AbstractA motorist involved in an accident will have to decide whether to claim from his insurance company or not when he is at fault. An optimal decision rule can only be determined in the light of future developments and future decisions, since the consequences of claiming or not claiming are felt in the subsequent year's premiums. In this paper, optimal no-claim limits are determined for a common Dutch type of insurance policy with bonus-malus structures, using generalized Markovian programming. The computational results are given for various values of the expected number of accidents per year.