Industry news · Total loss
Two thirds of damaged cars are now written off, claims data shows
Repair bills have climbed so far that scrapping the car is often the cheaper option. New figures show how quickly the maths has turned against drivers.
A car that went in for accident repair in 2019 usually came back. Today the odds have flipped.
Analysis of more than 31,000 claims handled by accident management firm Auto Claims Assist found that 66.5% of damaged vehicles were declared a total loss in the first half of 2025, up from 58% in 2019. At the peak of the trend, in 2023, nearly three quarters of the cars passing through the firm’s books were written off rather than repaired.
The reason isn’t that crashes got worse. It’s that fixing cars got expensive. The same dataset puts the average repair at £5,191, a quarter higher than six years ago, and the Association of British Insurers says vehicle damage cost insurers £7.5 billion in 2025, almost two thirds of everything they paid out. Chris Bose, the ABI’s director of general insurance policy, blames “the high cost of repairing today’s complex vehicles.”
Complex is the polite word. A bumper isn’t really a bumper any more; it’s a housing for parking sensors and radar that need recalibrating by someone with the right kit and training, and the industry is short of those people too. The Institute of the Motor Industry has reported tens of thousands of unfilled vacancies in the repair sector.
Insurers generally write a car off once the repair estimate reaches somewhere between 60% and 70% of its market value, and less than that for older cars. Run the numbers and the problem is obvious. If the average repair is £5,000 or so, any car worth under about £8,000 is living on borrowed time the moment it takes a knock. That’s a very large slice of the cars actually on Britain’s roads.
A worthwhile caveat: Auto Claims Assist handles non-fault claims, so its sample is one firm’s book rather than a national census. But the direction of travel matches what insurers themselves report, and nobody in the trade seriously disputes it.
For drivers the practical consequence is simple. Write-offs are no longer rare events that happen to wrecked cars. Plenty of lightly damaged, perfectly repairable vehicles are being retired on economics alone, which is why understanding what a write-off actually means matters more than it used to, and why the market in Cat S and Cat N cars keeps growing.