Tricia Griffith
President & Chief Executive Officer at Progressive
Thanks, Doug. Good morning, and thank you for joining us today. Anniversaries are a natural time to look back on the past, and since this is the first investor call of Progressive's 85th year, I wanted to do just that. We have grown from a scrappy start-up trying to find a foothold in The Great Depression to the 10th largest homeowners' carrier, the third largest personal auto carrier and the Number 1 commercial auto carrier.
In just the last 5 years, our total company-wide written premium has nearly doubled. Nowhere has growth been more remarkable than in Commercial Lines, which just passed a major milestone of over $9 billion in written premiums on a trailing 12-month basis. We grew Commercial Auto premiums over 200% in the last 5 years, all while generally achieving a better-than-average industry profit margin, and ended March just shy of 1 million Commercial Lines policies in force. It has truly been an incredible run with significant opportunities still waiting to be captured. Congratulations to the Commercial Lines team, and thank you to all Progressive employees and customers who have made the last 85 years so extraordinary.
Throughout our 85-year history, we've worked through many hard and soft markets, and we continue to address the hard market we're in today. While some indices suggest the value of used vehicles is leveling or even beginning to decline, used vehicle values are still significantly above those of early 2021. Steady but increasing trends in bodily injury severity has also contributed to the increase in loss costs we've experienced. Further, as the country emerged from the Omicron wave, we saw Personal Auto vehicle miles traveled recover to fourth quarter 2021 levels, which were in the 9% to 10% range below the pre-pandemic baseline.
Our response to these trends have been to reduce marketing expenses, increase underwriting scrutiny, limit build plan options. And in the first quarter, we implemented rate increases of 7 points in Personal Auto, that's still trending[Phonetic], which is in addition to the 8 points we took in 2021. While we're making progress, we still have more work to do to ensure all of our states reach rate adequacy.
Our rate and nonrate actions have had the expected effect on Personal Auto growth. While Personal Lines' PIF growth is still positive on a year-over-year basis, sequential PIF growth is negative. New applications are down year-over-year, and our policy life expectancy is also declining. When we look across all the metrics we track, it seems likely that we're ahead of our competitors in increasing rates, which explains a large part of our slowdown in growth.
As we look forward to the rest of 2022, we're optimistic as more states reach rate adequacy, we expect to be able to increase marketing spend and reengage the growth engine. Because of the advantages we believe we have in the way we buy media, we can adjust marketing spend at the local and segment level and in such a way to ensure the new business we write meets our economic goals.
And since we believe we're ahead of the competitors in taking rate actions, we hope to continue our long-term trend of writing more than our fair share of quotes. Even as we face these macroeconomic pressures, we have not slowed our pursuit of segmentation superiority. Our U.S. Personal Auto product model is now available in over 8 -- in over half the states and is showing early promising results, especially among more preferred segments.
We have also further expanded the footprint of our 4.1 homeowners product into 4 additional states in the first quarter, bringing the total to 12. Our new normal since the onset of the pandemic has been disruptions in the economy that has buffeted our business. While there are many paths the future can take, I'm confident in our strategy and our people and believe our greatest successes are still to come in the next 85 years.
Thank you, and I'll take your questions.