with auto and complement with a competitive property product is a critical path to increasing Robinson share.

After framing the share opportunity, market backdrop and the importance of an auto-led shopping experience, this slide brings the discussion back to our Robinson growth opportunity. Robinsons continue to grow in aggregate, but the results vary by channel because direct and agency have distinctly different business models.

In direct, Robinson policy in force growth has remained positive. This is squarely in Progressive's wheelhouse. We've proven we can generate demand, offer consumers choice and continually improve conversion.

In agency, Robinson growth has slowed as we intentionally reposition property for profitability, business health and long-term competitiveness. That slowdown was expected, given the choices John described earlier. And it creates a stronger foundation for disciplined growth going forward.

The key message is that growth in direct and agency will take different paths. Direct is growing and operating in continuous improvement mode, while agency represents a meaningful upside as property health allows for targeted investments that help us compete more effectively in the independent agent channel.

I'll use that distinction to organize the next few slides to go deeper in each channel. Let's start with direct, where HomeQuote Explorer, our distinctive platform for quoting property and bundles, provides customer choice. The HQX proposition is simple. When consumers come to Progressive for auto and home or just home, HQX provides options to ensure consumers get the coverage they need at a fair price.

In a 2023 Investor Relations call, I discussed the HQX business model in detail. I described our in-house agency, our ability to quote both affiliated and unaffiliated carriers and the win-win-win proposition it creates. Customers are provided choice, progressive is able to satisfy more household insurance needs, and partner carriers benefit from our acquisition engine.

HQX also meaningfully contributes to our Robinsons growth. The model combines digital and voice experiences. Customers can shop online, compare options based on price, coverage and service preferences, and they can call to receive guidance from nearly 2,000 Progressive in-house agents when they have questions or they need help.

Since launching online quoting in 2017, quote starts have grown at a 27% compound annual growth rate, increasing from just under 1 million annual quotes to more than 6 million today. A key driver of that growth has been expanding choice. We began with one carrier in 2007 and now offer 26 product options across 19 carriers. This expanded network increases our capacity and supports the broader customer-first value proposition.

Our success in direct is creating momentum with Progressive's brand consideration among Robinsons, having increased 13% over the last 3 years in our proprietary brand tracking study. The opportunity in direct is continuous improvement. At our scale, minor modifications can produce meaningful improvement in conversion while offering adjacent products like umbrella and renters strengthen the household relationship.

With that direct foundation established, let's shift to agency where the model and investment needs are different. With the progress John described in property, we believe Progressive is uniquely positioned to expand the value proposition we bring to independent agents and their customers.

We're not starting from scratch. With decades of experience, we've built a broad network of valued independent agents that creates a durable distribution channel. Today, we estimate that more than 40,000 agencies represent Progressive with over 90,000 storefronts. To put that in context, this footprint is larger than the U.S. presence of several of the most recognizable national restaurant and coffee brands combined.

This distribution breadth provides incredible market access. When combined with Progressive's national brand and the broad acceptability of our auto product, we've got all the right ingredients to scale.

And in the independent agent channel, scale matters. We estimate that Progressive is roughly 3x the size of our largest competitor in the channel. Our scale gives us a differentiated data advantage, creating producer level insights that help shape the capabilities we build for agents, which strengthens our position in the channel and feeds the flywheel over time.

Said simply, we have the infrastructure, brand, product breadth, scale and data advantage to make targeted property and bundled acquisition investments from a position of strength.

Next, I'll focus on two areas of investment in property and bundled acquisition, improving ease of use for agents and strengthening the value proposition we bring to the channel.

Ease of use is central to how agents operate, and it's an area where Progressive has invested for many years. In auto, that investment includes desktop quoting, server-based rating, for agents only and integration with third-party comparative raters, all with the goal of making it easier for agents to quote, sell and service Progressive customers.

The results of a blind survey of independent agents highlights our advantage. Agents consistently rate our auto sales and service functionality more favorably than competitors, which gives us confidence that we've built strong infrastructure on the agent desktop.

The opportunity now is to extend this ease of use in property and bundling. We've already made meaningful progress by investing in property quoting, providing adjacent products such as umbrella and renters, improving integration with the FAO portal and continued refinement of the property experience.

The next phase is focused on providing seamless bundled quoting for agents. That includes improving how auto and property are presented together, simplifying the sales flow and making the benefits of Progressive easy for agents to explain to customers.

The broader point is that this investment builds on a proven auto platform. We're not creating agent-facing infrastructure from scratch. We're extending capabilities that agents already know and use into the property and bundled experience.

The second area of investment is the value proposition we provide agents and compensation is an important part of that equation. Robinson customers are important to both Progressive and agents because they retain longer and offer a larger share of household insurance spend. Our Platinum program is designed to recognize the role agents play in developing and retaining Robinson relationships and align incentives with that shared value.

Beyond commission, Platinum provides agency development opportunities and features that help independent agents grow their business. This includes access to annual policies, enhanced system functionality to create bundles later in the policy life cycle and continuing education to support staff development. We're investing in our independent agents. So together, we can capitalize on the growth opportunity with bundled households, and we're focusing on their needs as business owners serving customers every day.

Much like agency distribution, Progressive scale creates meaningful advantage in product design. The size of our auto book gives us an exhaustive data set and a clear view into how customer needs differ across segments.

When we look at characteristics such as vehicle count, coverage limits, payment preferences and household composition, we see meaningful differences across Sam's, Diane's, Wrights and Robinsons. Those differences matter and inform how we design products, price risk and create experiences that match customer needs.

For Robinsons, that means building an auto product that supports bundled households with multi-policy discounts, higher coverage limits, pricing stability, billing options that fit different payment preferences and ease of use across agency and direct.

Our ambition is to become a destination insurer. We know customers' needs don't start and stop with bundled home and auto. So we're designing adjacent product options to extend the relationship over time. Trip interruption and Progressive vehicle protection are examples of optional protections that expand the value of the auto product.

I'm especially excited about embedded renters because it provides a great precursor for bundling. Consider a household with a young adult starting out on their own. If that customer begins with the Progressive auto policy that also meets their needs as a renter, we have an opportunity to protect them during a meaningful life transition, and we're positioned to remain the trusted insurance provider as their needs evolve. That's the power of product design that supports both today's needs and tomorrow's graduation opportunities.

As a reminder, we define graduation as moving from a single product to a broader household relationship. Back to the embedded renters example. This product feature allows us to meet a need early in the customer life cycle, stay connected as their needs evolve and create a natural path toward a future Robinson relationship.

Graduation also happens through more traditional cross-selling. Across both direct and agency, we look for opportunities to add auto or home to an existing monoline relationship to create the bundle. That allows us to anchor on an initial customer need, build trust and expand the relationship when the timing is right.

Our cross-sell workflows begin with identifying customers who may benefit from a multiproduct relationship and include policy reviews, customer communications and agent prompts. The impact of our graduation efforts is meaningful. Since 2023, we've created nearly 0.5 million Robinsons.

We view cross-selling not as an incremental tactic, but rather an important strategy to grow our Robinson share. Taken together, our strong auto position, property progress and channel-specific execution create a clear path for Robinson growth.

Thank you for your time today. I hope you leave with a better understanding of both the opportunity before us and the investments we're making to continue growing responsibly and profitably in Personal Lines.

This concludes the previously recorded portion of today's event. We now have members of our management team available live to answer questions. [Operator Instructions] We will now take our first question.

And our first question will be coming from the line of Elyse Greenspan of Wells Fargo.

My first question, I was just hoping to just kind of get your current thoughts on just how you guys are thinking about just the personal auto overall growth environment. I know in the Q, there were some comments just pointing to more competitive pressures, and we could see what's going on with rates throughout the industry. And so if you can just give us a sense of just the growth view and outlook. And I don't know if it's helpful to just break it out between agency and direct.

Great. Thanks, Elyse. Let me start at a high level about how we see growth. And then it might even go -- we'll go to private passenger I'll have Lori take that, but I'll go to some growth in the Commercial Lines area, which is a big part of our business as well.

So when I look at so far, some of the companies that have released earnings, comparatively speaking, we were very proud of our growth, especially when you look at our PIF growth. So take Personal Lines PIF growth at 8%, but that's based on 16% the following year, there the previous year and our best year ever.

So the fact the comparisons are kind of tough maybe don't look as great, but we are really proud of our growth. And of course, our unit of growth measurement that we care about the most is PIF growth, and we've surpassed 40 million PIFs. We've grown 2.8 million PIFs overall, 2.2 million auto, private passenger auto PIFs. So that's kind of the upfront thing.

But I think about, and Lori mentioned this in her opening, the advantage that we have, I think, about the strategic pillar of broad coverage. I think about having been embedded in two really solid channels for a very long time. So our roots in the independent agent channel go back 90 years. And of course, we were the first online in 1995 to sell auto. So having a reliance on two steady channels really gives us a good opportunity.

So that's just sort of my overarching part on our ability to grow and hopefully, the -- what we just talked about on the Robinsons growth gives you reasons to believe.

Let me go to Commercial just because I think we have some exciting things, and we have some -- we're pretty optimistic in Commercial Lines. And then I'll have Lori who, as you know, just took over as our Chief PL Officer; to talk about what they're working on in personal lines.

So from a Commercial Lines perspective, we are really in a good position from a profit perspective, which really allows us to focus more on growth. The industry in Commercial Lines continues to be over 100 CR. The last data point we have is about 104 CR, which is down from 110, but nowhere where we want to be. So we're taking some of that margin and increasing our media spend and our agent incentives, which is exciting.

And then here's kind of sort of three data points that give us reason to believe that we're at a turning point. We had positive new app growth in the Commercial Lines organization in the quarter, and it was most positive in June. So we see that as a turning point for growth. It is a signal.

And then on a PLE, our trailing 12 PLE is up, and we see that as our renewal rates being more competitive. Probably most importantly, and what we're excited about is our medium fleet program. So our quoting volume is the highest it's been since we purchased protective over 5 years ago. So we call that FSP now. So that's an exciting trend to think about.

And probably the last data point, I'll give you is on our medium our PIF growth year-over-year is up 30%. So while we usually focus on private passenger auto and it is a big growth trajectory for us, as you've seen in the Robinsons channel, our Commercial Lines is at a turning point, and we're pretty optimistic about the future with that.

And now I'll turn it over to Lori to talk a little bit more about private passenger auto.

Thanks, Tricia. Elyse, I'm going to add just a few data points to the setup that Tricia provided. And then I'll talk in detail about some of the actions we're taking in Personal Lines related to growth.

So if your question is partially being driven by our June results, we added 45,000 auto PIFs in the month, but one thing to remember is that the rate of growth in December is typically slower. And so that's going to translate to June being a slower renewal month.

But if you take a step back and look again a bit more broadly, Tricia mentioned it, our growth rates have slowed from the peak levels that we experienced in 2024 and 2025, but we continue to gain new customers, we're growing the top line, and we're investing in our business from a position of really strong profitability.

When we looked at the first quarter statutory data for the top 20 auto carriers, Progressive grew direct written premiums by $1.3 billion, while the remaining 19 carriers lost a combined $1.3 billion. And the second quarter for us was our sixth best sales quarter ever for direct auto new business apps.

We also reached another pretty major milestone for us, we mentioned it in the Q, but 40 million company-wide PIFs. In PL, PIFs were up 8%, as Tricia mentioned, and that includes 8% growth in agency auto, 10% growth in direct auto, 1% in property and 6% in special lines.

I'm anticipating a bunch of our commentary will mention the soft market conditions that we're experiencing. Competition is increasing. We're seeing more carriers take on additional risk, and they're increasing their appetite for growth. And at the same time, shopping activity appears to be leveling off. Although when you compare it to historical standards, it really remains high.

Our PLE is another function of growth. They're down here. But again, we're coming off of that post pandemic peak. And so when we look at the drivers of the decline, we believe it's largely consumer price sensitivity, which is leading to that sustained elevated shopping along with mix shifts that are resulting from our broader appetite.

Despite that backdrop, we continue to see really strong evidence that we've got competitive products in the market. Conversion is up in both channels, and we continue to win business when consumers shop.

All that said, let me spend a minute talking about the actions that we're taking to generate growth. First, we continue to take targeted rate decreases. During the quarter, we decreased auto rates in 16 states, and that represents 37% of our country-wide net written premium.

Second, we're investing in both acquisition in both channels. Tricia mentioned, increasing agent incentives, and we're also increasing advertising expenses. We reported $1.4 billion of advertising spend in the second quarter, and that's up 16% from last year. Despite the increase in spend, though, our cost per sale remains below our TAC, which gives us a bunch of confidence that the dollars we're spending are producing profitable growth.

Third, we continue to strengthen our competitive position, and we're doing it through segmentation, product enhancements and distribution improvements. So in auto, we continue to expand new snapshot and non-UBI product models, which leads for us to even greater accuracy matching rate to risk.

In property, you heard John talk about 42 states now operating on our latest 2 product models in 41 states positioned for growth as we continue to broaden availability.

So I share all that. And despite the fact that growth is moderated from the very elevated levels that we've experienced in recent years, our strategy really hasn't changed a bit. We remain focused on growing as fast as we can while maintaining our profitability objectives. And this means we're comfortable at points losing some volume, if it's at a rate that we believe is underpriced. And over the long term, this discipline has proven to generate market share gains for Progressive.

And then my follow-up question, you guys have been talking about, I think, on a couple of calls, right, about getting approval to go to a 3.5x premium to surplus, right, in most of your states, I believe. I think you guys were talking about working towards that this year.

Can you just provide an update on where we are? And then how does that tie into your capital plan, right? We did see elevated share repurchases so far this year, just hoping to tie together those two things.

Yes. I'll let Andrew take that one, Elyse, and he'll talk about the premium surplus because we're well on our way there. And then this will give him a good opportunity to talk about how he's thinking about capital overall.

Yes. Thanks, Tricia. Elyse, that's a great question. On the 3.5% premium to surplus, we were able to move towards it at the end of 2025. And we continue to move towards it in mid-2026 here. We did get some dividends from some of our insurance entities up to the parent. And then we continue that effort at the end of 2026.

And so of course, there are risk ratios, risk-based capital, things like that, that we have to think about and have to compute when we get towards the end of the year, but we remain bullish that for the vast majority of the entities that can move to 3.5 to 1, we'll be able to get there towards the end of the year. So we feel good about that.

On your larger question about capital and share repurchase, I can take a few minutes just to provide how I think about it in my new role and a bit on the wider topic of our use of capital.

I'll start with the big picture, which is, over the past 2 decades, we've generated more than $50 billion in net income and returned more than $30 billion to our shareholders. And so we have a policy of returning capital when we feel it's under leveraged within the company. Overall, we think our operating financial strategies have rewarded our shareholders well. And so we plan to continue them.

In the March investor call, we did a deep dive on our capital, how we think about our capital and the avenues we have with it. Just as a sink summary on that is that we believe our operational competitive advantage generates consistent underwriting margins while growing our market share.

And once we take on high operating leverage, which the [ 3.5:1 ] is a representative of, we get to magnify that operating competitive advantage. And this combination of operational excellence and our leverage is the core of generating the high ROEs that we've been able to generate over time. We also invest conservatively because of our high operating leverage. And so we want to make sure we have that stability for the company given the operating leverage that we employ.

With our high ROEs, we have the capacity to generate significant capital. When we generate capital, our top priority is to reinvest this into our business. This is our primary objective as management.

Progressive has shown the ability to grow quickly during hard markets, and so we've also engineered our financial policies to allow us flexibility to reinvest in our business when these opportunities present themselves. This is why we have a relatively low quarterly dividend, along with the flexibility of an annual variable dividend.

Now once we funded our underwriting growth, we have a strong preference to return capital to shareholders. We do retain some flexibility for corporate opportunities, but our bias is to return capital. In returning capital, we've had a historical preference for dividends as our primary mode of capital return. For many years, we had a formulaic variable dividend that essentially pushed all of our excess capital towards dividends. We moved away from this process in 2019. And with this, we started refining our share repurchase decision process.

As you called out, we've repurchased more this year than we have in previous years. Our share repurchase process includes an intrinsic value model along with peer and historical valuation benchmarks. And so we have a process by which we evaluate the share repurchase decision.

And so as CFO, I plan to have the same approach that we've had historically, which is to support the same stability and excellent returns for our shareholders. But our top priority will be to grow our business and to reinvest in our high-ROE business.

In times when our growth slows, and we have additional capital, such as capital, we might be able to bring out of our insurance entities as we move to the [ 3.5:1 ], we do plan to return that to shareholders, and we will look at the different modes between dividend and share repurchases in order to do that. But either way, between growing fast and reinvesting or returning capital to shareholders, we believe our shareholders win, and so we will continue to go down that path.

Our next question will be coming from the line of Tracy Benguigui of Wolfe Research.

On homeowners as a path to more Robinsons share, Florida moved from yellow to green state this year. Is that tort reform or your larger capital base, making your 100 PML to capital more supportive of growth?

Yes. I'll let John Curtiss take that. But we've obviously watched Florida closely since we nonrenewed some of the homes that we knew we couldn't make a profit margin on, and we're feeling a little bit better about that as well. Go ahead, John.

Yes, sure. That's a great question. Historically, Florida was our largest state in property. We did have profitability issues historically in the state. We do think that the tort reform has been helpful and is allowing not only Progressive but other carriers to kind of achieve better results.

One of the main drivers for the decrease in our 1 in 100-year PML were the actions that Tricia mentioned, which were -- or nonrenewing a big portion of our Florida book with a focus on coastal risk and properties that were on older building codes. And I think we're feeling a lot better. We're going to maintain our underwriting appetite, and we are starting to, in a very focused way, expand our distribution with agency partners.

Got it. But besides just the absolute 1 in 100 PML, is it fair that you're also measuring that against capital since capital has grown that suggestive that you could also grow more in that state?

Well, I think we'll grow if we think we can make our target profit margins. And so I think John really outlined, even if we -- capital will be separate from growth, we need capital to grow, but we're not going to grow unprofitably just because we have capital, is what I'd say.

Got it. And I like the property comparative radar screen where you're now blue, we can clearly see that you're now more competitive than peers. But what would the screen look like for auto?

I think the -- for auto, one of our strategic pillars is competitive pricing. And if you look at our history of segmentation, all the data we have, I don't know, I think it would look very promising because we're very competitive in the private passenger and have been for quite some time, really based on our constant segmentation and new product models and our treasure trove of data that allows us to understand it and be best in market. I think I talk about our industry-leading segmentation all the time.

Do you want to add anything, Pat?

No, other than the agency channel is highly competitive. It has been for a long time, and it's one of our more elastic channels in that comparative raters have a high penetration of quotes. And we think that is the core value proposition that comes from the independent agency channel, the ease and savings that consumers are looking for when they shop with an agent and they can look for multiple carriers to meet that client's needs.

What we have seen is our conversion remains very strong in the agency channel, which tells us that our offering remains highly competitive regardless of whether it's quoted directly with us. through our proprietary quoting or on the many comparative raters that are in market.

Next question will be coming from the line of Alex Scott of Barclays.

First question I have you is on what you're seeing in frequency trends. I think we've seen one of your peers talk about potentially increasing frequency. I think when we looked at the results from the last month, I think there is some concern that maybe frequency was starting to uptick as well. So maybe you could just give us a feel for the environment there and if at all or how it's affecting loss trend?

Yes. I'll start, and I'll ask Andrew to add anything that I've missed. Our frequency has been pretty stable. It's down this quarter, about 2.5%, down 2% for trailing 12. So we feel like our frequency trends are pretty much in line with what we intended.

It's always hard to understand. But we've talked about a couple of things that attribute to that and that is mix shift and also our vehicle miles traveled are down about 4 points in the quarter. So I'm pretty benign. Same thing on the Commercial Lines. Our frequency is down more in Commercial Lines based on our mix shift to more business auto contractor mixes.

Do you want to add anything, Andrew?

Yes. Last quarter, when you talked about frequency, we said we thought it might be moderating a little bit. Last quarter, it was flat year-over-year. This quarter, it's down 2%. And so right now, it doesn't look like we're seeing flattening trends. It's a little bit back and forth, but there's no signs that it's ticking up even given our June results.

Got it. That's all helpful. Second question I had is on the things you're doing with artificial intelligence and technology, maybe you could just give us a feel for how you expect that to influence your expense ratio, loss ratio, and your ability to compete with what you're doing relative to what you see in the marketplace?

Yes. I've shared a little bit about this in the last couple of calls, and we have a lot going on in this area, as you can imagine. We've always been a technology-forward company. So we're really studying what's out there, learning, growing and kind of have that on rents and repeat.

But the confidence that this audience should have in Progressive is, one, we have been a technology for company, and that we have a history of innovation, going back a long, long time.

And in fact, we have made investments in the last 10 years plus in a lot of digital initiatives that have helped our customers with ease of use. They include chatbots. And of course, we've had predictive AI in our world for some time now as well on, say, like things like prog.com to make decisions on a package that's good for you. We've now turned to Gen AI and Agentic AI in many areas of our business.

Here's what I'd say. I'd say that we have about a dozen or dozens, I should say, of advanced AI initiatives that are producing meaningful -- and we'll put some dollars to that at some point in the future, but meaningful results and an exciting pipeline of future initiatives. We feel really good about where we're testing, what we're doing. And at some future meeting when we have a more complete story, we'll tell you more about that.

I think I talked before that about 6 months ago or so, we formed an AI Strategy Council. We had -- I mean, AI council. We had strategy counts, and that's why we thought that would be good to have an AI council. So we -- they've come up with some really thoughtful things that we need to do across the enterprise, are actually going to communicate those during our next Board meeting to our Board of Directors. But they really took a look at overall the whole company and what we were doing and just to make sense of what our process is going to be short term, medium term, long term.

And then, of course, a little while ago about a month ago, we started -- we added our first Chief Strategy Officer. He works kind of hand in glove with our Chief Technology Officer. So we think of the business side of AI and the technology side of and they're helping manage it across the enterprise. So we know what our right-hand knows what our left hand's doing.

From a process perspective, our Board has a technology committee in-house for many, many years, so they have oversight to what we're doing from AI and other technology advances because everything that we do technology touches, but AI is touching more and more of it. And of course, we do it based on our core value. So we have a responsible AI committee that make sure that we do the right thing, and we always think that process through.

In terms of probably the first foray that you're going to see with most companies with AI is going to be more of a cost reduction. So I think it'd be more on the LAE side and the loss ratio -- and the expense ratio so, excuse me. And then as we get further and further into our AI initiatives, I think it could hit more on loss cost depending on what route we go.

But we'll share more about. I don't want to make headlines that are just -- that are out there. I could give you numbers now, but I think they're not as complete as I'd like them to be. Rest assured we're doing a lot in this area. I feel really comfortable with what we're investing and the returns we're getting to date.

And our next question will come from the line of Andrew Kligerman of TD Cowen.

Yes, that was a really impressive overview. On a blunt basis, I look at your property premium and it's a bit more than $3 billion out of, let's call it, roughly $80 billion in consolidated premium. How should I think about -- and I know you don't give guidance, but as we look maybe 10 years from now, how big a share of your premium could the coal owners get to?

And you insure about 1 in every 5 autos, that amazes me as well. what percent of homeowners could you get to? So I'm just kind of thinking very long term and wondering if you can help size what that opportunity is.

Yes. Andrew, if I had a crystal ball, I would absolutely give you some information. Here's what I'd say. What we're trying to give you today in our overview is this is a huge opportunity. And as you know, because we've brought you along in the journey, we've had fits and starts, but we feel like we're in such a good position, mainly because we took the last several years to invest in IT systems, in people and processes and segmentation.

I -- probably some of you remember this, but John Curtiss ran our auto, what we call PACE initiative, which was continuous getting new product models out to make sure we have rate to risk and that we continue to increase our preferred market share. That's one of the reasons why we asked him several years ago to run property because this is right in his wheelhouse, and he's doing a tremendous job.

So here's what I would say, huge runway, a lot of opportunity. I'm not going to give you -- we have obviously internal models that we work on. I'm not going to share those. I think what we're going to do is just put our money where our mouth is and continue to try to grow Robinsons and that starts with growing auto.

Andrew is going to add -- Andrew Quigg is going to add on something as well.

Andrew, I'm just going to add on one thing there, which is when you think about -- we do have about 1 in 5 vehicles insured with Progressive. When you think about the home market that we're going after, it is on the slides that were presented, our Progressive Home business is primarily targeting properties that are bundled with Progressive Auto.

And so not every home in America, right, is going to be bundled we're targeting those that will be bundled. And so as you think about the addressable market we're going after today, might be something to put into your calculus as you try to figure out where we might go over the next decade.

Got it. Got it. Very helpful. And with regard to -- you mentioned that -- you mentioned umbrella and renters products sold through other carriers. Kind of curious, could you share with us premium volume done through third parties?

And with that, maybe even shifting over to the Commercial end and what you're doing right now there in terms of premium volumes and -- anything to help size what it means to progress it today in terms of premiums or fees to Progressive? And I'll stop there.

Yes. I think more important than volume because when we're working with unaffiliated partners that what we're getting from them is a commission and we work with a lot of unaffiliated customers kind of across the board. So Lori has been working on two parts in the last several years. She talked about HQX, HomeQuote Explorer. And we've increased our stable of carriers there to really make sure that we are able to help out customers depending on their needs.

We have AutoQuote Explorer. So if you go to search for Progressive auto and for whatever reason, we don't seal a deal, it could be pricing, it could be one of many different things. we will provide for you unaffiliated partners we work with to make sure that we take care of our customers. That's the main thing.

And that's why I think it's important that many of us work with other companies, we don't necessarily write the businesses coming in on our own paper. What we're doing it for customers. They've gone to the process of trying to get coverage.

And of course, we've been doing that for many years in the Commercial Lines side with BusinessQuote Explorer, and making sure that maybe it's some of our products aligned with some products of other carriers. So we think it's important. It is -- it does affect incoming revenue from a commission perspective.

And Andrew can share a little bit more about that.

Yes, Andrew, if you -- of course, if you read our 10-Q and our 10-K, the commissions we receive from these third-party carriers can be found under our service revenues. And so through the first half of the year, we have $274 million of commissions and other fees that come from these relationships. And it's growing at a steady pace. And so that's one way for you to monitor how we're doing with those relationships and the economic benefit that it brings to progress.

Yes, I think what -- go ahead, Lori.

Just one more detail. Andrew, if you take a look at the presentation, I think the HQX model and our ability to sell partner carrier products is really what's leading to the difference in our Robinson share in the direct channel as compared to agency. And so I would suggest continue to focus on the gains we're going to make in market share as opposed to necessarily the commission volume.

And our next question will be coming from the line of Pablo Singzon of JPMorgan.

So from your presentation, you highlighted the importance of agents in pursuing your bundled strategy. So if we take the Robinsons segment, can you talk about the rough split between direct and agent there?

And I guess what I'm most interested in is -- has the market there stayed firmly within agency? Or are you seeing evidence of more bundled buyers might be in direct over time? And I guess, perhaps more broadly, maybe you can sort of give your thoughts about what how this market may look like down via-a-vis distribution?

Yes. I think we're going to depend on growth in both, especially I think we share sort of the trend in going from more captive agents to independent agents. Our model has always been around choice. And so we think there's obviously a huge opportunity in the agency channel.

John Curtiss just met with some Platinum agents a few weeks ago, and we'll continue to work with them and they're excited about that product. So that right now is a bigger opportunity, as you saw from the chart. But we think there's opportunity -- a pretty big opportunity in both agency and the direct channel and growing Robinsons.

Yes. If I could add just quickly, if you think about auto as sort of the leading direct versus agency indicator, in the presentation, we talked about, about 1/3 of U.S. auto insurance is sold direct to consumer. And on the property side, it's less than half of that. Part of that is because the product simply is more complex and not designed yet for direct distribution.

So think about you don't have [ even ] on a home. You have a lot of questions in the home insurance quote that require or typically are better answered when engaging a third party like a local independent agent, who can walk you through questions around your roof shape and your plumbing type and your wiring type or they just know the local market when it comes to what part of town you happen to be in, what the age of construction was and frankly, some details around what construction materials were in use at the time the home was built.

So we think there's a product opportunity that we have been investing in to close as we bring an easier to understand data fill enabled direct-to-consumer property product to market.

So if we think long term, if a household wants to buy their auto insurance directly, we think they should be able to buy their home insurance directly to. So if you think about closing that 15-point gap on the $160 billion, $170 billion homeowners insurance market, it's $20 billion that's just getting to where the auto market share is of direct that we think we will play a material role in closing and ultimately capture over time.

And then second question. So Lori, in your comments, you had mentioned some areas of irrational competition in Personal Auto. I was just hoping you could help contextualize that given combined ratios are very good for the industry overall and also for individual companies. So I guess are you seeing pricing behavior that effectively consumes all that margin that the industry is sitting on? Or are companies being more surgical in their competitive approach?

Yes. Sure. I'll handle that one. We talked about the soft market. And clearly, the industry is underwriting profitably, competition is getting more aggressive, and media spend is increasing both for us and for our competitors. And so you're seeing acquisition costs rise.

Related to profitability for us, you can count on us to maintain discipline. We're only going to spend when our cost per sale is below our target acquisition cost. And for us, when we talk about how media spend influences profitability, it's not just about how much we spend, we get to leverage our segmentation skills to determine where we spend.

And so our media team is looking at how many clicks, how many sales, how many quotes we're getting for every dollar we spend. And we're going to spend more where we know that there's room for incremental investment. And so we're going to continue to evaluate that spend in a very detailed and disciplined way. We're going to look to optimize growth, but we're going to look to maintain our cost per sale at or below TAC, which sits comfortably today.

Yes. I think Lori said it well. Segmentation and our scale of data will help us win in a soft market. It's very competitive. That's great for consumers. This is typically where we win.

And our next question will be coming from the line of David Motemaden of Evercore ISI.

I'm surprised within the within auto that you guys are still not really cutting price by that much. I'm surprised just given where the margins are running and I see that agent incentive spend has increased and Agency Robinson quote volume was up low double digits, but the Robinsons conversion in auto within the agency declined.

So I guess I'm wondering if auto is such a large driver of the purchase decision for those bundled households in a lot of cases, why not lower priced by more to increase conversion?

Yes. I mean I think we're in the position we've wanted to be in for a few years, and Pat can talk more about this as well. But we want to take small bites. I think historically, especially with inflation when it went up in 2023, we've had to take such large swings after COVID, large decreases. Consumers want stable rates. So we want to take a small bite to the apple.

So we feel good about what we're doing. We're very surgically decreasing rates, looking at state by state, segment by segment, and we believe that is a winning proposition. If we continue -- if we -- if there's a state as an example or a product where we don't think we can grow and we think giving away some of that margin will help us grow, we'll do it.

If there's a place where we don't think that will help, we won't give away margin for growth, and so it really is something that has been a highlight of what our pricing and product managers do to really understand that surgically and looking at it constantly. So we feel good about where we're going, we don't want to swing the pendulum the other way. We want to be very deliberate and use any margins for having growth.

Yes. The only quick thing I would add is, year-to-date, we had 30 states representing 63% of our premium, where we've taken new business rate decreases. And Tricia mentioned the kind of surgical bottoms-up way that our local product managers assess profitability it's not just at the state level, they're looking at the product and line coverage level in excruciating detail, honestly. And it's been really fun to be a part of the Personal Lines organization, working side by side with our product managers as they continue to assess profitability in this bottoms-up surgical way.

Yes. I mean -- but remember, our goal will continue to be grow as fast as we can. So know that, that's on our mind at all times.

Got it. And then maybe just bigger picture, you guys have been talking about growing the Robinsons for, I think, well over a decade. But the market share, I think it was like 1% back in 2017, and we're sitting here at 4%. So obviously, there's been some underwriting actions that's blunted the share gain over the last few years here. But I'm just wondering, I mean, this has been something that you guys have been attacking for a while and have not had as much success as you have had in the other segments.

So I'm wondering, from your perspective, what's structurally different this time versus some of the prior attempts to really grow share within the Robinsons segment? And do you think you have the expertise in-house? Or is this something that you might think about addressing through M&A or other means?

Yes. I mean I think we -- you're right, you're absolutely right. We've known this is an opportunity for Progressive for a long time. What we didn't have -- and there was also some catastrophic losses that happened over those years. So there's a lot of different things that happen.

So I think our first point of sort of restructuring to understand where it would be is what we did in Florida with the nonrenewal of properties that we knew we could make money on. But through that, our realization came that we just did not -- had not invested enough in cost sharing and segmentation by payroll in understanding just modeling like we did in the private passenger auto side, and that's where we're in a different position now.

It doesn't happen overnight for a couple of reasons. One, there's 12-month policies typically. And two, it took us a long time to get off the Florida property because of some other reasons. But that's, I think, why we're so bullish right now, is that we've invested in those, we've invested in technology. And we have invested in people, some within Progressive that are learning this, but also some that have come to us that have more of this knowledge.

So I do feel like -- you're right, we've been searching for this for a while, but I think we need to put our money where our mouth is, and we've done that. And as you can see the percentages that John Curtiss has been through on each of the slides, we're just really well positioned now to be able to have that growth.

And our next question will be coming from the line of Paul Newsome of Piper Sandler.

I just have one really probably a simple question. The growth in property, does that include thoughts or changes about your reinsurance purchasing as well? I mean a lot of folks use that as a pretty meaningful tool when they're increasing their property exposures.

Yes. We do think about reinsurance, obviously, a lot, and we'll be putting a primer out on that. shortly to be able to say that. But I'll have Brandon Hopkins, who runs our reinsurance, talk a little bit how he thinks about exposure and the reinsurance market.

Yes. Thanks for the question. I think this is the second time in the last 5 or 6 years, we've been asked about reinsurance. The last several years, we've maintained our overall capacity pretty stable despite recognizing decreasing exposures. That was a conscious decision. So now I think we're pretty well positioned to grow into the program that we have.

Does that include particular financial targets that -- exposure that you're managing with that? Or just where you are now in growing the value?

We do have group risk appetite statements in addition to our property business unit financial constraints that we manage around, and we've been well within those the last few years.

I would now like to turn the call back to Julianna for closing remarks.

That appears to have been our final question. With approximately 1 or 2 minutes left here, I'm going to pass it back to Tricia to conclude with a few remarks.

Yes. Thank you for your questions, your thoughtful questions. We're excited about our growth, we're excited about where we're at. I'm glad you got to see Lori again as she starts her new role. And the great news about Pat is that even after he formally retires from PL President in January, he will be around to be an adviser to me, and we have a lot of fun things planned for his "retirement." So a lot of work for him to do.

But I'm very proud of where we're at. As you can see from my letter, I'm proud of our employees and our culture and what we do to serve the customers we're privileged to serve. So I appreciate all of your time today and look forward to the next update. Thanks.

And this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.

Good morning, and thank you for joining us today for Progressive's First Quarter Investor Event. I'm Doug Constantine, Treasury Controller, and I will be moderator for today's event.

The company will not make detailed comments related to its results in addition to those provided in its annual report on Form 10-K, quarterly reports on Form 10-Q and a letter to shareholders, which have been posted to the company's website. Although our quarterly Investor Relations events often include a presentation on a specific portion of our business, we will instead use the 60 minutes scheduled for today's event for introductory comments by our Personal Lines President and a question-and-answer session with members of our leadership team.

Introductory comments by our Personal Lines President were previously recorded. Upon completion of the previously recorded remarks, we will use the balance of the 60 minutes scheduled for this event for live questions and answers with members of our leadership team.

As always, discussions in this event may include forward-looking statements. These statements are based on management's current expectations and are subject to many risks and uncertainties that could cause actual events and results to differ materially from those discussed during today's event. Additional information concerning those risks and uncertainties is available in our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2025, as supplemented by Form 10-Q for the first quarter of 2026, where you'll find discussions of the risk factors affecting our businesses, safe harbor statements related to forward-looking statements and other discussions of the challenges we face. These documents can be found via the Investor Relations section of our website at investors.progressive.com.

To begin today, I am pleased to introduce our Personal Lines President, Pat Callahan, who will kick us off with some introductory comments. Pat?

Good morning, and thank you for joining us today. First quarter results were consistent with the last several quarters, extraordinary profitability and growth well above the industry average. When performance is this strong for this long, it can be easy to take it for granted. So I wanted to take a few minutes to reflect on what the Progressive team has delivered.

First, market share. In Personal Auto, we gained 1.9 points of market share in 2025, moving us up to 18.6% share, our second straight year of gaining more than 1.5 points, which no other top 20 company has done going back to at least 1996.

To put the last few years in perspective, it took us 84 years to get to 15.2 points of U.S. auto market share and only 2 years to add another 23% more on top of that. It's a remarkable achievement and testament to the value that our offerings bring to consumers seeking high-quality and affordable protection products.

Growth is great to see, but profitable growth is our objective, and it's important to note that we gained that share while delivering Personal Auto combined ratios below 90 in 9 of the last 10 quarters. And that's just Personal Auto.

Preliminary industry results for Commercial Auto suggest the industry combined ratio improved, but once again posted an underwriting loss as it continues to face nuclear verdicts and social inflation. Despite these headwinds, our Commercial Auto results continue to be excellent as we continued our streak of underwriting profitability well in excess of the industry.

And in Property, we're building on last year's exceptional profitability while we continue to invest to ensure we have the risk selection and segmentation, geographic distribution and distribution footprint necessary to start increasing availability. As we mentioned on the last couple of calls, we're slowly starting to increase our appetite for property growth on our own paper, which is helping us find more growth in the important Robinsons segment. These results are only possible because of the competitive advantages we built across the organization and because we employ people who are truly among the best in the industry.

While we're certainly pleased with these results, we got here because we're always looking ahead. World events continue to create uncertainty in the global macroeconomic environment, and we remain vigilant about how those changes could affect our business. Given our concentration in vehicle lines, higher fuel prices are top of mind. The direct impact of higher fuel prices on Personal Auto frequency is difficult to predict because the timing, duration and magnitude of the price changes matter as does the broader state of the economy when those price changes happen.

Historically, we've seen that when fuel is more expensive, people take fewer discretionary trips such as cross-country road trips. And while foregoing those trips can reduce total vehicle miles traveled, those miles do tend to be lower frequency miles, so the effect on loss cost is typically smaller than the overall decline in VMTs.

To date, fuel prices haven't been elevated long enough to conclude how much, if at all, elevated fuel prices may affect our loss costs. On the severity side, higher energy costs generally contribute to broader inflationary pressures. However, it takes time for higher costs to make their way through the supply chain and can be partially offset by lower severity resulting from a lesser mix of higher speed, higher severity highway accidents.

In Commercial Auto, higher fuel prices can immediately pressure trucking margins, adding strain to an industry that has already seen significant change in the post-pandemic environment. As we did in 2021 with higher used vehicle prices and in 2025 with tariffs, we are monitoring the effects of fuel prices closely and incorporating what we observe into pricing as appropriate. While the macro environment could put upward pressure on pricing in the future, today, we're still delivering near-record Personal Auto margins and focused on growing as quickly as possible. The environment remains competitive as it has been for the last 5-plus quarters, so we continue to execute state and product level plans to maximize PIF growth at target profit margins.

On the new business side, in Q1, we increased media spend by 20% versus Q1 2025, making Q1 of '26 the most we've ever spent on media in a quarter. Top of funnel metrics remain robust with marketplace demand still strong. Our price competitiveness is also strong as reflected in higher Personal Auto conversion year-to-date.

Our product teams continue to execute their business plans with some states taking modest rate decreases when appropriate to capture in-market shoppers. On renewals, we're actively retaining customers through policy reviews as we've noted over the last couple of quarters. While possibly temporary, we were also pleased to see a lift in the Florida trailing 3 policy life expectancy during the quarter as customers received their premium credits.

At the countrywide level, mix shifts that arose because of a more aggressive new business posture continue to put downward pressure on PLE, although the year-over-year influence of those changes is abating.

In Commercial Lines, we're also seeing a competitive environment, and we are looking to all avenues to stimulate growth. We are increasing media spend and are looking to reduce rates in some states and business segments where we can bring in business at or below our profit targets. With targeted rate decreases and continued advancements in rolling out our next-generation product models across our core Commercial Auto, medium fleet and small business lines, we are well positioned for growth.

In closing, our business is in a very strong position. The macroeconomic environment will continue to evolve, but we've proven we thrive during periods of disruption as we're among the best at identifying and quickly adapting to uncertainty and changing business conditions.

As we close in on the important milestone of becoming the #1 writer of U.S. Personal Auto, we're not taking our foot off the gas. We'll continue investing in the business and leveraging our scale, advanced analytics and segmentation leadership as we make progress towards our vision of becoming consumers, agents and business owners #1 destination for insurance and other financial needs.

Thank you again for joining us this morning. We'll now take your questions.

This concludes the previously recorded portion of today's event. We now have members of our management team available to answer questions. [Operator Instructions] And I'll take our first question.

Your first question comes from the line of Bob Huang with Morgan Stanley.

I want to maybe just unpack some of the prepared remarks commentary a little bit. So regarding the Personal Auto industry, right, the industry seems to be excessively profitable. And in your shareholder letter, you kind of mentioned about the competitive environment being intense. And just can you maybe help us think about just where do you see all this end for the Personal Line or Personal Auto rather going forward as well as for Progressive, both for the industry and for Progressive? Are we in a prolonged soft market just given the profitability environment? Are we -- should we think about the industry being more competitive and/or maybe even profitability declining in 2027? Can you maybe just help us think about the broader environment where Progressive is situated in, so to speak?

Yes. I'll try to unpack your question with a bunch of different answers. We don't know how long the soft market will prevail, but we have definitely seen a lot more competition because everyone has great margins. And we haven't seen the margins in the industry like we have in '25 and into '26. So that's going to be competitive for all of us, which is great for consumers. So we'll continue to make sure that we reach our target profit margins. Other companies have different targets and run their businesses differently. But we think this is a really great opportunity to continue on our growth trajectory and continue to get more and more policyholders to achieve what Pat has said and not just to be #1 in private passenger auto, but to be the #1 destination. And that's where we'll get and focus on more bundles.

But it's probably worth saying that after our best year, which we would say it was 2024. In 2025, the private passenger auto market grew written premium about $11.8 billion. $8.9 billion of that was us. If you take just the top 10 carriers, that combined growth in 2025 was $10.4 billion. So we were 86% of that growth.

And in quarter 1, '26, we grew PIFs nearly $1 billion -- $1 million, sorry, Auto PIFs that were 11% of that. So my point is that our focus -- it's hard to say what the industry is going to do, but our focus will be to continue to grow as fast as we can at or below 96%.

Will margins compress? Possibly. Because we do look at growth in terms of policies. And we want to make sure we continue to have more and more policies when we get more customers, we gather more data. When we gather more data, we understand segmentation and risk to rate better, and then we can put that into our next product model. So it's a very nice flywheel that we've used for a long time. What the industry does, I can't foreshadow. But right now, it's competitive. That's good for consumers, and we're excited about what we believe can be our future.

It sounds like from a growth perspective, somebody is hogging all the fun, maybe other people would ask you to share. But maybe that aside, if we look at Personal Auto severity, it is more of a follow-up, right? You gave some commentary around severity and frequency. While higher medical cost, attorney representation still were the callouts in the 10-Q, it does feel like severity improved notably. In fact, if we look at it, aside from 2024, severity on collision hasn't been this good in 5 years. Can you maybe help us get a better handle on severity trends, specifically collision? Why is it so good, for lack of a better word? Is this durable as you're growing further and then talking about the 96, so to speak?

Yes. I'm going to let Andrew Quigg answer that. But you're correct. Severity is about 3% overall. Frequency was flat. And so we feel good about those trends. A lot of things can change, like you said, with bodily injury, specials in general. So I'll have Andrew give a little bit more color to that.

Yes. I'll start on the frequency side. I know you're asking about severity, but of course, they're linked. We see frequency moderating a little bit. The trailing 12 months has been more negative. And in this quarter, we are more flat for frequency. We had a shift to preferred over the past year. And as we open up underwriting, we're seeing frequency go back to kind of normal. On the severity side, you mentioned BI, yes. As we mentioned in the Q, large losses and attorney rep mix have impacted BI severity.

For PD and collision, we do see higher parts prices. And so that is impacting. Now we have some offsetting cost of labor and things like that are not accelerating as fast as parts prices. Going forward for collision severity, it's hard to know. Our crystal ball is cloudy. Certainly, we stay vigilant on what's happening with tariffs, what might happen with the conflict in Iran. All those might impact severity going forward. But we've been able to find ways to offset severity increases that we see through parts prices by how we manage the claims process. And so it's hard to say on collision going forward, but we feel good about the trends we're seeing today.

Your next question comes from the line of Tracy Benguigui with Wolfe Research.

On the topic of AI disintermediation on brokers, I always felt like if any carrier can bypass brokers on the Commercial Line side. But given that you guys made so much traction on direct Personal Lines over the years, I see that your Commercial Line business, 90% of that is distributed through independent agents. I'm wondering why not more on the direct side? Could that piece grow?

Yes, we definitely think it can grow, Tracy, and that's why we've been investing a lot in that area. I think just like when we went to Auto on the Internet, it takes a while, especially in the Commercial Lines product because they're much more complicated. So think if I'm a small business owner, I want to make sure I'm covered with all the right things and sometimes I want to sit knee-to-knee with an agent. We do think that more and more consumers, whether they're Personal Auto or Commercial, will want to do business directly with companies. And that's really what we've been building over the last few years. And so we do feel that we will continue to grow in both channels in our Commercial Lines business. Pat talked about it a little bit in the opening comments that we're really well positioned for growth based on our margins and our segmentation.

Okay. Great. And one of your larger competitors is getting into the independent agency channel for Personal Auto. And I noticed that AI is becoming a larger piece of the overall distribution pie. Any update on the competitive landscape on the AI side of personal insurance?

It's hard to say how -- with AI, how things are competitive because all of us, I think, are investing and investing differently. And what I would say to have any competition getting into really any channel, we think that's great because I think it puts more pressure on all of us to be better for consumers and to continue to make sure, like I talked about, having more data, segmenting better, making sure our brand is out there. So while we just think competition is good.

AI, I think, will come in different forms. I think initially, whether it's AI that we -- was predictive in the past or generative now, I think we'll start with helping to make sure that all of us are more efficient and can get tasks out of the work that will ultimately lead to more competitive prices. And so that really has been our focus now. But we've -- like I said in the last call, from an innovation perspective, we've been working on some form, whether it's a chatbot or predictive AI and now Gen AI for a long, long time. And I think others are starting to invest as well.

Your next question comes from the line of Elyse Greenspan with Wells Fargo.

My first question, I wanted to ask on written premium per policy. It continued, right, to go down in agency, kind of flat in direct. I was just hoping to get a little bit more color on just like the drivers there and how you would expect, especially, right, as there is less rate through the system, how you would expect the written premium per policy to trend from here?

Yes. I mean, I think it will be dependent on the pricing actions that we take in order to grow. Right now, it's been down about 1 in private passenger Auto, 1%. We'll continue to watch that. And like we've said in the past, our real measure of growth for long term is policies in force. And so we want to make sure we can do that. And with that, we're going to make sure that we do a couple of things, have the right rates in the system, but also in the last year or so, we've opened up our aperture. So you're going to look at different premium per type of customer. So we were pretty close when we were trying to get rate in the system. Our mix has changed. And so with that mix change, I think that you might see some changes. I don't think there's going to be anything dramatic, but we're going to -- like we do, we're going to go state-by-state, channel-by-channel to make sure that we're priced adequately in order to achieve our goal of growing as fast as we can.

And then my second question is on policies in force, right? Historically, right, PIF and just shopping has been more focused, right, during earlier months in a year. Obviously, over the last 2 years, right, there's just been rate taking in the market and there's been differing trends. How do you think just policies in force relative to seasonal factors and just overall growth views will trend over the balance of the year with kind of the seasonality factor in mind?

Yes. I might have Pat add in on that. But what I would say is, I think, with just so much competition because it's been a long time where the industry has been, has had the profit margins that we've had. And so things have shifted a little bit, and there's a lot of shopping. We've talked a lot about whether it's our customers even shopping, reshopping with us or us doing policy reviews. I think that's happening sort of across the industry. So I can foresee that it could continue to happen. We really can't tell. But that's one of the reasons why we wanted to leverage our ability with our brand and our marketing engine to increase our media spend to continue that growth. Do you want to add anything, Pat?

Yes, sure. You're right. We've seen kind of unprecedented shopping, and we don't expect to see it slow down. So historically, there has been a seasonal pop in Q1 and then the echo in Q3 as policies renew. And we're seeing kind of continued strong shopping as inflation and affordability for consumers remains tough and insurance is a higher percentage of their disposable or household income. So we intend to continue to invest while it remains efficient. And we're seeing signs like older shoppers, longer tenured shoppers coming into market in ways that we previously had not seen.

And when some of these long-tenured shoppers shop, they may not have shopped for 10 years previously. Once they do, they realize that the world has changed, and it's relatively easy with high information transparency and low switching costs to change auto insurance, in particular, providers.

And we think that's a good thing. If people can leverage the competitive nature of the voluntary market and save themselves, money on quality coverage, that's good for them. And as Tricia mentioned, being a value provider who uses lots of data to ensure we have the best matching of rate to risk, we think we win when more people shop and find that Progressive offers a competitive price for the value or coverage they're seeking.

Your next question comes from the line of Mike Zaremski with BMO Capital Markets.

First question is on productivity. This past winter, Tricia, you spoke to productivity gains that I think I estimate would allow Progressive to do maybe up to 10% more with the same level of employees. Maybe you can elaborate on what specific technologies are driving those efficiency gains because I'd love to try to better decipher whether some of those benefits will endure more so to Progressive versus peers as well?

Yes. I won't go into all the specifics that we're using, but we do have several generative AI solutions in production, and we believe they're delivering meaningful benefits that we think will be long term, and that's across personalized experiences for consumers, agents, business owners. And we're really, I think, just at the tip of that. And it's really a continuation of how we've invested in technology over the years, whether it's from digital ability in claims or actually in CRM as well. And we're just trying to kind of be where consumers need us to be. And that's one of our strategic pillars to have broad coverage and be where our customers want to shop, want to be serviced. So we believe -- and we just finished our 3-year strategic plan and presented it to our Board of Directors.

We believe that we can continue to reduce non-acquisition expense ratio over the foreseeable future. We do a 3-year plan because we think it's really important to -- even with the margins we have to continue to have pressure on us to have the most competitive price, but also the right rate to risk. So we believe that we can continue to push -- put pressure on expenses through technology plus changes, yes.

Okay. That's helpful. And just switching gears lastly to a question on capital management. Are you willing to kind of maybe elaborate more on why Progressive chose a very large special dividend earlier this year versus directing more of those excess funds towards a buyback? I don't know if you'll be willing to kind of share some of the math equation or thoughts that drove that allocation decision.

Yes. I'll have Jon Bauer from Progressive Capital Management talk about that. But as you know, we've got lots of uses for capital. We had a lot of capital last year because of our growth. I'll just start with that. And we need a lot when there's high growth in terms of our regulatory needs and our contingency capital. And then we have to make choices, and we work very closely with our investment and capital team with the Board of Directors to determine how much we buy back, which we did buy back a fair amount in the first quarter this year and what we do with dividends. Ultimately, they make the decision. But maybe I'll just have Jon Bauer go over a little bit more about our process around how we think about overall capital management. And Jon, maybe even just talk about the debt raise we just did.

Yes. Thanks so much for the question. I would start by pointing everybody back to our first quarter presentation where we talk through how we think about capital. And at a high level, we start with, can we reinvest that capital that we have back into the business for much of the last few years, what Pat was talking about and others. Our company was growing so fast, we needed much of the capital we were generating to reinvest in our business to fund that growth.

As we've seen over the last 18 to 24 months, the business has been producing prodigious amounts of capital even as we've continued that growth. And so as we think about that, what to do with that excess capital after we get through the initial reinvest in the business, we think about a few different things. So one is share repurchases. Another is potential corporate development opportunities and the other is investment risk. And so we look across those 3 lenses and say, do we see valuable opportunities there?

When we think about our share repurchase, we specifically look at a few different measures, the same that we see in many of your reports, things such as price to earnings, price to book, and then we have our own internal model. And we look to see do we believe our shares are trading cheap to our view of fair value. And then we look to scale the share repurchase plan that we have through 10b5-1s on a going-forward basis based on how much of a discount we see that the shares are trading to versus what our view of fair value is.

And so you should expect that we will continue to scale that repurchase based on how much excess capital we have, what are the other opportunities we see for that capital and where we see the valuation of our shares trading in the market versus our view of fair value. And if after the share repurchase, the corporate development and the investment risk decisions, we still have what we deem to be excess capital versus what we need for our business, then we will look to return that as we did with our variable dividend at the end of last year.

I will point out with last year, we had something besides just our internal cash flow generation, which was the switch to several of our subsidiaries, 3.5:1 premiums to surplus. So that afforded us to have an even greater amount of excess capital that we were able to move up to our non-insurance subsidiary that allowed for both the increase that we saw in our share repurchases in 2025 as well as the large variable dividend that you talked about.

I'll briefly just also mention we raised some money in the corporate debt markets this year. We thought that it was a good time to issue. We obviously have $1 billion of debt maturities coming in 2027. We thought that valuations were attractive in the market. And we saw, as many of you have seen that our financial leverage, which normally has ranged between 20% and 30%. We have our 30% limit, has fallen pretty significantly below 20%. And so with the issuance that we did in the capital markets, our financial leverage at the end of the quarter moved up over 20% to a more efficient level.

But I would, again, just circling back to where I started, point everyone to that first quarter presentation and our focus on driving strong returns for our shareholders. And the way we think about doing that is with that strong return on equity that Progressive has driven over its history, and that means being incredibly efficient with our capital, both the total amount of capital that we are holding as well as the split of that capital between debt and equity.

Let me know if that answers your question.

Yes, that's helpful. So just on need to check, should we be earmarking some of that debt capital towards buybacks potentially? Or am I misinterpreting?

Yes. We don't separate out that debt raise is for share repurchases or for something else. How I would think about it is, Progressive is in an incredibly strong capital position even after the dividend, the share repurchases that we've done and even pre that debt raise. Even after that debt raise, we feel like we're even in a stronger capital position. We have the opportunity to invest that capital in all of the elements that I talked about, share repurchase being one of them. And we will continue to look at what the split is between our view of fair value and where our shares are trading. And if we think that we should be repurchasing a greater amount of shares, we will. But for us, it's very important to determine how big of a discount to fair value our shares are trading at.

Your next question comes from the line of Rob Cox with Goldman Sachs.

Maybe I'll just follow up on the capital management discussion. Progressive has disclosed that the firm can get to a maximum 3.5x premium to surplus on a statutory basis. From the outside, it seems like maybe you're not comfortable going that high. How should we think about your criteria for premium to surplus on a GAAP basis? And should we expect that to trend upwards towards like the 3x range?

Jon, do you want to take that? And if John Sauerland, either one of you, because you were both involved in those conversations?

Sure. I will start, and then, John, I'm happy for you to add on to anything there. So we got the approval at several of our subsidiaries to move to 3.5:1 from the 3:1. It was not across all of our insurance subsidiaries, but a significant amount of them. So we -- this approval only came in 2025. So we moved the capital up that we could within the course of 2025 to move up that premiums to surplus to as efficient as we could be in 2025.

We will continue to look in 2026 and 2027 to optimize that premiums to surplus at our operating subsidiaries because we feel a huge amount of confidence in the underwriting business that Pat talked about that we are holding more capital there than we need for the risk that we have. So we will continue to optimize that over time.

Our overall premiums to surplus, including our non-insurance subsidiaries will include the capital that we're holding for other things that we just talked about, share repurchases, corporate development, investment risk, contingent capital and things like that. That capital will continue to be optimized, but we will also look to hold some of that capital for future opportunities. So the goal is to optimize the capital at those insurance subsidiaries as much as we can over time. And then the capital that we hold at our non-insurance subsidiary will go up and down based on opportunities we see to use that capital and if we are looking to hold back certain capital for future opportunities.

John, I don't know if you want to add anything to that.

Yes. I would, as Jon Bauer did, refer folks back to our first quarter presentation where we detailed our financial policies, our capital structure as well as the change in premium to surplus targets. So we got approval to go to 3.5:1 and by far, the majority of our operating entities. That said, we were not able to move as far as we desired in 2025 to those ratios.

Our aspiration is to continue to move premium to surplus ratios up in those entities in which we have received approval. I would also highlight that we received approval largely because our risk-based capital ratios are exceptional in those operating entities. So we have a great track record, especially in Personal Auto in underwriting margin. We have a conservative investment portfolio. We have, relatively speaking, little loss reserve development. All those factors go into the risk-based capital ratios, which is what, at the end of the day, I believe regulators look at to exceed their comfort level in the solvency of insurance companies.

So we fared extremely well on RBCs in those companies even at the higher premium to surplus ratios and our aspiration working with regulators is to continue to move those ratios up, which obviously allows us to decrease the total equity we require on a GAAP basis, which obviously then can lead to higher ROEs. So that is the game plan we laid out in our first quarter call.

And as Jon Bauer did, I would refer folks back to that call for more detail.

That's helpful. Maybe just a follow-up on advertising and the competitive environment. We noticed Progressive is accelerating advertising spend and obviously generating significant PIF growth. But it does look like to us that peer ad spend has somewhat flattened out at levels well below Progressive. What types of advertising is Progressive finding incrementally attractive today to deploy the additional advertising dollars? And why do you think Progressive is uniquely able to effectively deploy so much ad spend?

I'll start, and then I'll have Pat Callahan added. Like we talk about often, we are not going to advertise unless we think that we will get customers for that. We want to make sure it's efficient. So we'll advertise if our cost per sale is under our target acquisition cost. We target differently depending on the cost. And we -- and in each year, of course, we have to -- we'll pay some upfront costs for media -- mass media on TV have to do that well in advance. And then we look a lot more -- most of our incoming is in the digital area.

So we sort of look across the spectrum of all ways with which to get eyes on our brand. And of course, that's a specific part of you can market, but if you don't have a well thought out and well-defined brand, it may not work. We obviously do for over a decade. We have -- whether it's our characters or our message ultimately resulting in people wanting to shop and wanting to convert with us when we have competitive prices, that's the key. So I'll have Pat add some color to that.

Yes, sure. So one of the differentiators, I think, within our customer acquisition, marketing media is a really strong in-house media team where we buy virtually all of our media in-house. And what that does is closely couples our media team with our product teams to understand at a more granular level, the ultimate cost of a piece of media as it translates through the performance of the media funnel being what the cost per impression is, how well it converts, what the average premium is and then ultimately, what the lifetime profitability on that risk may be. So we've talked for years that segmentation is in our blood and segmentation when it comes to media and operating our media buys highly efficiently is what we continue to do. So we continue to add to that team, and that team continues to work with media partners to find new ways to efficiently reach customers and ultimately get them to come try what we think is a phenomenal value in insurance protection products.

So as Tricia started out with, we will continue to spend as long as it's efficient, and we monitor the efficiency of not only what we do from a run-the-business perspective, but we're constantly testing and learning and scaling winners and shutting off losers. And similar to the flywheel, there's adverse selection in media purchasing, meaning when we bid to a certain extent and back away and someone else outbids us, we're pretty confident the efficiency of that spend isn't going to return what they expected it would. And we do that in product, and we do that in media, and we do that in other parts of our business.

Your next question comes from the line of Josh Shanker with Bank of America.

If we look at the declining premium per policy in the agency segment, a lot of that seems to be, at least some of it, the growth rate of Sams and Dianes relative to Wrights and Robinsons, and you're just growing it faster in a lower premium bucket of consumers. If you're a big believer of Progressive as the signature destination for insurance shoppers, part of that promise is you have to grow the Robinsons and the Wrights, maybe you have to grow them faster than the Sams and Dianes. What are you doing right now to address that imbalance in the growth rates?

Yes. I think we are definitely growing Sams again. And like I've said many times, that is okay because Sams were our bread and butter for a lot of years. And as long as we can price them accurately to make sure we have our profit margins that we target, it's important.

Now yes, you've hit on something important. I've talked about in the last couple of quarters. We definitely -- in order to achieve that new goalpost that Pat talked about in the opening comments, we want to be the #1 destination, which means private passenger auto is a piece of that, but property has to be another piece of that. So we definitely want to grow more on both the Robinsons and the Wrights.

So if you think about our agency channel, that is going to be the Progressive home product and the direct channel will be a stable of care of companies in -- that are non-affiliated. So we've been doing a lot of things. I talked about the blueprint. I've talked about kind of where we're going. I'll reiterate that and then talk about a couple more things we're doing and then give you some kind of a highlight or foreshadowing into our Q2 call, our deep dive.

So we talked about new business readiness. So that is, do we have the right rate level? Do we have the right segmentation or the product model in play? Do we have cost sharing in the contract, interstate diversification and what are the regulatory and marketing conditions? So we have about 38 of our 47 states we've identified where we're in growth mode. We'll add a couple more states in quarter 2. So we want to increase availability, expand distribution and expand our underwriting appetite.

A couple of the new things that we are doing in the first quarter, in the second quarter is we're really trying to -- in the agency channel, like you had said, understand and address the barriers to growth and conversion and what are some agent pain points. So our property team and our agency distribution team have been doing sort of roundtables with our platinum agents. We've done 29 roundtables in quarter 1 in 13 states, and we'll do another 19 in 10 states in Q2.

And we're learning, incorporating feedback, and I'm certain that will ensure changes or revisions to our products going forward. So we want to make sure that we do make sure that we have more Robinsons. That will be how we understand, how we get to our ultimate destination. And so we're trying to understand that. We don't want to swing the pendulum all the way. Obviously, we've had some volatile years. But yes, we agree with you. That is a big part of our growth strategy. We have a great team on that.

I'm going to let Pat talk if he wants any more of that. But I did want to say that our next deep dive will be on both overall property growth and Robinsons growth. And so if you could so that we are able to answer your questions adequately or accurately if we -- if there's information that we want to share, get those questions you have on both Robinsons growth and property growth overall to Juliana, our new Head of Investor Relations because she can start to gather those. And as John Curtiss, our Head of National Property and Jim Curtis, our relationship, our Head of Auto, they're going to be doing the deep dive next quarter. They can get those questions and try to really like be able to answer them in depth. So that's my one ask of you between now and our call will be in August, get those as soon as you can so we can get information sort of gathered to be adequately addressed any of those questions. Do you want to add anything else, Pat?

Just a couple of quick things, Josh. You mentioned the decline in average premiums in the agency channel, and that's driven by a lot of different things, not just the mix shift potentially to some Sams and Dianes, part of it is we're writing fewer annual policies than we were previously. And not all premium declines are compressing margin. So we see mix shift to better risks and different states that bring with them potentially a different average premium.

So I wouldn't want you to think that it's just a mix shift to Sams and Dianes, which there's a little bit of that as we're growing those rapidly. Now we're growing fast across segments, but we're growing those faster than we are the more preferred segments, and Tricia talked a little bit about that. But I guess I'd close with the focus on unlocking the Robinsons access, we'll spend some time on in August. And for us, it represents a $40 billion to $50 billion top line opportunity.

So we have roughly 20% share of Sams, Dianes, and Wrights and penetrating 40% of the $240 billion U.S. Personal Lines, Robinsons opportunity is just massive top line growth, and that's why we're focusing on it, but doing it in a smart way to ensure it's deliberate, it's consistent and most importantly, profitable growth that we generate from that segment.

Your next question comes from the line of David Motemaden with Evercore ISI.

Just wanted to just get an update on where cost per sale compares to your targeted acquisition costs now versus 3 months ago or maybe 6 months ago and how you're thinking about potentially increasing it by more over the next several months or quarters?

Yes. It's still under our targeted acquisition cost, probably a little bit tighter. But again, we look at that differently depending on the customer that we are acquiring. And so sometimes that target could move depending on type of media, type of customer. But so far, we see no reason to stop our current trend of advertising. If we see some decline or some reason, we'll pull back a little bit, but we are pretty excited about continuing our growth and part of that is our increased media spend.

Got it. And then just following up to an answer to a previous question. I think it was Pat who spoke about some shoppers who maybe not have shopped for the past 10 years, now shopping. I'm assuming those are potentially Robinsons' customers. So I guess -- maybe just a high level, is that true? And then just maybe high level, how are you guys thinking about where the book of Robinsons stands today as a percentage of the total mix? And as you guys ease some of those property restrictions in certain markets, what's the expected time line for that to show up in Auto PIF and maybe actually a bit on the premium per policy side as there's more bundled Auto business?

Yes. So the comment that I made about longer tenured and older shoppers shopping is coming from LexisNexis demand meter. And it's interesting data, and it doesn't have necessarily our segment breakdown to know whether they are Robinsons, but I follow your intuition that if they're long tenured, they are likely a more stable insurance risk, whether they choose to place both their auto and home with the same carrier or not. So long tenured and stable risks do overlap well with where we want to go with the Robinsons segment. So we're underpenetrated. We think there's a massive upside potential in that segment, continue to invest against it.

But it's also a pretty competitive segment. It's an area that the captive or exclusive agent companies own a large portion of that market share. And as we know, those companies that are mutuals or in some cases, reciprocal have different objective functions and a different time horizon for how they think about pricing their products.

So we know that competition for those customers is high, will be high, but it's encouraging to see that once those customers seem to get a taste of the competitive market or the ease and savings that comes from the choice model of the independent agency distribution channel that we see them coming back and realizing that having choice, having breadth and depth of coverages potentially better meets their needs as an insurance consumer over their buying lifetime. So those are encouraging signs that we see, and that's why we continue to invest heavily in the independent agency channel where ease and savings come from the choice model.

Your next question comes from the line of Gregory Peters with Raymond James.

In the limit -- just because I know you're running out of time, I'll just ask one question. Tricia, you talked about presenting the 3-year plan to the Board. And I know almost every quarter, you guys give us an updated view on autonomous vehicles. I just want to pull out the growth in your TNC business, which seems to be positive in Commercial Auto. There's the oncoming wave of Waymo's Teslas that are self-driving, et cetera. So I'm just curious when you map out your 3-year plan, how you're thinking your TNC business might evolve over the course of the next couple of years?

Thanks, Gregory. I'll have Andrew talk a little bit more about that, but that was a big part of what we updated the Board on. I think we've talked about this since probably maybe right around 2013 or so, we have what we call a runway model, and we look at the addressable market. So we look at all trends. But obviously, we want to look at AVs and each level of AV, what that means from a market perspective, a safety perspective. We have relationships with TNC providers. Some of that increase could come from mileage. So there's some different ways that we -- that things increase in the TNC space.

But we are very close to that data, and we have models that we work in terms of, hey, if this happens conservatively because I think you can read the articles just like you would read about self-driving cars 10 or 15 years ago and get piped up about it. It doesn't mean we're putting our head in the sand. What it means is, we're watching it closely and understanding very clearly that there's a lot of opportunity to continue to grow and work with a lot of these providers because I think it's going to be great for consumers and it's very different also depending on state, weather, driving, geo-fencing, all of that.

But Andrew, do you want to give a little bit more insight?

Yes. It's definitely a topic of conversation with our Board. We have an ongoing dialogue about autonomous vehicles and specifically in the TNC space. The only, I'd say, material commercialization right now is from Waymo, and they have a ridesharing service, right, that competes directly with our TNC customers. And so it's something we pay attention to.

Right now, Waymo's are in fewer -- many fewer urban areas than our TNC partners, and they are limited in the amount of vehicles that they have there. And so right now, at least from an insurance side, we don't see a cannibalization of the opportunity, but we're cognizant of it. And as we plan for the future, of course, we want to be careful on how we do that. We think there's robust demand. There's seasonality that's present in the TNC market.

Certainly, in winter, people choose TNCs over -- more than they do during nice weather in the summer. When it's raining, there's more choice, when in the mornings in the evenings. And so there's this variability and seasonality of demand that's present in the TNC space that's hard to solve with a fixed set of vehicles that we might see from Waymo or other AV providers. And so for the long term, we think that there will be a combination of both AVs and TNC companies with human operators even in the far future. So something we pay attention to, something we think about, who knows, but we try to be cognizant of the risks that are there and the opportunities.

And I would also add, Gregory, that that's one of the reasons why several years ago, regardless of what happens, we decided to really diversify more in our Commercial Lines organization. So we've had our 5 BMQs for a long time. But as we've gone into more fleet, especially medium fleet, our BOP program going direct. So that's one of the reasons why we have been investing and we'll continue to invest.

Pat talked about it in his opening comments. We feel like we're in a really pivotal position right now with Commercial Lines industry, lack of profit has been around for a long time, even though it's getting a little bit better. I think the -- we think the 2025 CR is right, ex-Progressive is right about 105, but we have profit as one of our core values. So we want to make money in all lines. And so we think we have a really good point of growth right now in our Commercial Lines business. So regardless of what happens, and we can -- we'll continue to do modeling and be on top of AVs, that's one of the big reasons why we've diversified our product line in our Commercial Lines organization.

There is approximately 5 minutes left in the event. We'd like to preserve those 5 minutes with some closing remarks from Tricia. Those left in the queue with questions can direct them to myself or Juliana directly. Tricia?

Thank you. I just want to take a few moments. One, I want to welcome Juliana Patera as our new Director of Investor Relations. Many of you have met her. We're super excited to have her on the team. As I said, please give her any questions you have on Robinsons, on property, just so we can really adequately try to address your needs when we do our Q2 call in August.

And then hot off the press, I want to congratulate Doug Constantine on his new role in Progressive as IT Controller. We just announced it to the organization yesterday. Typical with Progressive, we love moving people around. So Doug has been in PL, has been in CL and now he's in our right-hand guy prepping us for these calls for many, many years, and his work has been really appreciated. So thank you so much, and congratulations, Doug.

And then lastly, John Sauerland, and this is his last IR call. He announced that he'd be retiring in July, and he has been instrumental in making these successful and sort of being everyone's right-hand guy. There's -- the weekend before when we start to get competitor news and different things, I always turn to John to get any answers. And of course, he's been mentoring Andrew as we pass the baton. So I would like to give -- for those of you in the room, give John Sauerland a round of applause.

Thanks, Tricia. Rebecca, I'll hand the call back over to you for the closing scripts.

That concludes the Progressive Corporation's First Quarter Investor Event. Information about a replay of the event will be available on the Investor Relations section of Progressive's website for the next year. You may now disconnect.

Good morning, and thank you for joining us today for Progressive's Fourth Quarter Investor event. I am Doug Constantine, Treasury Controller, and I will be a moderator for today's event.

The company will not make detailed comments related to its results in addition to those provided in its annual report on Form 10-K and a letter to shareholders, which have been posted to the company's website. This quarter includes a presentation on a specific portion of our business, followed by a question-and-answer session with members of our leadership team. The introductory comments and the presentation were previously recorded. Upon completion of the previously recorded remarks, we will use the balance of the 90 minutes scheduled for this event for live question and answers with the leaders featured in our recorded remarks as well as other members of our management team.

As always, discussions in this event may include forward-looking statements. These statements are based on management's current expectations and are subject to many risks and uncertainties that could cause actual events and results to differ materially from those discussed during today's event. Additional information concerning those risks and uncertainties is available in our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2025, where you will find discussions of the risk factors affecting our business, safe harbor statements related to forward-looking statements and other discussions of the challenges we face. These documents can be found via the Investor Relations section of our website at investors.progressive.com.

To begin today, I'm pleased to introduce our CFO, John Sauerland, who will kick us off with some introductory comments. John?

Thanks, Doug, and good morning, everyone. While we're already in March, I would like to take a couple of minutes to review the very strong year that we had in 2025. Following a year of incredible growth in 2024, we added almost $9 billion in net premiums written in 2025 and almost 3.7 million additional policies in force. When we look at statutory results for the private passenger auto market through the third quarter of 2025, we believe we picked up close to an additional 2 points of market share versus last year to move to around 18.5% market share. However, what made 2025 even more exceptional was that along with that growth came remarkable profitability. We earned almost $13 billion in comprehensive income across our operating and investing units or a comprehensive return on equity of 40%. Profitability across our businesses was excellent, and policy in force growth was also positive across all the businesses with personal vehicles leading at 12% or almost 3.5 million more policies than last year. That equates to almost 5.5 million more vehicles insured by Progressive versus year-end 2024.

Property profitability was the beneficiary of a lighter-than-average catastrophe year and is also a reflection of the significant work we've done to manage the risk in this product. As we indicated in our Q2 2025 investor call, we're much more comfortable with the property line and are actively looking for ways to increase growth in property through bundling. In Commercial Lines, PIF growth was primarily from business auto and contractor risks, while growth in trucking was challenging as the industry continued to face headwinds. Commercial Lines also had an excellent profitability in contrast to what we believe was an underwriting loss for the Commercial Auto insurance industry.

As you know, Progressive is very focused on our underwriting operations, and we believe this is the primary driver of our success. We focus on our 4 strategic pillars to win in the marketplace and grow as fast as we can at less than or equal to a 96 combined ratio at the enterprise level as long as we can provide high-quality customer service. These 4 pillars have served us quite well since we established them formally as our strategy in 2015. Our culture and our focus on the growth and profitability operating mandate are supported by a very efficient capital model and strong risk-adjusted portfolio returns. This leads to high comprehensive returns on equity over the medium and longer term.

We view our comprehensive return on equity along with growth to be the ultimate measures of our financial success. And we believe success on these measures drives higher multiples for Progressive stock. As you can see from the slide, return on equity in our industry is correlated with price-to-book ratio. Additionally, we believe growth plays a considerable role in our multiple being substantially above the line derived from the large public property and casualty competitors.

Comprehensive return on equity is a function of the operating discipline we so frequently discussed on these calls and also very much a function of discipline around our financial policies. Today's discussion will go deeper on those policies, highlighting recent changes in operating leverage, providing insight around our variable dividend and detailing our approach to managing our nearly $100 billion portfolio at year-end.

At the same time we execute our capital-efficient strategy, we need to ensure that we give ourselves maximum flexibility as we encounter uncertainty. While we believe strongly in our operating model, we are unable to predict broader geopolitical and macroeconomic changes with certainty. Therefore, we have set up a model that allows for flexibility in both our capital allocation and our investment risk. Since we run with higher operating leverage and a fair amount of financial leverage, we need to make sure that we can retain more capital when we believe it is beneficial to the business. We believe that our variable dividend policy and a liquid more conservative investment portfolio give us the capital we need to grow when growth is significant and an off-ramp when we hit periods of volatility.

As an example of how our model balances these goals, if we look back to the 2022 to 2023 period, Progressive saw faster premium growth that required a significant amount of capital. On top of that, margins were volatile due to the surge of auto-related inflation. Further, that same inflation drove significant investment market volatility. In response, we were able to significantly reduce share repurchases and variable dividend payments, take down investment risk, and raise debt capital in order to ensure the fuel for our strong organic growth in 2022 and beyond. This flexibility allows us to aim for strong growth, while also operating with a high degree of capital efficiency.

More recently, capital generation has been very strong. In 2025, we earned almost $13 billion in comprehensive income across our operating and investing units. Our below 90 combined ratio, along with more than a 7% return on the investment portfolio, drove historically high profits for Progressive. The combination of the strong capital position in which we entered 2025, robust income generation and increased operating leverage allowed for Progressive to reward our shareholders with a $13.50 per share variable dividend in January. This came on top of modestly higher pace of share repurchases in recent months. Given this pace of income generation, the variable dividend and the announced change in our operating leverage last year, we thought this would be a good time for us to review with you how we think about capital, leverage, capital allocation and investment risk at Progressive.

While we focus on comprehensive ROE for the purpose of benchmarking, I want to share the history of results around ROE. Over the medium and longer term, our model has produced returns on capital that have outperformed not only our P&C peers, but most other financial firms. In order to achieve this continued outperformance, we have to not only be disciplined on the operating side, but also with our investments and our capital allocation. A key consideration around capital allocation is our operating leverage or, in other words, premium to surplus ratios at our insurance companies. As we conveyed in our Form 10-Q for the third quarter of 2025, we have received approval from our regulators that oversee most of our operating entities to move our operating leverage up to a maximum of 3.5:1 premiums to surplus.

As a reminder, The Progressive Corporation is a holding company, and we own 45 insurance entities and some non-insurance companies. Insurance companies follow statutory accounting rules and are subject to regulation in their state of domicile. Surplus in statutory accounting is essentially equivalent to equity in GAAP accounting. Statutory accounting differs slightly from GAAP accounting, primarily around recognition of expenses more in line with cash flow and investment-grade bonds are valued at amortized cost versus mark-to-market.

Regulators have numerous tests to monitor and regulate insurance company solvency. Premiums divided by surplus is one ratio for which limitations are set by regulators to ensure that insurance companies have the capital necessary to pay out policyholders when needed.

For our core vehicle lines of business, we have always believed that based on our rigorous underwriting acumen, conservative investment posture and relatively modest reserve development that we did not need to hold as much capital as regulators were expecting us to. Those same factors are generally considered in risk-based capital ratios that regulators use to monitor solvency, and in extreme cases, to force changes in the management of insurance companies. Our risk-based capital ratios are very good in most of our insurance companies, and this fact helped us receive approval to hold less capital or surplus at most of our operating subsidiaries. We hold a significant amount of capital outside the insurance companies as well, and we'll talk more about that in future slides.

As you can see, there's a wide range of operating leverage models in the property and casualty insurance industry. Progressive, with our consistent operating results, is normally near the top. This exhibit shows just the surplus in our insurance subsidiaries relative to net premiums written. As noted previously, The Progressive Corporation is a holding company, and we hold surplus in the insurance companies and generally balance those insurance companies to our target premiums to surplus ratios towards the end of each year.

At year-end, we generally hold contingent and additional capital at the holding company level. At year-end 2025, we held around $13 billion in an investment subsidiary of the holding company. In January, we paid almost $8 billion in a variable dividend out of that $13 billion.

Naturally, the next question is what this change in operating leverage means for our overall capital position. We think of capital in terms of 3 different layers, which are regulatory, contingent and additional capital. As I previously mentioned, our regulatory capital is overseen by our state regulators. However, our contingent capital layer is fully determined by our risk appetite and controls. It is currently set at an amount in which it would take a one in 200-year modeled scenario to go from the top of our contingent capital to our regulatory layer. As the name is contingent, our goal is for that layer to generally not be fully eroded to the point of reaching the regulatory layer. So we normally hold some level of capital above the contingent layer.

How much additional capital we hold on an ongoing basis is a function of factors such as operating and investment volatility, financial leverage and the potential opportunity to deploy capital towards investments, acquisitions or share repurchases. While we will always be open to holding on to additional capital for future opportunities, management is very focused on Progressive's return on equity over the medium and longer term.

We won't do a deep dive on our reinsurance program today, but it is certainly worth noting that our reinsurance program is integral to the size of our contingent capital layer. Relative to our balance sheet, we have fairly modest retentions in our reinsurance program, and our catastrophe limits are relatively high. This naturally allows us to need to hold a lower level of contingent capital all else equal.

As you can see from the graphic on this slide, the change in our premiums to surplus means lower capital needs at our insurance subsidiaries but does not require us to hold any more capital at either our contingent or additional layers. Therefore, this move has the potential to incrementally raise Progressive return on equity due to the lower capital needs. I will also note that the incremental $1.6 billion freed up in 2025 resulting in our premiums to surplus ratio at the enterprise level to move closer to 3, relative to an average of 2.8 over the previous 5 years. Our insurance company subsidiaries are subject to numerous regulations on capital beyond net premiums written to surplus.

So while we may have approval from the state of domicile to move to 3.5 for the net premiums to surplus ratio, additional regulations may limit at what pace we may move to that ratio and how close exactly we get to that ratio. Our intent is to work to move closer to 3.5 going forward. Our operating leverage has historically helped us to achieve industry-leading returns on equity and this change will naturally further that positioning. And while operating leverage is important, it is only one element of our capital model.

Now to continue the discussion on financial leverage and capital allocation, I will pass it along to our Treasurer, Maureen Spooner. Before I do that, allow me to give a brief bio on Maureen, and our Chief Investment Officer, Jonathan Bauer. Maureen has been with Progressive more than 20 years and has previous experience in Treasury at another public company as well as public accounting. During her tenure at Progressive, she has held controller roles in our special lines and IT groups, managed our comparison rating offering in our direct group, served as our Ohio Auto Product Manager and most recently, our Audit Business Leader. Jonathan Bauer has been with Progressive almost 20 years, all within our investment management group and has previous experience in investment banking in New York and London.

Thank you again for your time this morning. And now to you, Maureen.

Thanks, John. While operating leverage is important, it does not tell the full financial or capital picture. First, because it only reflects the capital needs at our insurance subsidiaries. Second, it does not differentiate between equity and debt capital. So it does not consider financial leverage. And finally, it doesn't include our capital allocation policy or it does not consider where we can invest. So I will briefly review our financial policies, while sharing our capital allocation process.

First, we want to ensure we have the capital we need to write as much profitable insurance as we can. This is our best use of capital. We want to ensure we have the regulatory surplus plus contingency capital to grow our business at less than or equal to a 96 combined ratio. While our decisioning is not linear, we have a decision tree on the next few slides to demonstrate how we think about capital allocation. Once we have determined we have excess capital over and above our operating needs.

If we have excess or additional capital, we then consider how we would deploy that excess capital, and we consider the valuation of each opportunity. We consider 3 areas of potential investment. Additional capital may be deployed for corporate development or acquisitions and strategic investments, for share repurchase or for increased investment risk. Jonathan Bauer, our Chief Investment Officer, will be covering investment risk here shortly. In all three instances, we evaluate the investment and valuation and determine if the return is attractive for the investment.

With respect to corporate development, we introduced our Three Horizons framework to you back in 2019, which covers our strategic approach, including acquisitions. Horizon 1, our products within our current constellation of businesses. Horizon 2 are products that are adjacent to our current product footprint. Then Horizon 3 includes businesses outside of the P&C insurance landscape that we currently play in. We continue to fully integrate and optimize our previous two acquisitions, and we have continued to work on our skill set throughout the organization in preparing for future investments.

Secondly, we may use excess capital to repurchase shares. Our policy is to repurchase shares to neutralize the impact of employee stock compensation. We also consider repurchasing shares if the share price is attractive to what we believe is our intrinsic value. We have not repurchased a significant number of shares over recent years, even though we have board authorization to repurchase 25 million shares annually for the past 9 years.

In some recent periods, our growth rate was high enough that we needed to preserve capital to support growth. At other times over recent years, we had additional capital available to repurchase shares but we did not view the market price of our shares to be attractive or below our view of intrinsic value. Over the past few months, we have begun to be more active with repurchases, but obviously not yet at a significant level. As highlighted in the chart, in January 2026 in 1 month, we repurchased shares at a value similar to the repurchases made for all of 2025 as we felt the share price was attractive. Once we have exhausted considering capital needs for both business growth and investments, we consider returning underleveraged capital to shareholders via dividends.

For greater flexibility, we modified our dividend policy in 2019, moving to a modest quarterly fixed dividend of $0.10 per share and an annual variable dividend that is no longer formulaic and is completely variable. Before 2019, we tied the annual variable dividend to our gain share factor, which is a score we use internally to calculate annual cash bonuses for all Progressive employees. We made the change because there were times that the formulaic approach had us returning capital via dividends and at the same time, needing to raise capital to support growth.

The annual variable dividend is entirely at the discretion of the Board, which considers current capital levels relative to prospective expected capital needs and determines generally in December of each year, if to pay a variable dividend, and if so, how much. The $13.50 annual variable dividend declared in December and paid in January 2026 largely reflected robust capital generation in 2025 from both underwriting and investments, along with the shift to higher operating leverage at our insurance subsidiaries. As John noted, we held $13 billion of capital at the holding company level at our year-end and naturally net of the declared dividend, that number was $5 billion.

There's obviously judgment here, and we believe it's prudent to retain some capital above our operating needs for growth above our expectations, stock repurchases, investment risk, other strategic opportunities or contingency growth. And the $5 billion, along with our ongoing earnings, certainly provides us that flexibility. Once we have determined how much capital we are retaining for operating growth and investing, we need to consider what is the right mix of equity and debt. We have a publicly stated guideline of keeping our leverage under a debt-to-capitalization ratio of 30%. That does not mean that we will take any dramatic action if it drifts over that level, but that our intention will be to have it under 30% over the longer term.

You might ask why 30% is the right limit. Given Progressive's very steady stream of earnings and cash flow generation, we could likely support a more leveraged balance sheet. While we always keep challenging ourselves as part of Progressive's culture. At the current moment, we believe that the 30% level strikes the right balance between efficiency and having a strong balance sheet, which gives us strong debt ratings and allows us to prosper through economic cycles.

When reviewing our historical monthly financial leverage ratio, we did surpass the 30% guideline of debt to total capital during the financial crisis and then again briefly in 2022, largely due to unrealized losses in our investment portfolio. However, in both instances, we brought the ratio in line with our guidelines through the normal course of business. While we have a goal of staying below 30%, we do not have a policy regarding a minimum amount of leverage as we want to give ourselves maximum flexibility. Over the last 18 months, you can see that we have been trending below our historic range. The main drivers of that decrease have been significant income generation in 2024 and 2025 from both our underwriting business and investment portfolio.

Also, when you look at our financial leverage relative to our stock insurance company competitors, you'll note it is broadly in a similar range. Ultimately, we believe that an appropriate amount of financial leverage will help ensure a strong balance sheet and along with our now higher operating leverage, maintain our industry-leading return on equity.

In summary, while operating leverage is important, strong financial discipline is also a focus. We ensure we have enough capital for our operating growth or to write as much insurance as possible at less than or equal to a 96 combined ratio. We allocate additional capital where it can be beneficial to the business in corporate development, share repurchases or increased investment risk, while also neutralizing impact of employee stock compensation. We look to return underleveraged capital to shareholders via dividends, and we maintain a debt to total capital target below 30%.

That covers our financial policies at a high level, and I'll now turn it over to Jonathan Bauer, our Chief Investment Officer, to discuss our close to $100 billion investment portfolio.

Thanks, Maureen. I'm happy to get a chance to speak about how our investment risk decisions are part of the overall Progressive model that has driven strong shareholder returns over time.

Given the relatively high operating and financial leverage that we spoke about earlier in the presentation, along with a focus on capital efficiency, our investment leverage defined as invested assets over shareholders' equity runs relatively high. This means that gains and losses are more magnified than many of our peers, who run with a more significant capital base. Therefore, we tend to run with a more conservative investment policy, especially in times of significant operating growth.

So if we go back to the broader discussion of our capital deployment, if we have excess capital, we could deploy it towards corporate development, share repurchase and another option is to take more investment risk. In order to assess this decision, we think it might be useful to take a step back to review our investment policy since it has been a few years since we have engaged on this topic.

We have two different parts of the portfolio that are managed distinctly. Our fixed income portfolio, which currently makes up about 95% of the portfolio is actively managed by our team. Our equities portfolio, just under 5% of the portfolio is a passive replication strategy to the Russell 1000 Index. We decide how much to allocate to equities, but after that, you should expect returns to broadly match the index.

Our goals are twofold for the portfolio: first, we want to ensure that the operating business has all the capital it needs to grow as fast as it can at a 96 or better combined ratio. Second, after we have comfort in the capital position, is to achieve a strong risk-adjusted return over the longer term. If we look at two distinct periods over the last 6 years, you can see how our priorities are borne out in specific actions.

In 2020, as COVID caused immense volatility in both the world and financial markets, we were in a strong enough capital position to both support our internal growth and take on additional investment risk at attractive levels. However, in the inflationary period between 2021 and 2023 that we spoke about earlier, the combination of incredibly strong growth with volatility in both operating margins and investment markets meant that a reduction in investment risk was appropriate to ensure no hindrance to our growth model.

If we take a step back, we can see that over the last 10 years, Progressive's explosive premium growth has led to a portfolio that neared $100 billion at the end of 2025, up from $21 billion at the end of 2015. The portfolio growth is even more impressive when accounting for the significant dividends paid out over that time.

We thought it might be useful to review how the different elements of our portfolio flow through our financial statements. The investment income that you see on our income statement is mostly driven by our interest income, along with the dividend income from our equities portfolio. These flow through into our operating income and are generally viewed as more recurring in nature. As we will talk about on the next slide, we have seen strong growth in this category over the last 10 years.

Further down our income statement, you will see the realized gains and losses in our fixed income portfolio as well as the holding period gains and losses within our equities portfolio. This is driven by the actual sales in our portfolio and any change in the unrealized value of our equities.

The final element of our investment returns and flows is the changes in unrealized gains and losses in our fixed income portfolio. This number does not flow through to our net income, but only through our comprehensive income. If we think about the significant interest rate volatility felt across the insurance industry over the last 5 years, that has been mostly seen through comprehensive income. But the important point that I would want to get across is that we manage the portfolio on a total return basis as opposed to a book yield or an investment income number. We believe this allows us greater flexibility in our investment decisions and allows for a longer-term thinking in our strategy.

Our portfolio growth as well as the shorter duration nature of our portfolio has combined with rising interest rates to create significantly larger investment income flows over the last few years. We believe that if valuations improve in the fixed income credit markets over the next few years that we could have a further opportunity to drive additional returns.

As John mentioned earlier, 2025 was an incredibly strong year for capital generation. Our investment portfolio returned 7.33%, with strong results coming from both our fixed income and equity portfolios. On the fixed income side, the combination of lower interest rates and tighter credit spreads drove strong absolute gains. The after-tax contribution of our investment results was just short of $5 billion, which combined with our operating results made up the almost $13 billion in comprehensive income.

As mentioned earlier, Progressive continues to be a company with significant growth, and we run with higher leverage. So it's important that we have the right guidelines in place for our investment team. You can see some of the more important guidelines on this slide. Our Group 1 allocation is a combination of what we consider our riskiest or at least most volatile assets in the portfolio, which include high-yield bonds, certain preferred stocks and common equities. As you can see, we are nowhere near our limit due to our view on where valuations sit amongst these assets.

The second guideline measures our duration or interest rate risk. As can be seen, we are in the upper half of our range as we have been shifting our duration higher since mid-2022. The third guideline establishes our minimum average credit rating on the portfolio as A rated or better. While the team does its own credit work on all securities in the portfolio, we feel it's an important benchmark for our stakeholders to have a general idea of the credit strength of our portfolio. At year-end, the average credit rating of the portfolio was AA- as the current valuation environment does not lend itself to significant investment in lower-rated securities. The last guideline addresses the financial leverage that Maureen spoke to earlier, which even after our significant variable dividend remains below 20%.

Our investment team is based in Stamford, Connecticut and manages over $95 billion using year-end numbers. As mentioned earlier, the portfolio is split between an actively managed fixed income portfolio and an equities portfolio that is managed through an index replication strategy. This split in strategy is based on the view that active management and fixed income can provide value that is more difficult to achieve on the equity side.

The goals of the investment portfolio are to both support the operating business, while also achieving a strong risk-adjusted return on the portfolio. That portfolio return is measured versus a benchmark on a 1- and 3-year basis. We believe we are able to attract unique talent to our team, both due to Progressive's culture and the structure of our team that allows for employees to rotate amongst different asset classes and industries throughout their career.

The investment group is split up into three units: Our economics team provides macroeconomic research and analysis to both the investment team as well as broader Progressive. They've done a great job of helping with investment strategy through some significant swings in growth, inflation and employment. As our operating business has dealt with a very dynamic insurance marketplace, the economics team has partnered with them to understand and model out labor and claims trends. Our core investment research team drives our portfolio strategy as well as our security selection.

Our model is somewhat different in that after spending several years in an asset class, we will rotate those individuals around to other portfolios. We believe this broader investment knowledge assists our portfolio managers and analysts in determining relative value across different investment types. Our trading and execution team supports all of our fixed income trading as well as the company's share repurchase program.

I should also take this time to mention that we have an incredibly strong investment reporting and accounting group based in Cleveland that reports separately up through John. Each of our investment professionals are informed by the team's macroeconomic views, but are focused on detailed analysis at the security level. They are examining not only the credit risk, but the relative value versus other securities in their sector and other asset classes in the portfolio.

The incentive compensation of the team is partly measured based on the overall portfolio performance. This is meant to encourage collaboration and discourage building the size of one's portfolio if there is no absolute or relative value. One of the major focuses of the investment team is our interest rate risk, which is measured by duration. The investment team spends a significant amount of time on macroeconomic analysis and engagement with our internal economics team to determine our interest rate positioning. You can see at year-end, we were close to 3.5 years in duration, which is close to the highest we have been over the last 25 years. This is up from 2.75 years in mid-2022 and 1.6 years in 2014. The movement to a higher duration over the last couple of years has been driven by a view that we had turned the corner on inflation and the Federal Reserve was likely to move to an easing posture. Our portfolio duration is reported monthly in our earnings release.

The other major focus of our investment team is on credit risk. We invest across the fixed income universe, including asset-backed securities, commercial mortgage-backed securities, corporate debt, municipal bonds, preferred stocks, residential mortgage-backed securities, short-term or cash and U.S. treasuries. There are not fixed sizes of any of these portfolios, and we will shift our exposures around significantly over the short, medium and long term. One great example of that is our municipal bond portfolio, which has shrunk significantly over the last decade due to corporate tax reform, which has made municipal bonds significantly more attractive to high net worth individuals as opposed to corporations.

As we look at comparisons versus our competitors, we see that Progressive has historically held more common equities than our public peer group, but significantly less than the mutuals and conglomerates that we compete against. We have not historically invested in the alternative space viewing public fixed income and public equities as a better risk return and liquidity profile. However, as some of those alternative markets develop, we will continue to search for the best way to achieve our goals of capital stability and strong total returns.

Our relative fixed income performance has been strong over various time periods. The drivers of that outperformance come from interest rate risk and credit risk throughout the portfolio. We believe that our ability to take a long-term view towards investment valuations has allowed for us to continue to outperform our benchmarks over time. With a portfolio that is extremely liquid with mostly publicly traded securities, even though we have grown to a significant size, asset allocation changes are not difficult to execute.

An easy example to look at is how quickly we were able to generate the cash needed for our variable dividend from under $2 billion at the end of October to over $10 billion at the end of December, we were able to satisfy the dividend needs with very low transaction costs.

To bring the conversation back to where we started, Progressive's #1 focus is to grow as fast as we can at a 96 or better combined ratio. We believe that goal, along with our incredibly strong culture will continue to drive Progressive's growth over time. The focus of this call has been to try to inform about how we can best translate that growth and a capital-efficient structure into strong financial results. We believe that higher operating leverage, combined with an appropriate amount of financial leverage and a relatively more conservative investment portfolio can provide Progressive with both a strong financial position that can withstand volatility, while also generating significant returns over time.

With that, I will pass it back to Doug.

This concludes the previously recorded portion of today's event. Before we take questions today, our CEO, Tricia Griffith, would like to take a few minutes to discuss changes in our executive leadership. Tricia?

Thanks, Doug. As we stated in our recent news release, our CFO, John Sauerland announced he will be retiring in July of this year. And as you know, we are planning for Andrew Quigg to assume that role in July. I thought it would be great if you started to sit in on the IR calls and today, before we start Q&A, I've asked Andrew to talk a few minutes -- take a few minutes to introduce himself to all of you. Likely, you've seen him over the years if you've covered us for a longer period of time. Andrew?

Thank you, Tricia, and good morning, everyone. I'm excited to join you for this earnings call as I transition to the role of CFO of The Progressive Corporation, when John Sauerland retires in July. My background is available on our Investor Relations site.

I thought I might provide three themes you'll see in that bio. First, I know Progressive. Since joining Progressive more than 18 years ago, I've been inspired by the extraordinary people of Progressive. What has kept me energized is how deeply our core value is aligned with my own values. Our culture and people give me confidence in our ability to continually innovate and bring value for our customers, while also delivering industry-leading returns for shareholders.

I'm also very proud of the past 7 years during which I served as Chief Strategy Officer, reporting to Tricia. I've been a member of the executive team that has led our company through the pandemic and the subsequent cost inflation environment. This period has been great training for the CFO role.

The second theme is that I'm a lifelong learner. I received a Bachelor of Science from Yale University. I earned an MBA from Harvard Business School, graduating as a Baker Scholar. I've grown through many roles in investment banking, finance at General Mills, consulting and a handful of different opportunities at Progressive. I enjoyed learning about new aspects of Progressive and our industry. I'm bringing that mindset to the CFO role.

Finally, I love solving big problems. My career at Progressive began as a Personal Auto product manager, a core role where we balance growth and profitability. In particular, I led a turnaround of our Massachusetts Personal Auto business, after we entered the state and found we were underpriced for the environment. I also led our Direct Media team, buying advertising for our direct-to-consumer businesses. My first investor presentation came at this time in 2013 as I shared insights into the marketing and competitive advantages we achieved from data. In 2015, I moved to be a General Manager in customer relationship management, where my team created experience improvements for our customers. I spoke to investors in 2016 about the science around our experience and retention efforts.

During these years, I was proud to pioneer notable advancements as the business sponsor for our first big data project and the data science team that implemented our first AI chatbot. Nearly 8 years ago, I was asked to build a new strategy organization at Progressive from the ground up. This has included creating corporate strategy and corporate development teams. The strategy organization has also started Progressive life insurance and recently Progressive Pet Insurance as we add products around our market-leading vehicle insurance franchise. In 2019, I spoke with investors for the third time, sharing our plans to grow across the Three Horizons.

Just a final word of thanks to Tricia and our Board of Directors for providing me with several months to learn from our current CFO, John Sauerland. John is an institution at Progressive, and I am accelerating my learning to have a smooth handoff from John. I'm excited for this opportunity and look forward to connecting with you all on future investor relations calls. Thank you.

Thanks, Andrew. We now have members of our management team available live to answer questions, including presenters Maureen Spooner and Jonathan Bauer, who can answer questions about the presentation. [Operator Instructions]

We'll now take our first question.

Our first question comes from Bob Huang with Morgan Stanley.

My first question is on severity. On the 10-K, when we look at auto severity, it does look like it's marginally deteriorating, but it looks very manageable. It really hasn't spiked as the way I think we all thought it would have at the middle of 2025. Just curious, as we head into 2026, can you maybe comment on your thoughts on severity? Is it still a big concern for you going forward? Or do you feel in the current environment, the inflationary pressure is just simply not going to be there?

Yes. I think overall, severity isn't as concerning. It's been relatively flat for both the trailing 12 and the quarter. Probably the one area that we watch closely is BI severity. And of course, we report incurred. And we see that through more attorney reps, larger loss costs. We've been seeing more specials and generals. But overall, we will continue to watch as the world evolves. And we do see some parts prices increasing, a little bit higher than labor rates. So we'll continue to watch that with the supply and demand of both parts and labor.

Okay. My follow-up is on autonomous. Previously, I believe, 3 quarters ago, but I'm probably wrong on that. You were saying that the progress in autonomous has been faster than you previously thought? But just curious as we're seeing more autonomous becoming gradually commercially viable, I just curious how you plan to navigate the future of autonomous from a Personal Auto insurance context? And also from a Commercial Auto insurance context as well so.

Yes, absolutely. There's a longer answer to that question. I'm going to have Andrew answer it because his team is split into three areas and one is what we call a process group. And for years, they have looked at what we call runway. So the addressable market across the board, but specifically for private passenger auto.

But before Andrew speaks and kind of goes into what his team models and in fact, they just are wrapping up a model for our next 3-year strategy. I want to reiterate both what Maureen had talked about and also Andrew mentioned, and that was our Three Horizons. So many, many years ago, not long after I took this role, my team and I really thought about how are we going to position ourselves for the future. And we used the construct, it was from McKinsey for the Three Horizons. And so at that point, we were a little bit over $20 billion overall in written premium. And so we really thought about, okay, how are we going to use these Horizons, and really make sure we're investing in all three of them concurrently.

So the first one, and you saw Maureen's slide was execute. We want to execute the heck out of increasing more Commercial Auto and more private passenger auto, and we did just that. We maintained our #1 spot in Commercial Auto. And we went from #4 in private passenger auto to #2. So we're very proud of that. But we also knew we wanted a diversified portfolio. So as we thought about Horizon 2, we thought about sort of adjacent products we could do. And most of those fell into Commercial Lines. So think of our relationships with TNC providers where we've learned a lot about autonomy. We bought protective insurance to kind of expand our fleet. And now we've been really focusing on the last 5, 6 years on BOP, which we now are in 46 states and really ready to grow on that in small fleet. So having that diversity is really important.

And then, of course, Andrew just mentioned what we work on in terms of a little bit further afield, but products that where we think we have the ability to win, and we believe we can win. And that is a couple that we've done so far, and we have more in the pipeline, direct-to-consumer life and pet insurance. Those are products that people want, but also they help with retention for our auto.

So looking at those Three Horizons, execute, we've been doing that. We're going to continue to do that. Grow as fast as we can at 96. Expand, we are going to continue to work on relationships with both mobility and overall in our commercial business specifically. And then explore, Andrew's team and our next CSO, will continue to work on really thinking about exploring, again, where we have the right to play and the right to win. So I just wanted to kind of set that in motion before I have Andrew answer the question on autonomous vehicles.

Yes, Bob, thanks for the question on autonomous vehicles. We've been thinking about advanced safety technology for more than a decade. We initially provided thoughts to our investor community in 2013 by providing long-term trends on frequency, severity and ultimately, the size of the insurance market. In 2017, we provided investors with thoughts and projections, while providing modeling on outcomes that we could see in the future. The framework from those presentations are still applicable today, we think.

As Tricia mentioned, we continue to invest in modeling future scenarios, including both personal and commercial, as you indicated. We have recently updated our projections. And we would say, even with strong assumptions around the efficacy of vehicle safety technology, we still project personal and commercial vehicle insurance in the United States will grow robustly for decades.

It's also worth noting that our projections of the U.S. vehicle insurance market have consistently underestimated actual market growth. I'd like to spend just a couple of minutes talking about how we think about the modeling and also how we think about Progressive's position within the industry.

First, on the modeling side. We do expect safety technologies like autonomous driving to continue to be added to vehicles. We often see these new technologies, first arriving in the most expensive new models. In addition, the ramp-up of voluntary new technologies and new vehicles can take a long time. The average vehicle on the road is about 13 years old. So even when mandated after a certain model year, fleet penetration is slow.

To be specific, we have tracked different technologies over time. An example is electronic stability control, which we consider to be fast. We find it takes about a decade for 1% of vehicles to have a new technology like ESC and 20 years for it to reach 45% of the fleet. Reaching 90% of vehicles can take more than 3 decades.

When we model on the frequency side, we consistently see that vehicle technology can lower the rate of accidents. It's worth noting that sometimes safety statistics don't provide incremental improvement above what is already present in the fleet. Double counting is a persistent challenge that we and others have to navigate through.

On modeling severity, we also see that these technologies can increase the cost of claims. An example here is Tesla vehicles. I recently saw a model for the size of the auto insurance industry that assumed Teslas were already fully autonomous vehicles, providing much lower frequency with similar severity. In Progressive loss experience, we see that Tesla Model 3s have higher loss costs than similar EVs. This is due both to higher frequency and higher severity.

We're also aware of some pilot insurance programs for FSD on Teslas. Teslas represent less than 1% of vehicles on the road. Only a portion of these vehicles have an FSD subscription and FSD is used on less than 100% of trips. So in total, it represents a small opportunity today. This is not to say that Teslas will not lower pure premium in the future, it just isn't in our fleet data currently.

One additional aspect in the modeling that is not often called out, if drivers aren't required to monitor vehicles all the time in L3 to L5, we may see consumers increase the amount of vehicle miles traveled as they substitute personal auto transportation for other forms of transportation. So accidents per mile may be reduced, but the VMTs might go up.

It's also worth noting that 3.2 trillion miles are driven annually in the United States. As you mentioned, we've seen companies like Waymo that seem to be leading in the commercialization of autonomous vehicles. But over the past decade, it appears that Waymo has about 200 million AV miles, which is a very small fraction of overall VMTs.

On the Progressive side, we think Progressive is well positioned for changes in mobility whenever they may come. Progressive continues to invest in segmenting risk down to the vehicle level. Not all technology is equal, not all technology impacts every line coverage equally. We continue to invest in the data and the math to be extremely accurate, and we believe the proliferation of safety technology will make this focus even more valuable.

Beyond the vehicle level, our UBI capabilities allow us to understand how a driver performs using this technology. Progressive has access to tens of billions of driving miles annually to observe changes in driving behavior and technology. With our Snapshot, customers now allowing us to continuously monitor their driving behavior, we will pick up any tech-enabled changes in loss costs over time and adjust our rates as individual drivers harness technologies to different degrees.

We also have the capability to accept data streams directly from OEMs and third parties on an individual vehicle basis with consumer consent. This has been part of our UBI technology for many years, and our UBI capabilities extend beyond our own devices and our own applications.

Progressive also has over a decade of experience in insuring transportation network companies. We believe this infrastructure on our Commercial Line side can be leveraged for further commercial deployments like robotaxis.

Finally, Progressive has historically been able to compete very effectively at a local and state level. Auto insurance is regulated at a state level. And as regulations adapt, we expect that this local knowledge will continue to be critical. We certainly don't know how the world will change in the coming decades, but we believe that our competitive advantages, our very robust data assets, our leading analytics and of course, our history of execution will serve us well as safety technology changes.

Thanks, Andrew. I hope what you got out of that, Bob, was that we do a lot of modeling, a lot of detailed modeling, have been doing it for decades, and rely on that, and we put some conservatism, but we believe that there's a lot of runway under all of our Horizons.

Our next question comes from Michael Zaremski with BMO.

Congrats to John and to Andrew. My first question is specifically on premiums per personalized policy. I know there's a lot that goes into this but I believe the overarching theme is it's been slightly negative because of just healthy competition and also price reductions in Florida. If you agree with that, just kind of curious where should we expect that ratio to stay negative in '26 or maybe it will revert back to positive territory later in the year as the Florida pricing decreases kind of level off?

Yes. It's hard to say how the year will unfold. We're going to continue to grow as fast as we can at or below 96. So if we see states where we might want to reduce new business rates in order to grow, we might do that. Florida was one big piece of it. But we're always adjusting our rates accordingly. And now we're doing more small bites to the apple of a little bit up, a little bit down. But you're right, when you look at the kind of difference between net premium growth and PIF growth, a lot of it is reducing some of those new business rates in order to grow. Some of it is highly influenced by mix.

So as we've opened up our aperture to grow more in the last couple of years. Our mix has shifted back to probably more pre-COVID levels. And that's okay because every customer that comes in, we believe we have the data to make sure that we get to our target profit margin. So that's one piece of it, and wouldn't necessarily have that be your barometer. And then we are selling more 6-month policies, which is about half the premium you get in a 12-month policy. Again, just trying to kind of balance that affordability for customers that want to stay insured.

Got it. That's helpful. My final question is on technology. I'm curious if advances in recent months or quarters have kind of materially changed Progressive's views on the ability for the, let's say, the combined ratio, the LAE ratio to benefit from efficiencies on claims and underwriting.

Jay, are you talking to more in like the artificial intelligence technology, the technology that Andrew was speaking of on the vehicles?

Correct. AI specifically.

Got you. Yes, here's what I would say. This is probably a longer answer than you need, Mike. But we have a history of innovation. And so we are really concentrating on AI across the board and have been for a while. But if you go way back, into 1995, we were the first to put our auto rates online, like we saw the future, and we did that and that was before Google was even in existence. And what a great bet that was because over half of our private passenger auto is on the direct side and increasing more of our Commercial Auto. So we're going to continue with the history of innovation, including our usage-based insurance where we evolve and are getting better and better and more closely to price to the whole curve with surcharges and discounts.

And more than that, using technology for our customers. So we've talked about our accident response. That's a really powerful message when people get into accidents and they're unable to call an ambulance or a tow truck, we're able to do that for them. So we've talked I think a little bit over the last year or 2 years, maybe even longer on what we've worked on in predictive AI, a lot of models using unstructured data, voice data to trigger models, and we'll continue to do that. And I think 2 quarters ago, we had someone from claims come in and talk about Gaussian Splatting for our claims analytics. So know that we are working a lot on AI and have a lot that we are focused on.

I'm not going to share with you all that we're doing. We have an inventory of items that we're doing across really the enterprise, and we're speaking across the enterprise to make sure we're doing the right thing for our customers, our employees in order to make sure -- just making insurance easier and just easier to understand, easier to work with. So whether it's digital or agentic, we're going to continue to focus on that. I did talk in my letter about marketing commercial that we did called, Drive Like an Animal, that was all AI generated with the exception of Flo's voice. And we did that in so much less time than a regular commercial and so much less money and more importantly, it worked. So we measure our new prospects, and it worked very well. So we're excited about that as well.

We're going to have business models, rigorous controls, and we're going to continue to invest in this, and we're going to continue to lean into now Gen AI. We recently formed an AI Strategy Council. And so while we're working on sort of the next year and here's where we're at and working with vendors and making sure that we're testing things to make sure it's a really fluid process. This AI Strategy Council is sort of looking to where the puck is going in the next 3 to 5 years. So think of how -- one, clearly efficiencies, we're going to want those. But how is this going to change our industry? How is it going to change Progressive? How is it going to change how customers shop, et cetera? And they should report to my team in a few months, and we're going to continue to evolve that because we think the puck will move because this is going really fast.

Here's what I would say. Lastly, I'm super excited about the promise that AI holds for Progressive, and I'm excited about all the work we're doing. As with past innovations, I'm confident we will be a leader in our execution, and we'll do it responsibly. So that's where we're at. We are getting -- we're seeing efficiencies when you look at our data, and I think that will continue.

Our next question comes from Peter Knudsen with Evercore ISI.

Just another question on AI. I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about how you think AI agents potentially could change the Personal Lines distribution, specifically for Progressive, but also the market overall?

I mean I think it's probably a different answer if I'm talking about our direct business versus our agency business. Our direct business, I think it could change it dramatically because if we have agentic agents for some policies. So I think there'll still be the desire for more complexity to talk to a human. But for some easy policies, and if I think it flows well, we should be able to change as these evolve and get better and better. Independent agents, I think it's a little bit different. Oftentimes, customers go to independent agents for more complexity of needs, feeling confident in their decisions. We've seen that especially on the Commercial Line side, where it's a little bit more of a complex policy coverage contract, and so they want to be able to kind of have that knee to knee. But I do think it's changing. If we can make it easy for our customers, one of our strategic pillars, John shared those is broad coverage. We want to be aware when and how customers want to shop and be serviced and some of that might be through an agentic AI agent.

Okay. And then one thing I've seen in the past cycles is that frequency on first-party coverages has bounced back 1 year or 2 after we've seen auto prices moderate. And so I'm wondering, a, if you would sort of agree with that hypothesis, if you have seen any evidence of this in your book? And then if yes, basically, how is that changing your assumption for frequency in the coming year now that we've seen a softer prices?

Yes. I think frequency is obviously -- there's so many attributions that happen, but we have seen that. John, do you want to take a little bit more detail on that?

Sure. We are always analyzing frequency at the coverage at the state, at the most finite level we can, and our product managers are constantly assessing what they think the future looks like to ensure that our prices that we are setting today ensure that 96 or better combined ratio moving forward.

You're right. When the market tightens up, we do -- we believe it's tough to see it exactly. But when the market tightens up, there is some change in claiming behavior. And as the market loosens, we do think sometimes we see some loosening in claiming behavior. It's, again, tough to tease out relative to everything else going on in the marketplace. Additionally, we watch coverages very closely when things like recessions happen because claiming behavior changes there as well.

So yes, we are certainly in a softening environment. The availability of insurance is certainly opening up relative to where it's been, and that can have influences on first-party claiming behavior. I won't try and put a number on it for you today. And I would tell you, it's not a large number ever, but it does have some influence in the direction of frequency.

Our next question comes from Katie Sakys with Autonomous Research.

Can you hear me?

Yes, Katie.

My first question is really on the regulatory environment. I think as you guys are well aware, there have been several state legislatures that are looking to push forward legislation that would focus on consumer affordability. Several states have pointed to Progressive specifically as an example of ways in which the auto insurance industry can be further regulated to support this goal. I'm just kind of curious how you guys are thinking about the potential for additional regulatory changes over the next year or 2? And really what that might mean for your overall approach to underwriting in those states?

Yes, it's hard to say, except for where we have the data, and that's from Florida. And so you saw the tort reform, the House Bill 837 that they put into play. And that has had a tremendous effect on affordability for Floridians. And in fact, if you bought a policy today versus 1 year, 1.5 years ago, you're going to pay on a new policy, 20% less, which I think is really significant. So that's been pretty powerful.

I know Governor Hochul from New York is, I think, proposing some legislation on to reduce fraud and lawsuit abuse in New York, we think we support that. So we support that because we do think affordability is an issue, and competitive prices, again, is one of our strategic pillars, and we want to make sure that we take into account things like affordability.

I'll talk about some of the other things we've been doing internally, though. So we will abide by the rules of any state. We know how to work, state to state. We've done that for nearly 90 years. But we internally also have felt it important to make sure that we take actions to help with affordability. So specifically on the CRM side, and we've talked about this before as it relates to PLE, we have something called customer preservation team. And customers can call in, and we can talk about maybe changing coverage. We'll do a whole policy review. So maybe it could be changing coverages, lower deductibles, and we can kind of work our way around different types of that. Sometimes when people call in, they will have a different product model. We rewrite that. But the 4 million customers that called in, in 2025, had an average decrease of 21%, which is significant for those customers. We also do proactively call out to customers that we think might defect to kind of help them work through the policy review.

Another piece that we've had for a long time are our loyalty rewards. So think of loyalty for tenure, for minor child discounts, accident forgiveness, things like that. And that's equated to about $1.5 billion in savings in 2025. I've talked about this for years, especially during and after the pandemic, Snapshot. If you -- Snapshot whether it's the OBD device or the mobile device, if you're a good driver, you can have really, really generous discounts because we understand that rate to risk.

And then we try to be flexible with what's happening in our country at any given time. So when the federal government shut down, we made sure if those employees called in that we gave them some lenience in terms of when they would pay their bill. And I know that really helped a lot of our federal employees.

We talked a little bit about reducing some new business rates where we want to grow, and I think that is important. We feel like right now, we're in a really great competitiveness from a price perspective, there's a lot of shopping, and it is a soft market. But we are having really high conversion. In fact, the highest we've had in decades. So we do feel really good about that. But we applaud any reforms that can make insurance more affordable. And we think Florida is a perfect example of that.

I appreciate the extra color there. I guess maybe zooming in on Florida then, it was great to see that loss trend on the Florida Personal Auto book sort of came in below you guys' expectations last year and drove a lot of the favorable development on that book. On the flip side, that also translated to the policyholder credit charge growing to $1.2 billion by the end of last year. How are you guys thinking about rate relief in Florida over the course of '26? And how that might translate to a policyholder credit charge, if any, taken this year?

Yes. We're watching our combined ratio there closely. You sort of think of it's a 3-year rolling, so you've got '24 and '25 sort of in the book with this credit. In '26, we'll continue to watch. We've reduced rates 3x in the last year. The hard part about that area of the country is catastrophes usually come towards the end of the year. But I know Pat's team is watching that. And if we feel like we need to take more new business rate decreases, we'll do that. So more to come on that. I will tell you, we're watching it very closely and modeling it continuously.

That was our last question. And so that concludes our event. Daniel, I'll hand the call back over to you for the closing scripts.

That concludes The Progressive Corporation's Fourth Quarter Investor Event. Information about a replay of the event will be available on the Investor Relations section of Progressive's website for the next year. You may now disconnect.

Good morning, and thank you for joining us today for Progressive's third quarter investor event. I'm Doug Constantine, Treasury Controller and I'll be moderator for today's event.

The company will not make detailed comments related to its results in addition to those provided in its annual report on Form 10-K, quarterly reports on Form 10-Q and the letter to shareholders, which have been posted to the company's website. Although our quarterly Investor Relations events often include a presentation on a specific portion of our business, we will instead use the 60 minutes scheduled for today's event for introductory comments by our CFO and a question-and-answer session with members of our leadership team. Introductory comments by our CFO were previously recorded. Upon completion of the previously recorded remarks, we will use the balance of the 60 minutes scheduled for this event for live questions and answers with members of our leadership team.

As always, discussions in this event may include forward-looking statements. These statements are based on management's current expectations and are subject to many risks and uncertainties that could cause actual events and results to differ materially from those discussed during today's event. Additional information concerning those risks and uncertainties is available in our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2024, as supplemented by our Form 10-Q for the first, second and third quarters of 2025, where you will find discussions of the risk factors affecting our business, safe harbor statements related to the forward-looking statements and other discussions of the challenges we face. These documents can be found via the Investor Relations section of our website at investors.progressive.com. To begin today, I'm pleased to introduce our CFO, John Sauerland, who will kick us with some introductory comments. John?

Good morning, and thank you for joining Progressive's Third Quarter 2025 Investor Relations Call. We had an excellent quarter with an 89.5 combined ratio, 10% premium growth and policies in force growth of 12% versus a year ago. That policies in force growth equates to 4.2 million more policyholders or almost 7 million more vehicles in force than a year ago. While growth is lower than in recent years, we are still gaining significant market share in capitalizing on the opportunities for growth through robust media spend and competitive rates. Year-to-date, our combined ratio is 87.3%, with 13% premium growth and comprehensive income of $10 billion, which is over 30% ahead of 2024. Rounding out our key performance metrics, our trailing 12-month comprehensive return on equity stands at 37.1%.

Before moving to questions, we'd like to take a moment to offer more commentary on the $950 million estimate for policyholder credit expense for Personal Auto customers in Florida that we recognized in September. Florida is Progressive's largest market, and we are the leading provider of Personal Auto insurance in Florida. In 2023, Florida legislators responded to rapidly rising insurance rates by passing House Bill 837, which, among other things, move Florida to a modified comparative negligent system, meaning drivers who are more than 50% at fault for an accident could no longer sue for damages, and this allowed one-way attorney fees. Since House Bill 837 took effect, our average loss cost or pure premiums for Florida injury claims are down between 10% and 20%, and the percentage of Florida personal injury protection or PIP claims, for which we receive lawsuits is down around 60%.

While we have been responsive in reflecting these changes in our loss costs through 2 rate reductions for Florida consumers in the past year and another plan for December, the drop in loss cost was more pronounced than we expected. Additionally, obviously, there was significant risk of very costly storms in Florida, and we have seen virtually none in 2025. The Florida excess profits law calls for the return of profits in excess of 500 basis points better than our filed and approved underwriting profit margin over a 3 accident year period. And at quarter end, we estimated that liability at $950 million.

For perspective, in 2022 alone, inclusive of Hurricane Ian, our Personal Auto combined ratio was over 100, and those results translated to around $750 million decrease to the excess profits equation for the periods that included 2022. Our Florida auto business is more than 50% bigger now than in 2022. We applaud the legislative changes in House Bill 837 and resulting in more affordable personal auto insurance premiums for consumers, and desire to continue to grow our presence in Florida. Our loss reserves will continue to develop as we handle more claims into the new system, and our estimate for the policyholder credit expense for the 2023 to 2025 period will develop accordingly, with monthly adjustments showing up in the expense line on our income statement. Naturally, going forward, our intent is to manage profitability in Florida to avoid excess profits.

And finally, in response to questions we received, while a few other states have statutes covering excess profits, we don't currently foresee other similar exposures. Thank you again for joining us, and we'll now take your questions.

This concludes the previously recorded portion of today's event. We now have members of our management team available live to answer questions. [Operator Instructions]

The first question is from the line of Bob Huang with Morgan Stanley.

My first question is on advertising spend. Ad spending this quarter in terms of dollar amount is fairly similar to the last quarter. Just given the increased competition policy in force growth has decelerated, specifically in Personal Auto. Curious if there's a way to think about ad spending going forward. Clearly, these policies are very profitable. Do you need to maintain the current level of ad spending in an increasingly competitive environment? Just curious how you should think about ad spending going forward?

Yes, Bob, we monitor that every month on an ongoing basis and monitor most importantly, efficiency. So we want to make sure our cost per sale is lower than our targeted acquisition cost, and that remains to be the case. So Pat Callahan and his team, we do a lot of our buying of advertising internally. They look at it overall for a year, with things you have to buy in advance. But ongoing, we have the lever to increase or decrease depend on competition. That's what we'll continue to do. Again, our operating goal is to continue to grow as fast as we can and advertising is a great lever to reach that goal.

Okay. Maybe just clarifying that point a little bit. When you say that you kind of have -- you're buying ads 12 months in advance. Does that mean that essentially for the next 12 months your ad spending is more or less set already? Or are there some levers around that? Or is it just that most of it still is kind of not so certain? I just want to see if there's a clarification on that point.

We'll do some buys in advance to get some discounted buys, but -- a big majority, a big majority of the ads that we buy are in the auction, and we can -- that's where we can have the levers to pull back or go forward that you've seen in the last several years.

The next question is from the line of Elyse Greenspan with Wells Fargo.

My first question, I was hoping you could just comment just on the competitive environment in general and what you observed in the Q3, and I guess, like a forward view, right, we've seen others pivot to growth as we move through the year? And just how has that impacted that combined, right, with the fact that we're in this environment where you guys said in the Q, you don't need that much rate right now? How does that help you formulate your view about growth, right, both in the near term, like in the fourth quarter, but then also as we think about 2026?

Thanks, Elyse, and thanks for acknowledging your report last night that we had strong growth in Q3 of '24 because I've been comparing the growth and the fact that we've slowed is sort of funny to me because of how much we've grown on such a big base. So I appreciate you acknowledging that. So yes, the competitive environment has gotten stronger, which we knew would happen. That's why we got out in advance of rates to capture all the growth that we did, and we did. This is when the fun starts. So competition is great. It's great for customers and consumers. And so we'll continue to find ways with which to grow. We have a lot out there in terms of as we look at each state, each channel, different factors in terms of Sams, Wrights, Robinsons, and we have a strategy to grow all of the above. And probably, the biggest growth point for us, Elyse, is when we think of Robinsons. So we have -- we want to grow in every single persona.

So we love Sams as long as we can make our calendar year profitable. But we want to grow Robinsons because that market is about a $230 billion addressable market, and we have a low percentage of that share. So there's a lot of opportunity. I'll probably go into a little bit more detail than you need. But I think as you think about not just fourth quarter, but especially as we get into '26 and '27. And the area of our focus will be more Robinsons because we're in such a different position than we were a few years ago. So as you know, we needed rate increases, we needed better segmentation, we needed some cost sharing to go into the policies, we needed to exit DP3. There's a lot of things that we did that I referred to a couple of different times of our 5-point blueprint to get to where we need to go to. We did just that.

We increased rates from 22% to 24%, about 55% and continue, but on a much more moderate level because we're in such a different position. Our calendar year combined ratio now on property is about 78%, and granted some of that is favorable reserve development as well as we haven't had many storms at all in 2025, but that is a great position to be in. And so as we think about our growth, we think about -- we have a framework that we're using called a new business readiness growth. And we look at the assessment of adequate rate level, segmentation, so which product is in the market, cost sharing, interstate diversification, regulation and market conditions. And when we look at all those factors, what we look at state by state is where do we want to grow and where we think we can grow and how are we positioned in those states. So currently, there's about 30 states -- 33 states where we want to -- we're going to spur on growth.

And about 20 of those are in our growth states that we've called growth states and 13 are more volatile. We'll be a little bit more conservative in the volatile state, but that really opens us up broadly for more Robinsons, for more growth. And as you can imagine, in John's opening statement, he talked about VIF, Vehicles in Force, which we don't publicly talk about. We talk about PIF. But when you compare the $4.2 million PIF growth year-over-year, that equates to about $7 million VIF growth. You can imagine that this growth with more Robinsons is much higher because they're multicar and multiproduct households. So competition is there. We have a lot on the horizon to spur on growth, and we're pretty excited about it.

And then my follow-up is just, I guess, on margins and tariffs. It seems like from the Q commentary that you guys really have not seen an impact yet. So I just want to make sure I'm reading the comments correctly. And then, do you guys still expect that perhaps we could see an impact on loss trend in margins as we move through the balance of the year?

Yes, you read that exactly correct. We haven't seen much on that. It might be because there's inventory and of course, the tariff schematic has changed along the way. But we're still -- we're looking at low single digits, and we have the margins to be able to absorb that. So we're not too worried about tariffs at this point. Of course, that could change. But at this point, we're not too worried about it.

The next question is from the line of Mike Zaremski with BMO.

My first question is on, hopefully, teasing out premiums per policy when we just kind of prudently divide premiums by PIF, and this is for Personal Auto. It's been slightly negative for a while now, which appears to be different from the kind of the flattish pricing you've been speaking to. So trying to tease out whether the negativity is coming from just some of the Florida rate reductions? Is the December one going to be a large one if you want to preview that? Or is it coming from just other actions you're talking about policyholders switching to lower-cost policies, et cetera?

Yes. I think, Mike, there's a lot of things happening. Our average written premium is affected by our rate decreases. And obviously, it went up tremendously in '23 into '24 with all of the increases that we took based on inflation. I think the reaction might be a little bit on growth, although 12% PIF growth on a 14% PIF growth to me is really unheard of. And any time we're in anywhere near that double-digit growth, we're pretty darn excited, at an 89.5% with the $950 million accrual. So the Florida situation is just that. And we're going to tell you what we know when we know it. So as John said, we'll continue to revise our accrual as the year plays out. So in a couple of weeks, you'll know if the accrual has gone up or down for October and then there are sometimes late year storms, I think in 2024, Helene and Milton were both in September and October. So we'll watch those. But I feel really good about where we're at. I mean if we had a crystal ball in Florida, we might have done things differently. But I think we have handled that really well. We're very large. They're the largest.

And as John said in his opening statements, I -- and I've said this before, I'm going to commend Governor DeSantis and Commissioner Yaworsky for this legislative change with House Bill 837. It really has had a profound and a momentous effect on the state of Florida's insurance market. And I've been in this business about 38 years. I would never imagine these changes and how great they are for the benefit of Florida consumers. So we'll continue to watch that. But I think from a premium per policy, we're always going to be competitive and segments change, and that kind of all goes into the math.

Okay. Got it. Maybe pivoting to, Tricia, your remarks about share buybacks potentially being a bigger lever than historically. Can you talk about just the framework there? Should we -- are you alluding to the special dividend being put into buybacks instead at current valuations or for both? Or anything -- any color would be helpful.

Yes. When we have excess capital, we think of it in 3 ways. And obviously, we're -- I just talked a little bit when I answered Elyse's questions about our desire to continue to grow and our actions around that. And then, of course, we look at share buybacks if we believe it's under our intrinsic value. Of course, we always buy enough shares to dilute the stock compensation in any given year. We have the ability to do that. And you'll see in our monthly release the actual number of shares we buy back each month as well as the average price. And so you'll see that in a few weeks as well. We have a company-wide 10b5-1 that we file with certain price points to buy back stock if we think it's under our value.

And so you'll see our actions that we took in October in a few weeks. And then we've been in party discussions with the Board of Directors in the last couple of meetings on what we think could be a dividend. And of course, that will ultimately be their choice, and we'll have another conversation in December. And with that, we'll kind of be watching our ability to buy back more as well as what we think if we have a dividend, what it will be. But those are conversations that are constantly happening within our walls and with our Board of Directors.

So just, Tricia, just to be clear, were you signaling a change in capital management tone by stating the buyback language? Or are you saying this is just business as usual discussion with the Board?

All I was saying was that we're very cognizant when the shares -- when we believe the shares are under our intrinsic value, and we typically, if we have the capital, take action when that happens.

The next question is from the line of Tracy Benguigui with Wolfe Research.

I have a question about your Florida excess profit statute. When you perform the same exercise next year, let's call it, September for accident years '24 to '26 to see if you owe any excess profits in early '27. Is there a scenario where you'll be paying another Florida excess profit statute given all the favorable reserve development you experienced in the state in recent years? Or do the excess credits you're paying in '26 basically neutralize a lot of those excess profits that you could owe in '27?

Well, we don't know. And we're going to -- as I said earlier, we're going to continue to refine our accrual as each month goes by for this 3-year trailing period. It's -- and at that point at the end of this year, we'll know the sort of fully like you said, neutralized amount for that. And so the hard part, and we've tried to signal this about Florida is the storm season is typically at the end of the year. So we're putting another decrease in, in December. We'll watch that closely. I think John said, we'll do what we can to avoid a similar situation in '27 for calendar year '26, '25, '24, but we feel good about where we're at right now with the accrual and we'll continue to revise that.

Okay. And you saw that Florida auto business is more than 50% bigger now than in '22, and you're managing the profitability in Florida to avoid those excess profits and you took two rate cuts and you're going to take another one. So my question is on bundling. Can you share how much of your homeowner policies have grown in Florida? And how you're thinking about your property exposure relative to your risk appetite?

Yes. Our property growth in Florida has been minimal. Several years ago, we reviewed our policies in Florida to get to where we -- where we are in terms of our readiness growth. We had a lot of DP-3. We had a lot of coastal properties. And so we had a lot of nonrenewals that we gave to another company to be able to write. We will write a little bit in Florida now, mostly new construction. That's a place where like we say, when we talk about volatile states that we will not be -- have huge aggressive growth, but we'll grow where we think we can and make our target profit margins. But the growth in the property book has not been huge.

The next question is from the line of Jimmy Bhullar with JPMorgan.

I had a question just on competition in Personal Auto. Most competitors have been increasing marketing spending in recent months. Many have alluded to potential price reductions as well just given strong margins. So your comments on competition, is that what they reflect? Or are you seeing competitors get more aggressive with pricing and writing business either with sort of implied losses or very low margins, so just whether its exactly rationale?

Yes, I just want to say, I think we're seeing all of the above. I think we're seeing a lot of -- we saw a lot of price decreases. We've seen more increase in advertising, and I think that all goes to competitiveness. So I think we think that's good for consumers. And when we think of -- when we think of the strategic pillars, that's one big piece of it but you have to have a really great brand, and our brand has continued to evolve and will continue to evolve to get us on that short list. You have to have for us broad coverage where, when and how customers want to shop. And we have that across the board from our independent agent channel, our direct channel and then we have multiple different areas with which to buy our products or the products of our unaffiliated partners.

And then we have -- and this is sometimes underestimated because part of what's been Progressive's success is our people and our culture. That's really hard to put on the spreadsheet for an analyst. We just finished our Gallup survey, we're in the 99% of culture and engagement. That's really important because when you have times where you want to get something done, whether it's growth or decrease expenses or roll out a new product, execution is the name of the game and you have to have a great culture to be able to do that because people want to be able to rally around a singular goal. So those four things we think about all the time. But as far as competitive prices, we're seeing increased advertising and much more competitive pricing out there.

Okay. And then maybe on a different topic, if I think about your commercial lines business, I would have thought that it would be growing at a fairly fast clip since you were expanding your target markets, broadening coverage, adding new types of coverages, policies. And if we look at the numbers the last couple of years, they've been high single digits, which is decent, but high single-digit premium growth the last couple of quarters. I think premium growth has actually been negative off of modest comp. So how do you think about like maybe talk about your aspirations or growth potential of your Commercial Lines business over the longer term?

Yes. I think longer term, we have great aspirations. Clearly, FHT has been a headwind, those are -- that was -- it's higher margin business, but we have slowed growth there, a lot due to both rate and non-rate actions. And we've increased our growth in business owners and contractors which are a lower premium, and we've done some 6-month policy. So there -- so what you're seeing is real in the data. However, I think you're correct. We have a couple of areas that we have grown over the years and really wanted to understand them more deeply. And we have pretty complex plans to spur on growth in a couple of different areas. I'm not going to talk about those today. I'll talk about those maybe as we get into them. More specifically, I don't want to show my cards. But yes, we believe that the runway in Commercial Lines continues to be really strong.

The next question is from the line of Gregory Peters with Raymond James.

In your letter in previous comments, you've talked about new products, your Personal Auto product, 8.9 and 9.0 and then in the property area, your next-gen product, 5.0. So as we're sitting here on the outside watching these developments, trying to understand what does Personal Auto product 9.0 mean versus product 8.9 and is the difference that material? And the same question would be applied to the property next-generation product, too?

Yes. That's a great question. First, I would say we're not very creative when we name our new product model. So I'm going to give you that because you'll see on 5 -- we're 5.0 and 5.1 in property, 8.9, 9.1. I'm going to let Pat take that. But what I would say is years ago, probably around 2016 maybe, we decided that we really wanted to have the pace of our models increase to get more and more variables out there that are predictive of either loss cost or if we wanted to increase a certain segment like the Robinsons. And that's why we end up doing that. But -- and we -- I don't think we're going to go into the specific variables. But I'll let Pat talk about that a little bit more because we have very large R&D groups that work on these product models constantly. Pat, do you want to add anything?

Sure. So from a product perspective, we try to do a couple of things every time we roll out a new product. And the first is primarily to match rate to risk better than we did in the prior product. And insurance is a scale game. We have more data than most competitors, and our product is more complex. So we have more segmented or finite data than virtually all competitors in market. So that data enables us to solve what predicts and fits losses more precisely or more accurately than others can. So the first and foremost is to match rate to risk.

Second, though is to introduce differentiating coverages that meet consumers' needs to transfer risk to us as the carrier to smooth household cash flows. So a couple of examples of that between 8.9 and 9.0. So 8.9, we introduced Progressive vehicle protection. Think of it as a mechanical breakdown coverage for vehicles that supplements a new car warranty and provides things like lost key fob and dent and ding repair as well as supplementing the OEM warranty as the powertrain warranty or bumper-to-bumper warranty kind of runs off on a new car.

And 9.0, similarly, we come out with new segmentation where we solve all the math and the factors to fit the loss curve more precisely while also introducing with 9.0 embedded renters. So now you can embed and buy a renter's insurance coverage as part of your progressive auto policy. So we recognize that renters insurance is a potential gateway product for us in the property space, and we want to make sure that we are attracting multiline customers early in their insurance shopping and buying journey, and we want to protect their household goods as part of a renter's product and allow them to move them into a home or a condo as they change their living situation. So really, a couple of things we do with every product, but primarily it's solved the math to make sure we're as accurate as we can, leveraging our massive scale; and secondarily, get that product to market, as Tricia mentioned, as quick as possible.

As a follow-up question, I'm going to focus pivot to technology and autonomous driving. The new cars coming out have a lot of embedded technologies. Some of them actually can drive themselves to locations, the new Tesla I'm thinking about, in particular. So I think it's appropriate for us to -- as we think about Progressive, what's your view on this technology, emerging technology? And in that moment in time, maybe 15 years from now when we get to a fully autonomous type of environment. Can you talk about how the company is thinking about that? And any color there would be helpful.

Yes. We've been watching this for many, many years. I think we first did our first, what we call runway model, in 2012 and to try to understand, okay, the implications of cars that are safer. First of all, safer cars are better for the world. So we think that's a great thing. And I think we build that into our product as we think about vehicles that have safer components. Just like you would have at any time with seat belts or backup cameras, those sorts of things. So we're continuing to revise our model. In fact, we're in the midst of doing it right now to try to understand when that will impact us. And we see a lot -- we gather a lot of data. We see a lot of data even when you compare like the Waymo cars in Austin, and we look at our relationships with TNC, we've not seen too much of a change and the changes there with pretty heavy Waymo use has not muted TNC miles. So we're continuing to watch that getting as granular as we can.

But at a higher level, what we did years ago is we constructed the 3 horizons to really understand how we can grow across the board, not just in where we've typically grown in our private Passenger Auto and our Commercial Auto, which we're still going to continue to do. But that's when we really built our Commercial Lines product models out. So think of BOP fleet, our relationships with our TNC partners and many other things. And then, of course, our Horizon 3, which are smaller now, but we believe will be bigger in the future. We're going to continue to look at that, we call it, execute, expand, explore to make sure that we have a really robust model as cars get safer and as frequency goes down, and we'll watch that and make a determination of what we need to do to continue to grow.

And we talk about this all the time because it's important for society, but it's also important for us to know areas where we can grow, where we can leverage our people, our data, our scale to grow in different ways, and that's what we talk about as we think about autonomous vehicles. It's -- the time frame is always sort of the big question mark. Because if you look at articles in 2012, it would have said everyone is driving around playing bridge in the back of their car. In 2019, that hasn't been the case. So we still think there's a lot to go again. We don't have our heads in the sand, and we'll continue to think about growth in different areas.

The next question is from the line of Alex Scott with Barclays.

First one I had is on shopping and retention. I was just interested if you could compare sort of the time period where you're taking bigger increases or the industry is taking bigger increases in the shopping activity that was going on then in sort of reaction to higher prices as opposed to maybe what you're expecting over the next 12 months on retention related more to well, you could shop and go get a lower price potentially somewhere. Are you seeing different kinds of sensitivity to that related to up in pricing versus potential for down?

Yes. I mean I think we're seeing a lot of shopping, which means all customers are going to shop including ours, and you see that in our PLE. Our feeling is just as we talked about in the Q, oftentimes, our customers will reach out to us and we can do a policy review with our cancer preservation team to see if there's something we can do to help them out from a price perspective. If we end up writing a brand-new policy that starts the clock ticking. So that is a little bit of a headwind to PLE, but not when we think about our consumer life expectancy, our household life expectancy. When you look at that, we don't share that data externally. We share PLE. But if you look at our, say, household life expectancy of having a product with Progressive, that's relatively flat. So we feel decent about that.

Now if you shop and you end up leaving us, we believe that is just adverse selection because we believe we have the most current up-to-date price, as Pat talked about and I talked about briefly. Our models are constantly changing and revising them to make them more specific to rate versus risk. And if you end up leaving, we believe that we have more data than wherever that customer is going to in terms of profitability.

Got it. That's helpful. And then going back to the capital discussion. I mean, M&A was something you didn't mention as much relative to like the buyback and variable dividend conversation. And just in light of that conversation you had on autonomous and potentially expanding into other products and so forth. I mean, how does M&A fit into that? How do you think about M&A over a little bit longer time period? And why wouldn't you use a really strong capital position now to explore that?

I mean M&A is really complicated. We've done a couple of acquisitions in the last 10 or so years, and they were very specific. So we bought ASI, which is now Progressive Home because we wanted that bundled customer and access to that customer, especially in the agency channel. We bought Protective a few years ago to increase our fleet capacity and we'll continue to kind of close the gap on that on the Commercial Lines part. But acquisitions can be tough and integrations can be tough. So we want to make sure it's the right company, the right culture and something that can be additive. .

So if we think we want to grow, and there's a company that has a bunch of private passenger auto that we believe we can get anyway, I'm not sure you want to pay the premium on that. That said, we have a group of corporate development group that's always scanning to look to see if something makes sense. And we always want to have dry powder in case something comes up. But again, that's something that I think every company does, including us in terms of just making sure we're on the growth trajectory. Do you want to -- John, do you want to reiterate sort of our capital structure and how we think about regulatory contingent in excess?

Sure. So M&A would be one deployment of excess capital in our minds. Reinvesting capital in the core business is always the first option that we pursue is obviously our returns in that space have been very good. We also obviously considered previous discussions here, the dividend and buyback. And as Tricia noted earlier, as we believe the stock is below what we view as fair market. We will be in market buying back shares when we have the capital to do so. And obviously, right now, our capital position is robust.

So we -- as Tricia noted, we have a corporate development team. They are constantly looking at opportunities. And as she said, those opportunities would be focused on expanding the breadth of offerings for Progressive and less so around adding to our core products is our market share growth has shown pretty consistently that we can acquire that business efficiently and effectively in the marketplace, and we think that's a better way to go.

The next question is from the line of Josh Shanker with Bank of America.

A couple of things. I'm looking at the Travelers numbers and the Allstate numbers and Hartford's and I have some guesses around GEICO's numbers looking at what they've done. And it doesn't seem like they're growing very quickly as Progressive's on net policy count growth has decelerated. I'm not looking for you to name names, maybe you have some thoughts on where the business is churning to, whether it's mutual, whether it's smaller competitors who are stronger than they've been in the past, whether it's direct business that's going to agencies. Where do you think the churn is moving towards?

Well, I think that -- and I won't talk specifically about competitors either, but there have been competitors that were all captive and now have access to a nonstandard in the independent agent channel. There's competitors that were only direct that are trying to get into the agency channel. We've always been broad. So that's really the beautiful part about our growth and trajectory, and that's an important part to make sure we are where customers are. And so I won't talk about where things are coming from. But again, I have to reiterate, our growth is substantial based on the best year in the history of Progressive. So much of that growth comes to us.

And so we feel great about that, and we'll continue to grow. And I think I've said this the last couple of calls that I want to make sure as we compare ourselves to the best year in the history of Progressive, that we're that were pragmatic about the fact that we still grew PIFs 4.2 million year-over-year, which is substantial, especially at the margins that we have. So that gives us the opportunity to continue to spur on growth, especially with our efficiency around our media spend.

And then changing gears a little bit and following up on some other questions. From 2007 to 2019, the dividend program at Progressive is pretty formulaic. We could play at home using gain share month-to-month to figure it out. And then I think in '19, you said there were so many opportunities for investment that you don't want to be forced into that paradigm and it became less possible for us to follow along. And now while you said when the stock is attractive to us, we would also be repurchasers of that, if that were the right thing to do. Is there any formula or way that investors can think about the transparency of capital return the way it was prior to the 2020 year?

Probably not. That was pretty formulaic, and we were -- one of the reasons we changed that to go from the gain share was that we were experiencing high growth, and we needed that capital to grow. And so we didn't want to have something that we needed to pay out when the better use of that capital was to grow the firm, which is what we were doing over those years. But that program worked well during that time frame, but no longer served us. I mean how you can think about it is we have a lot of capital right now. The Board will make a decision as we do in our 10b5-1 for stock buybacks. The Board will make a decision to make sure that we think about that and the best use of it and the best use of any capital returns to our shareholders. And I can't give you a formula because, again, we do want to have dry powder. We want to make sure that we thought of a bunch of contingencies. But I think that's -- and that's sort of what I tried to say in my letter is that we feel like we have excess capital at this juncture.

I might add a bit on that, Josh. So you all recognize our regulatory capital needs. So historically, we've been in the 3:1 range for our Personal Lines businesses -- Personal Auto business, excuse me, and about half that for home. You might have noted in the Q that we now have approval in a couple of key markets to move to 3.5:1 predominantly for our Personal Auto businesses, but a fairly broad approval so we can move operating leverage higher. So you can do the math around what required surplus is necessary. And when we do that math, we look forward, of course, and we expect to grow. And then we have that contingency capital layer that doesn't change based on that regulatory layer, and that is intended to ensure that we, on a modeled basis, have a very low percentage chance of needing additional surplus.

Capital in excess of that, again, we first want to reinvest. But secondly, we look to dividends and buybacks to the extent we feel our stock is undervalued. But you can come to a pretty close estimate of what we consider capital in excess of regulatory and contingency and that would be the capital from which a variable dividend would come. Now what portion of that is up to ultimately the board. But that is a good way to frame what a variable dividend or first excess capital would be, but secondly, what a variable dividend would be.

The next question is from the line of Paul Newsome with Piper Sandler.

I was hoping you could give us a little bit more thought on and information on the severity trends for auto, both the private passenger and Commercial Auto businesses. It looks like severity is accelerating a little bit in Personal Auto and a little bit more about why that may or may not be happening. And similarly, in Commercial Auto, you've got some peers who have had some pretty significant troubles in that line. Any thoughts on where you may or may not be experiencing similar trends for them?

Yes, Paul, that's a good question. Just as a reminder, when we look at severity trends, we report out incurred and a lot of our competitors report out in paid. So as an example, when you look at our PD from quarter 3 '24 to '25, it appears to be about 7%. We had a large decrease in reserves in quarter 3 '24, about 2.5 points. So that would be about 4.5 points versus the 7. So that's where it might be a little bit different comparison. BI continues to be specials are outpacing attorney rep, meds are up. So -- and actually some states that minimum limits have gone up. So we feel like industry severity where we're pretty close to the industry on the private passenger auto side. On the commercial line side, I feel like we are in a better position than most of our competitors. We got ahead of rate. The severity is up. But again, same sort of thing with you've got high limits, you've got attorney reps. And -- but we feel good about where we're at from a margin perspective and our ability to grow perspective as well.

Maybe a second question and a different one. Could you talk a little bit about the level of telematics and whether or not we're getting to at least closer to a point where that is a more mature part of what it does in terms of usage and the ability to slice and dice?

Yes. I mean telematics has always been a key part of us understanding. I threw out some specific data that we have on our OBD device, I think I did, at least on -- I guess maybe I didn't. It was on frequency. We know from our OBD device that vehicle miles traveled have been down to about 4% in the quarter. So those are kind of things we can point to as we try to dissect and attribute frequency and severity changes. It's -- we have our mobile device, which is the majority of what people choose now in 47 states. So we feel like it's a really powerful part of our variables. And more importantly, for customers that drive safely, it is really an ability to lower your insurance rates pretty substantially. And so that's really the main component of it. And we learn a lot. We have many, many, many miles. How many miles do we have now, do you think? Some billions -- yes lot of miles, a lot of data. And so it will continue to be a big part of it. I'm not sure if that answered your question.

No, I was just trying to get a sense of whether or not we're getting to a point where the amount of folks that are using the telematics is where you can sort of a maximum given how a certain percentage will never use it, right? So just whether or not we're getting towards the maturity of the product itself.

I think we have an opportunity to increase that specifically on the agency channel is what I would say.

Yes. What I would add to that is Telematics is a really predictive rating variable but it's not one size fits all. So we continue to collect data. We continue to innovate and we continue to refine how we use that data against what you would expect to see from similar drivers and similar vehicles to rate more accurately. So Telematics is a broad brush. And while we're seeing strong consumer adoption, and I think your intuition there is that consumers are getting more comfortable with monitoring on a continuous basis, which, as Tricia mentioned, is just a great way to modify their own behavior to control their insurance costs. But we are not standing still by any means. We have an entire team that leverages larger and larger data sets on a continuous basis to refine how accurately we can use it to ensure that people are getting the most competitive price that's personalized for them and how they drive.

And one thing I'll mention, which is a little bit further field, but important because it's important for consumer safety is we have the ability for -- to understand that people have been in accidents. And whether the tow-truck or ambulance, I think is really a key important part of feeling like you're cared for as a customer with our Snapshot devices or mobile devices.

The next question is from the line of Ryan Tunis with Cantor Fitzgerald.

I just had a follow-up on what's going on in Florida and I wanted to know if I'm thinking about something right. But clearly, that's been an important market for Progressive. I think you guys have top market share there by a mile. I guess my perception has always been an important reason for that is it's a tricky market to underwrite. But talking about the listing of some of the tort reforms, it sounds like it's become a more insurable market. So I guess my concern would be, just like any state where you have meaningful amounts of tort reform kind of creates a lever for competition to come in. So I'm wondering if I'm thinking about that right or if it's something maybe that's unique to Florida that we wouldn't necessarily see in some random state like Minnesota?

Yes. I think every state has a little nuance, right? You said Minnesota, I went to their high PIP coverage. So I have like all of my thoughts of every state. I think the fact is that it will be more -- there will be more competition because of the tort reform. I think that's good. But again, we are so well ahead of it because it's been our biggest state for a long time, and we feel really good about it, and we feel great about serving the consumers of Florida, and we want to grow there. So we're going to continue to grow and having the right rates and the right legislative changes is going to make that, I think, better for everybody, but most importantly, consumers.

Got it. I better shore up my knowledge on Minnesota, sorry about that, Tricia. But the follow-up is -- you mentioned in the 10-Q, there's this dynamic of customers replacing existing policies with new progressive policies. I was just curious if that had a meaningful impact on the new issued app number?

Yes, I think it does and had a meaningful on the PLE numbers because this is a very unusual dynamic that's been happening. And I think I've heard in other calls, it's happening in some of our competitors. So yes, I don't have the specifics for you. But I think customers are super sensitive right now. We get it. We're doing our best to keep rates stable, lowering rates when it makes sense and we believe that we can grow in certain demographics. But I think it's meaningful kind of across the board.

Yes. I think the ultimate metric, Ryan, is PIF growth. So yes, you're right. To the extent we are rewriting more customers. Those we do report as new customers. But at the end of the day, the PIF count and VIF count to previous conversations, I think, is what you should look at in terms of our growth and our market share.

The next question is from the line of David Motemaden with Evercore ISI.

I was hoping just to touch a little bit on pricing. And I was a little surprised the stable pricing that you put through in the third quarter, just given how strong the margins are even if we put in sort of like a normal catastrophe loss level for the auto business. Is this something that you guys are considering? Is there something on the horizon that would prevent you from doing this? It didn't sound like you were concerned really about tariffs. But just trying to get you just a sense for how you're thinking about potentially lowering price to accelerate growth and also improve retention.

Yes, we absolutely have been thinking about that. We were more conservative, I think, when the tariffs came out. And so now that, that seems today to be more certain, we are a little bit less concerned. Of course, that could change. I think we decreased rates in about 10 states in this quarter, increased rates in about 6. So we're very surgical on channel, product, state, but we do want to grow. And so we will look to that for both growth and retention in terms of reducing rates.

We just want to make sure because of the competitive environment that if we -- we get something for that. So that you don't want to reduce your margins and not get growth. So we're trying to be, like I said, really surgical in each state of when we think we can get growth and that unit growth is important. And so we know we have some margin to play with, and that's really what we're talking about now at every individual state and DMA level.

Got it. And then maybe sort of a higher-level question. Just as we think about the impact of collision avoidance systems and ADAS as it penetrates the fleet more and more. I don't think -- I'm sort of looking at ISO data. I think for 10 years up until 2019, industry frequency was pretty flat. And now when I sort of look since 2019, we obviously had COVID in there, but it's a pretty substantial decrease. So I'm wondering if you can think of -- like just maybe just talk about unpacking some of that decline and improvement in frequency that looks like it's still continuing and sort of how we can think about that as impacting the longer-term growth of the business?

Yes. I can't predict the future, but take aways that kind of couple of years during COVID because things were so strange with driving. Frequency has been going down for the last 50 years. And as vehicles get safer, as laws around DUIs and other things get more stringent and have gotten more stringent, I think that's a really good thing. Now it's been offset and then some by severity. And that's been where when you look at the models, we have -- when we do our models for our runway, we look at that and severity has increased well more than frequency.

And so we'll continue to see what happens in terms of parts, the ability to repair vehicles, the ability to have talent that can actually repair those vehicles as they get more complex, and those are things that we can't predict, but we look at those all the time, and we're deeply looking at those right now as we think about our next 3-year strategy.

The number of cars on the road -- I'm sorry. I was just going to add that the number of cars on the road has also increased. The average age of those vehicles has increased. So all those factors, in addition to the pure premiums or the frequency and severity, affect the size of the marketplace. And the marketplace actually has grown faster than we had anticipated when we first started assessing the long-term runway or market size of the Personal Auto marketplace.

Got it. That's interesting. Yes, it definitely feels like -- I mean, I think it's like '07 until 2019 industry frequency was flat. So like if we look at it over a 50-year time frame to this point, it's definitely still down, but like there is definitely an air pocket in there where the industry was benefiting from like flattish frequency. And so yes, just something I'm sort of thinking about, but I appreciate the -- I appreciate the answers there.

The next question is from the line of Brian Meredith with UBS.

The first one, and this is I know it seems like it comes up every quarter, but on the PLE drop, can you talk maybe a little bit, is it mix driven this quarter that's kind of dropping everything? Or is it kind of across all the cohorts that you're seeing the drops in PLE?

I think it's probably more pronounced than Sams. I'm not quite sure, but I think it's mainly across the board. I think everyone's shopping. And when we look at our mix of business just in terms of even growth as you look through our Q and think about just our prospects and conversion, you can see that -- even though that's relating to consumers coming in, we think that has an impact. Do you have anything to add, Pat?

Yes, it's pretty much across the board, but driven by different aspects and that Sams are obviously more price-sensitive and household costs are rising. On the Robinsons side, we certainly have taken some action to redistribute our book and to limit access to our property product at some agencies, which has an effect on where they place that business and whether it retains with us. So we are seeing it more broadly. But -- yes, more broadly.

Great. That's helpful. And just a second question, if I look at where your pure premium was in the third quarter, and granted, I understand it's calendar year, so it's not exact here. And versus average written premium per policy, there's a pretty meaningful kind of spread difference, which would imply some pretty meaningful margin compression here going forward, granted from very attractive margins you're seeing right now. As you think about kind of going forward and what you're looking at, is that something you're anticipating? Is that your margins will compress here in personal auto insurance going forward here closer to the target level?

I mean I think it depends on if we can get the growth for that. So our operating goal is to grow as fast as we can at a 96 or lower. We're obviously well in advance of that. We've had some conservativeness baked in because of tariffs and some other things. But yes, we could see it compress if we believe we can get that growth, and we're always kind of managing that trade-off. But I believe that's an accurate statement going forward because our ultimate measure of growth is units. So PIFs and VIFs, as we talked about today, and we'll do what we can to continue that growth because, again, if we have a plan around our property, the more auto we can get in there, the more bundles we can get in sort of a nice circle. So we're going to do what we can to grow as long as it serves us in terms of our target profit margins and our operating goal that has been in place for decades.

We've exhausted our scheduled time. And so that concludes our event. Those left in the queue can direct their questions directly to me. Alissa, I will hand the call back over to you for closing scripts.

That concludes the Progressive Corporation's third quarter investor event. Information about a replay of the event will be available on the Investor Relations section of Progressive's website for the next year. You may now disconnect.