It will normally depend upon state insurance laws and the insurance company's own guidelines and underwriting rules to determine if each driver must be a primary on a vehicle or not.

In general, it is up to the individual insurance carrier to decide about primary or principal drivers and occasional drivers and how they must be listed on the policy. Not all insurance companies use the rating terms primary or principal driver.

With insurance companies that do use these terms then typically they will consider someone as the principal driver on the policy if he or she is the registered owner of the vehicle, drives the vehicle to work or school, or drives the vehicle more than anyone else.

As we mentioned not all insurance carriers rate using primary driver or occasional driver classifications. An occasional driver is typically rated at a lower rate than a primary driver by insurance providers that do have these different designations. Also, it may be possible to have a person listed as the primary on one vehicle, but not on all household vehicles.

When placing cars and drivers onto your car insurance policy you will need to discuss your insurer's definition of driver rating terms and see if there must be a primary driver with each car. It depends on the insurance company and their guidelines as well as their rating systems if it would be cheaper to have someone listed as an occasional driver or primary driver (if they use these terms) on a vehicle.

With CarInsurance.com carriers, during the purchase process you may be asked who the primary driver of each vehicle is. There is a help icon to assist you in your assessment, or you can always call one of our licensed agents.

Speak with your insurance agent and see what types of driver designations they use and how your agent would advise you have the drivers listed on your policy. If your insurer requires each person to be primary on a vehicle then you can shop around for car insurance to see if other companies can offer you a lower price and have different driver classifications.

You can also contact your state's insurance regulator. Their consumer division should be able to give you information on the state's insurance laws and answer questions about what is permitted regarding driver designations on auto insurance policies.