What Your License Number Is Actually For

It feels like a strange thing to hand over for a price check. Here is the plain answer: your license number is how a carrier pulls the correct driving record, and the driving record is one of the three factors California requires insurers to weigh first.

The legal backdrop

California Insurance Code section 1861.02 puts your driving safety record, your annual mileage and your years of driving experience ahead of everything else in the rating of an auto policy. An insurer cannot weigh a driving record it cannot find, and names are not unique enough to find one reliably. The license number is.

What it retrieves

• Convictions for moving violations and the dates they occurred.
• Accidents reported to the DMV.
• Suspensions, restrictions and the license status itself.
• How long you have been licensed — the experience factor, verified rather than estimated.

What it does not retrieve is your credit score. Credit history is not among the factors California allows for private-passenger auto rating, which is one of the genuine differences between insurance here and insurance in most other states.

What it does to your credit file — nothing you'll feel

Insurance quoting generally uses inquiries that do not affect your score the way a loan application does. Practices differ between companies, so if this matters to you, ask before you give the number and get a specific answer rather than a reassuring one.

If you'd rather not give it yet

That is a legitimate position and you can still be quoted. What you get is an estimate built on the record you described rather than the record on file. Two things follow: the number is provisional, and if the DMV record turns out to contain something you had forgotten or mis-dated, the price moves at issue.

In our office, the forgotten item is almost never a dramatic one. It is a ticket from three years ago that everyone assumed had aged off, or an accident that was reported when the caller thought it hadn't been. Neither is a disaster. Both change the number.

Protecting the number sensibly

Give it to a licensed agent or an insurer you contacted, not to a caller who contacted you. A real quote conversation starts with you. If someone rang you first and is asking for a license number, a date of birth and a payment method in the same breath, end the call and dial the company yourself using a number from your own documents.

Start with what you're comfortable giving — you can hand over the license numbers when you're ready to make the quote final.