Minimum liability limits, compared

“State minimum” is not one number. Across the states on this page it varies by a factor of four for injury to a single person, and every one of those figures has an effective date that most comparison tables leave off.

The table

One row per state whose minimum liability statute has been read directly. The effective date column is the part most tables leave off, and it is the part that goes stale.

A dash in the filing-period column would mean this site has not read a statute fixing that state's period and will not guess at one. One still carries one: Tennessee. Virginia and Arizona cleared on 21 September 2026 (Va. Code sec. 46.2-316, A.R.S. sec. 28-4088) and Ohio on 22 September (Ohio Rev. Code sec. 4509.45(D)), and every state in the table now has a page of its own. The periods run from one year to three, which is its own argument against quoting “three years” as if it were a national rule.

Three things the table shows that a single national figure cannot

The spread is a multiple, not a margin

Florida requires 6.7 times what Louisiana does for injury to one person. Those are both “state minimum” policies. An agency quoting you at the floor is quoting a fundamentally different product depending on which side of a state line you are standing on, and the phrase does not warn you about that.

Two of these are not SR-22 states

Florida and Virginia use the FR-44 for driving-under-the-influence cases. Florida's sits at the top of this table by a wide margin, and that is not a coincidence — the point of the form is to require substantially more cover from a driver in that position. The comparison guide takes it apart.

Property damage is where the floors are worst

Look down the property column rather than the bodily-injury ones. Washington's statutory floor is $10,000; California's is $15,000. Those are numbers from a different era of vehicle prices, and they are what a minimum-limits policy pays when you write off someone else's car. The premium difference between that floor and a limit that would actually cover a modern vehicle is frequently smaller than people assume, and it is one of the few genuinely discretionary decisions in this process.

An old figure can still be a live rule

The instinct when a state raises its minimum is to delete the old number. Arizona shows why that loses information. The paragraph above its current amounts carries lower figures, and it applies to policies issued or renewed on or before 30 June 2020 and to anyone holding a certificate of self-insurance or partial self-insurance.

Ordinary policies renew annually, so essentially nobody is left on the date limb. The self-insurance limb is current law for the people it covers. “Arizona raised its minimum in 2020” is therefore true for almost everyone and false for a specific class — a distinction that disappears the moment a page tidies the old amounts away. The Arizona page carries both.

The limits are not the only number the state sets

A filing has a second statutory cost that nothing in the table above captures: what the state charges to give the license back. It is set by a different chapter, it is not proportional to the limits, and it is drafted very differently from state to state. Two have been read.

Virginia builds the fee out of parts

Virginia does not have a reinstatement fee so much as a recipe. A base fee, a supplement where the suspension followed an intoxication or reckless-driving conviction, and a further amount collected on any restoration and paid into a trauma fund. A driver reinstating after a Virginia driving-under-the-influence conviction is looking at $100 in statutory fees before any insurance at all.

The detail worth carrying away is the stacking rule: where several suspensions sit on one record the statute charges one fee at the highest applicable rate plus a small administrative amount for each additional suspension, not a full fee each. The Virginia page shows the whole build-up.

California sets no figure at all

The contrast is instructive. California's equivalent section requires “a fee sufficient to pay the actual costs of the issuance, reissuance, or return as determined by the department”. There is no amount in the statute to quote.

So a page that prints a single California reinstatement figure is printing something it did not get from the code. This site prints none, and says why.

The other states in the table have not had their reinstatement provisions read, so no figure for them appears here either. That is a gap, and it is the next thing worth closing.

How these were read

Each figure was read on September 19, 2026 from the section cited in its row. Where the state's own website could not be reached from the build host, the statutory text was read from a published reproduction of that state's code and the state's canonical URL is printed on the state page alongside it, so the two can be compared. The methodology page names which states that applies to and why.

No figure on this page is an average, a synthesis or an estimate. If a state is missing, it is missing because nobody here has read its statute yet.

Common questions