Car insurance
If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you’ve recently gotten a ticket, and you’re wondering what it means for your car insurance. Like many Canadians, you might assume that any ticket will automatically raise your insurance rates.
In reality, it’s not the ticket itself that matters most, but what happens next. What you do after receiving the ticket can determine whether it affects your insurance at all.
In this blog, we’ll break down how driving tickets that turn into convictions can affect your insurance, which types are most likely to impact your rates, and how long those effects can last.
Key takeaways
Traffic tickets on their own don’t affect your insurance; convictions do. Multiple tickets and more serious offences, like distracted driving and at-fault accidents, can increase your premium for 3+ years (or longer for more serious offences), while parking tickets don’t affect insurance at all.
Driving tickets turned convictions can affect insurance
A driving ticket, also called a citation, is an official notice issued by a police officer alleging that you’ve violated a traffic law. It is not a punishment yet, but a formal accusation. A ticket like this won’t necessarily affect your car insurance on its own, unless it turns into a conviction, which happens when:
- You pay the fine (usually treated as pleading guilty), or;
- You’re found guilty in court, or;
- You don’t respond and are convicted by default
Once this happens, the conviction is added to your driving record (also known as a driver’s abstract), which insurers can access. At your next renewal, insurance companies will review your driving record and factor any convictions into your overall risk assessment.
As Channelle Cote, AMF- and RIBO- licensed broker at YouSet, explains, “From an insurer’s perspective, a conviction can signal a higher likelihood of future claims, which may lead to an increase in your premium, especially if the offence is more severe or part of a pattern in your driving history.”
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The more severe the driving conviction, the more it will affect insurance
Not all convictions are treated the same, and insurers look closely at the type of offence when assessing your risk as a driver.
More serious convictions, such as excessive speeding, careless driving, street racing, and impaired driving, tend to have a much bigger impact on your premium, as they’re considered high-risk behaviours. Even one single offence can lead to a noticeable increase in your rates.
That said, more “minor” convictions, such as rolling stops and driving a few kilometres over the speed limit, can still affect your car insurance. This is especially true if you have multiple convictions on your driving record, as this can suggest a pattern of riskier driving behaviour, and your rates can go up because of it.
Convictions can affect your insurance for 3+ years
Driving convictions won’t affect your insurance forever, but they will for at least a few years. In most cases, a conviction will affect your premium for about 3 years or more.
For more minor offences, like a speeding ticket, the impact can be relatively small, especially if it’s your first conviction. In some cases, it might just mean losing your conviction-free discount rather than seeing a big jump in your premium. However, if you have multiple tickets during that time, you may see an increase for each one.
The exact impact can vary depending on your province and insurer, and more serious offences tend to stick around longer. For example, distracted driving can impact your rates for 3 to 5 years or more, while at-fault accidents can cause a much higher insurance rate and remain on your driving record for up to 6 years.
Driving while impaired or suspended can also keep you in the high-risk category for 10 years or longer.
Parking tickets don’t affect insurance in Canada
Parking tickets are considered non-moving violations, not driving offences. They are issued for things like how you park, where you parked, or if you’ve had issues with payment. They do not, however, necessarily reflect your driving behaviour. As such, they don’t show up on your driving record, and insurers don’t use them to assess your risk.
The only time parking tickets can cause an issue is if they go unpaid. If you have multiple outstanding fines, you might not be able to renew your driver’s license or plates until they’ve been paid, but this still doesn’t affect your insurance.
