Total losses hit a record in 2025. The number of totaled cars still fell.

A shop owner I work with texted me a good catch recently. Total losses are supposedly at record highs, he said, but Copart, the company that auctions totaled cars for a living, just reported its insurance volume down about nine percent. If the people who sell totaled cars are moving fewer of them, how can total losses be setting records?

It's a fair question. When I went and pulled the actual numbers, I realized I'd been getting it wrong too. Not the trend. The number I was pointing at.

A rate and a count are not the same number

"Record total losses" is a rate. It's the share of insurance claims that get declared a total loss instead of repaired. That rate hit 23.1 percent in 2025, the highest ever recorded. That part is real.

Copart's number is a count. It's how many actual cars moved through the auction lane. And a count can fall while a rate climbs, as long as the thing underneath both of them, the total number of claims, is shrinking.

That's exactly what happened. Total claim volume fell roughly 8.5 percent in 2025. Apply a record percentage to a smaller pile of claims and you still get fewer cars. A bigger slice of a smaller pie is still less pie.

Why the rate keeps climbing

The rate is rising for reasons that aren't going away. Repair costs keep going up, and used-car values have been falling. When the cost to fix a car gets close to what the car is worth, the insurer totals it instead. So more and more borderline cars tip from repairable to totaled, and the percentage climbs a little every year.

Why the count is falling

The count is falling for a different reason: people are filing fewer claims. Deductibles are up sharply, a lot of drivers have dropped collision coverage, and the small claims are quietly disappearing from the system. The crash still happens. It just never becomes a claim, and never becomes a car at auction.

You can see it in more than one place. CCC's own count of total-loss valuations fell about 2.9 percent in 2025. Copart's US insurance units fell about 9.5 percent. The percentage set a record while the headcount went down.

What this means if your bays feel quiet

Here's the part that matters for an operator. If your volume is down and you've been blaming total losses for it, you're aiming at the wrong number. Fewer cars were totaled in 2025, not more. Total losses didn't pull the work out of your shop. The shrinking claim pool did, and that's a different problem with a different set of answers.

This isn't last year's news, either. The full-year 2025 figures only landed this spring, and 2026 is so far running the same direction. It's the current read.

The habit worth keeping

The lesson outlasts this one statistic. When someone hands you an industry number, ask whether it's a rate or a count before you build a belief on it. They can move in opposite directions in the same year. Right now, the total-loss rate and the total-loss count are doing exactly that.

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