The claim that catalytic converter theft keeps climbing while overall car theft falls does not hold up against the insurers’ own numbers anymore. What actually happened is closer to a reversal: after a genuine explosion in thefts earlier in the decade, catalytic converter claims have fallen sharply right alongside the broader decline in vehicle theft nationwide. The part of the story that does still hold, and the more useful part for owners, is that the vehicles thieves are targeting have changed noticeably from a few years ago.
The surge that actually happened
The scale of the original problem was not exaggerated. The National Insurance Crime Bureau reported that insurance claims for catalytic converter theft jumped from 16,660 in 2020 to 64,701 in 2022, an increase of roughly 289 percent in two years, with California and Texas alone accounting for more than 32,000 of those thefts combined. The driver was straightforward economics: the platinum, rhodium and palladium packed into a converter’s honeycomb core could fetch recyclers anywhere from $50 to $250 per unit, and up to $800 for the units pulled from hybrids, according to the same NICB reporting.
The turn nobody advertised
That surge did not continue in a straight line. State Farm’s own claims data, the insurer’s internal figures rather than an industry-wide estimate, showed a 74 percent drop in catalytic converter theft claims in the first half of 2024 compared with the same period in 2023. State Farm attributed the decline to a combination of factors, including tighter law enforcement cooperation, new state laws that hold scrap and recycling merchants liable for verifying where a converter came from before buying it, and a decline in precious metal prices that made the crime less profitable per unit.
That drop tracks with what has happened to vehicle theft broadly. The National Insurance Crime Bureau has published a string of releases through 2025 and 2026 describing a “historic decline” in vehicle thefts nationwide, with the trend continuing through the first half of 2025 and again into 2026. Catalytic converter theft did not defy that trend the way it appeared to a few years ago. It moved with it.
What actually changed is the target list
The part of the earlier reporting that remains genuinely current is the shift in which vehicles are worth stealing from. State Farm’s data, cross-referenced against a separate Carfax analysis the insurer cited, identifies the vehicles now drawing the most theft activity as a noticeably different lineup than the early pandemic-era pattern of older Toyota Priuses and Honda Elements prized for their unusually metal-rich converters. The current list leans toward trucks and SUVs with high ground clearance that make it faster for a thief to slide underneath without jacking the vehicle up, led by the Ford F-Series, alongside the Honda CR-V and Ford Explorer among SUVs, the Honda Accord and Toyota Camry among sedans, and the Toyota Prius still present among hybrids. The geographic pattern held steadier than the vehicle list: California, Illinois, New York, Texas and Florida remained the top states for reported claims, according to State Farm’s figures.
Why the shift makes sense
The move toward trucks and SUVs is not random. As sedans with the highest-value converters became harder to find in the used-car fleet and as anti-theft shields and etched-VIN converter marking programs spread through fleets of the vehicles hit hardest in 2021 and 2022, thieves appear to have gravitated toward vehicles that are simply faster to work under, even when the individual converter is worth somewhat less on the scrap market. Speed matters more to a thief operating in a parking lot at night than maximizing the payout on any single job, and a lifted truck or SUV can be stripped in under two minutes without tools more sophisticated than a battery-powered saw.
For owners, the practical read is not that the threat has disappeared, only that it has relocated. A driver of a Prius who installed a shield in 2022 based on that year’s headlines is arguably better protected today than the driver of a new F-150 or Explorer who has not thought about it, because the anti-theft hardware and awareness built up around the previous wave of targets has not yet caught up to the current one. Checking whether a shield, cage, or VIN-etching program is available for a currently owned truck or SUV, rather than relying on outdated advice built around a different generation of stolen vehicles, is the one action that tracks where this crime has actually moved.