What do the regional classes mean?
The regional classes are calculated once a year by the GDV and reflect the damage balance of the 413 German registration districts. The decisive factor here is not where the damage occurred, but in which registration district the vehicle owner resides.
Motor Insurance/Regional Classes: Video
This is how the risk of damage works
The loss balances calculated in this way for the registration districts are actuarially converted into an index value that determines the respective regional class. Basically, the better the classification in the regional class, the cheaper it is on the insurance premium.
How many regional classes are there?
Where are the regional classes high, where low?
Who has the worst damage record?
In the current regional statistics, Berlin has the worst damage balance nationwide. In the capital, the damage is almost 40 percent above the national average. Drivers there therefore pay significantly more for car insurance than in other cities. High regional classes also apply in other large cities and parts of Bavaria.
Regional classes 2023 for cities with more than 300,000 inhabitants
Berlin
Hamburg
Munich
Nuremberg
meal
Wuppertal
Frankfurt/Main
Duisburg
Dusseldorf
Dortmund
Cologne
Manheim
Bielefeld
Bochum
Dresden
Stuttgart
Karlsruhe
Hanover
Leipzig, city
Bremen
Bonn
Munster/Westphalia
“Brandenburg, Schleswig-Holstein, Lower Saxony and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania achieve particularly good claims balances in motor vehicle liability insurance: Here, motorists cause less or less expensive damage than the national average,” says GDV General Manager Jörg Asmussen. The district of Elbe-Elster in Brandenburg has the best damage balance in Germany in terms of motor liability insurance – here the amount of damage is almost 30 percent lower than the average.
Regional classes of the provincial capitals 2023
Berlin
Hamburg
Munich
Wiesbaden
Dusseldorf
Saarbrucken
Dresden
Stuttgart
Potsdam
Hanover
Bremen
Bremerhaven
Mainz
Magdeburg
Erfurt
keel
Schwerin
GDV recalculates class boundaries
To ensure that the regional classes bundle districts with damage balance sheets that are as similar as possible, the class boundaries are regularly checked and adjusted if necessary. This will result in new risk assessments for 168 of the 412 districts in 2023. “As every year, the changes balance each other out,” says Asmussen. The increases for the 101 districts mentioned are on average lower than the decreases for the 67 districts.
Many thefts drive up the hull damage and thus the regional classes in the big cities.
The reason for the recalculations is that many districts with different loss balances were recently classified in the lowest and highest regional classes. For the lowest regional class of motor vehicle liability insurance, the damage balance of a district must now be almost 22 percent instead of around 15 percent below the national average. As a result, only 24 instead of 55 districts reach the lowest regional class.
At the other end of the scale, the highest rating no longer starts at 20 percent, but only at around 30 percent above the average. Therefore, no longer 19 districts, but only Offenbach and Berlin are classified in the highest regional class. Districts with an average damage record continue to have regional class 6 in motor vehicle liability insurance.
What is the impact of changing the regional class?
However, it is not possible to predict in general terms what will actually change for the individual insured person as a result of an upgrade or downgrading of their regional class in the insurance premium. Wolfgang Schütz, Managing Director of the Verivox insurance comparison, explains: “The regional classes are not only based on the claims reported in the past year, but are determined over a longer period of time. That is why reclassifications from one year to the next are almost always only one class up or below. The additional contributions or savings for the individual drivers are usually less than ten percent.”
