Minimum car-insurance liability limits by state (2026)

Every jurisdiction that requires liability insurance writes its minimum into statute. This is that table, read from the statute text rather than from a summary of it.

The familiar three-number shorthand — bodily injury per person, bodily injury per accident, property damage — fits most states and breaks in four instructive places. One state mandates no bodily-injury cover at all, so a three-number row would have to invent a figure that does not exist. One mandates no liability purchase at all, and prints limits that bind only once a financial-responsibility requirement is triggered. One carries a separate, higher limit pair where the accident causes death. And in one the per-accident limit is not twice the per-person limit, which quietly breaks any code that derives it.

Of the 51 jurisdictions, 45 carry limits confirmed against the legislature’s own statute text and corroborated by the state insurance department or motor-vehicle agency. The remaining 6 rest on a secondary reproduction, and under this site’s two-source rule they show no figure at all rather than a figure we cannot stand behind.

Several states have raised their minimums recently and the change is where published tables go stale fastest. Where a state has an increase already written into statute for a future date, it appears in the scheduled-increases table rather than here, because a limit that has not taken effect is not the limit in force.

Source of record: each jurisdiction’s own statute text, corroborated against its insurance department or motor-vehicle agency. 45 jurisdictions carry values confirmed against primary text; the rest show no figure until the primary text is read.

Statutory records last verified against primary sources on 10 August 2026. Every cell in the table above is read from a committed record with its own citation; nothing here is copied from a secondary comparison.