The premium-per-vehicle gap: where a franchisee stands on insurance cost

What this figure is

Every franchisee in your network carries its own commercial-auto insurance, on its own fleet, at its own rate. Looked at one franchisee at a time, an annual premium total does not tell you much: is $48,000 a year high or low? It depends entirely on how many vehicles that number is covering and what everyone else in the network is paying for the same coverage. The premium-per-vehicle gap is Verinode's answer to that question. It takes a franchisee's total annual commercial-auto premium, divides it by how many vehicles that premium actually covers, and compares the result against the rest of the network to produce a single number: how many dollars a year that franchisee is running above or below what the network typically pays per vehicle, for its own fleet size.

This is a derived number, not a raw figure anyone typed in. Nobody enters a "premium gap." Verinode computes it nightly from two figures each franchisee already has on file in their own Verinode IQ account: total annual commercial-auto premium and active vehicle count. Verinode does not shop, bind, renegotiate, or advise on any individual policy. It reads what is already there, does the arithmetic, and surfaces the result so network leadership can see where a rate conversation is worth having and where it is not.

Where it surfaces

Open Assets from the HQ sidebar, then the Fleet pill (hq.verinode.ai/fleet). Assets is a single sidebar entry that opens onto a page with three pills across the top, Facilities, Fleet, and Equipment. The Fleet page stacks five rows, top to bottom: a hero panel, Insurance Risk, Compliance & Driver Risk, Accidents, and Fleet by Franchisee.

The premium gap appears on tiles in exactly two of those rows:

• Insurance Risk, the row of franchisees carrying at least one active commercial-auto policy expiring inside the next 90 days. On a tile here, the gap sits on the meta line beside the soonest policy end date, for example "Next 2026-08-14 · +$3k/yr vs peer."
• Fleet by Franchisee, the full roster of every franchisee with registered vehicles. On a tile here, the gap sits on the meta line beside the annual premium total, for example "$48k/yr premium · -$5k/yr vs peer."

It is the same figure in both places, computed once per franchisee and reused wherever a fleet tile needs it. The hero panel at the top of the page does not show it. The hero's own Annual premium secondary tile is a network-wide sum, not a per-franchisee comparison, so there is no gap to show there. See Fleet: your network's vehicles at a glance for how the hero and all five rows fit together, Insurance Risk: which franchisees have policies expiring inside 90 days for the full anatomy of that row's tiles, and Fleet by Franchisee: vehicle count, age, mileage, and premium per member for the roster row's.

How it is computed

The calculation runs in two steps, both against the same nightly network rollup the whole Fleet page reads from.

Step one: premium per vehicle. For every franchisee that has both a total annual commercial-auto premium and at least one active vehicle on file, Verinode divides the premium by the active vehicle count. A franchisee missing either figure, no premium on file, or zero active vehicles, is simply left out of this step.

Step two: the network median. Verinode takes every franchisee's premium-per-vehicle figure from step one, across your whole network, and finds the median (the middle value when every figure is sorted; the average of the two middle values if there is an even number of them). That single median becomes the reference point every franchisee's own premium-per-vehicle figure is measured against. A franchisee's own figure counts toward this median too, it is not excluded from its own comparison.

Step three: the dollar gap. For each franchisee, Verinode takes the difference between that franchisee's premium-per-vehicle and the network median, flips the sign, and multiplies by that franchisee's active vehicle count, turning a per-vehicle difference back into a whole-fleet dollar figure for the year. The result is rounded to the nearest dollar.

Reading the sign

This is the one detail worth getting exactly right, because it is easy to read backward:

• A plus sign ("+$3k/yr vs peer") means that franchisee's premium-per-vehicle sits below the network median. It is paying less than the network typically pays for a fleet its size. This is the favorable reading.
• A minus sign ("-$5k/yr vs peer") means that franchisee's premium-per-vehicle sits above the network median. It is paying more than the network typically pays for a fleet its size. This is the reading worth a conversation.

The sign is flipped deliberately during the calculation so that "plus" always reads as good news and "minus" always reads as a candidate for attention, the same convention used for every other favorable-versus-unfavorable comparison on the Fleet page. Do not read a plus sign as "spending more" or a minus sign as "under-covered." Plus is cheaper than peers. Minus is pricier than peers.

How the number is formatted

The figure always ends in "vs peer" and is scaled for readability the same way every dollar figure on the Fleet page is:

• Under $1,000, it shows the plain rounded dollar amount, for example "+$650/yr vs peer."
• $1,000 and above rounds to the nearest thousand with a "k" suffix, for example "-$5k/yr vs peer."
• $1,000,000 and above shows to one decimal place in millions, for example "+$1.2M/yr vs peer."

When it is left off a tile

The gap is omitted entirely, not shown as a dash or a zero, whenever it cannot be computed with confidence. In practice this comes down to one condition: that specific franchisee needs both an annual premium and an active vehicle count on file. Without both, there is nothing to divide.

What it is compared against, and what it is not

This figure compares a franchisee against the rest of its own network only, the same set of franchisees rolled up into your Fleet page. It is not a regional benchmark, not a national benchmark, and not an industry-wide insurance rate comparison. If your network is small, the median it is comparing against is built from a small sample, and a gap in that setting should be read as directional, not precise.

For a genuine cross-network premium or fleet-cost comparison, one built against Verinode's broader intelligence layer rather than just your own franchisees, see Benchmarks at HQ. That is a separate part of the platform with its own methodology and its own peer cohorts. The premium gap covered in this article is scoped to your network, and your network alone.

Privacy: what this figure does, and does not, reveal

Verinode HQ is the network intelligence layer, not a window into any single franchisee's private insurance policies, and this figure does not change that. It is built entirely from the same nightly, franchisee-level rollup every other number on the Fleet page reads from, never from a live query into a franchisee's own account.

How a franchisee's identity displays next to its gap figure depends on your network's data posture, set once at the group level:

• In an independent-operator network (the default, and the safer posture for a franchise or association where locations run as separate businesses), the franchisee's real name is replaced with a stable anonymized label everywhere the gap appears, so you can track a specific franchisee's insurance-cost position over time without learning which business it is.
• In a same-entity network (a single multi-location enterprise, or a PE-backed roll-up operating as one legal business), real franchisee names surface directly next to the gap, since there is no separate-business privacy boundary to protect in that model.

In a smaller independent-operator network, the entire Insurance Risk and Fleet by Franchisee rows, gap figure included, are held back until the network has grown large enough that an anonymized label genuinely protects identity rather than being identifiable by process of elimination. When that guard is active, a notice appears above the rows explaining that per-franchisee tiles are suppressed to protect operator privacy while the network is still small, with the network-wide hero totals still shown in full. Same-entity networks are not subject to this guard. The Equipment section's privacy-boundary article documents the full mechanism behind this, name anonymization, the small-network floor, and the fact that HQ's database role has no path to a franchisee's underlying policy documents in the first place, and it applies identically here.

How to use this figure

1. 1Scan Fleet by Franchisee for the largest minus figures, these are the franchisees paying the most above the network's own median for a fleet their size.
2. 2Before assuming it is simply a bad rate, check that franchisee's fleet age and safety history in its detail overlay. An older fleet or a worse accident record can justify a higher premium on its own; the gap figure alone does not settle that question.
3. 3Cross-check Insurance Risk for any franchisee that is both carrying a meaningful minus figure and has a policy renewal coming up inside 90 days. A renewal that is already on the calendar is the natural moment to raise a rate conversation, rather than a separate outreach later.
4. 4Bring a consistent minus figure across several franchisees running the same equipment or vehicle class to a broader group-purchasing or fleet-lease conversation, rather than negotiating each franchisee's policy one at a time.
5. 5Treat a plus figure as a quiet confirmation, not an action item. A franchisee running well below the network median usually needs nothing from you here.

Related reading

• Fleet: your network's vehicles at a glance: the full Assets → Fleet page this figure lives on.
• Insurance Risk: which franchisees have policies expiring inside 90 days: the row where this figure appears alongside policy renewal dates.
• Fleet by Franchisee: vehicle count, age, mileage, and premium per member: the roster row where this figure appears alongside every franchisee's fleet totals.
• Fleet and bulk-buy candidates across the network: the separate, equipment-focused "Fleet" surface under Operations, not to be confused with this one.
• The privacy boundary: aggregates, k-anonymity and small-network suppression: the full mechanism behind franchisee anonymization and small-network suppression, identical for Fleet.
• Benchmarks at HQ: for a genuine cross-network premium comparison, separate from this figure's own-network-only scope.

Data sources