Method

Method and sources

Every limit on this site was read on an official state page or statute on 2 or 3 November 2026, on the date given beside each source below, then entered by hand in a file with its address. 38 of 51 jurisdictions are read. The other 13 are marked not verified: Arkansas, Colorado, Idaho, Indiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, Ohio, Rhode Island, Tennessee.

What counts as a source

A state agency page (motor vehicle, revenue or insurance department) or a statute on a legislature's own site. Not a lawyer's blog, an insurer's guide or a national list. Utah's limits come from its insurance department, because the code page answered with an empty shell.

How the page was read

Each page was fetched by a script that declares its name and says it is not a browser. It read the site's robots.txt first, followed it, and asked for each address once. A site that refused it was closed for the rest of the session: no second identity, no other tool, no archived copy, no search engine queried by script. The text was stored, the passage with the figures was read by the Claude AI agent that wrote this site under Radif Partners' direction, and the figure was then entered by hand. No lawyer has reviewed it.

This replaces a first reading of the same day, made with a browser-style user agent, which we discarded. Figures that could not be read again were removed, Colorado and Ohio among them, and Indiana's was removed because the page gave uninsured motorist limits and not liability ones. On 3 November 2026 we read Illinois, Louisiana and South Dakota for the first time under the same rules, and read Connecticut, Georgia and Oklahoma again to write their state pages.

What refused or did not answer

A site can have a second publisher: where an agency refused and the legislature answered, we read the legislature's text as a separate document (Alaska, Maine and Louisiana). We did not read: Colorado's insurance division and motor vehicle sites, California's legislature, Hawaii's legislature, Nevada's legislature, North Carolina's legislature, New York's Senate, Tennessee's state portal, New Jersey's state portal, New Hampshire's code, insurance and motor vehicle sites, Massachusetts's portal, Michigan's portal, Rhode Island's insurance and motor vehicle sites, New Mexico's motor vehicle site, Louisiana's insurance department, Illinois's Secretary of State and Florida's highway safety department, all of which refused. Sites that did not answer include the legislatures of Idaho, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, Ohio and Rhode Island, Ohio's motor vehicle bureau and Idaho's insurance department; Michigan's legislature refused the connection outright. Colorado's statutes are published only through a commercial host, which we did not use. Ohio's insurance department answered our reader with a page-not-found error. New Mexico's insurance office gives no figure on its auto page, and the state's statute site displays nothing without a browser, so New Mexico stays unread.

Terms count as well as answers. Indiana's state portal allows its content for personal use only, not for republication, and Indiana's statute site needs a browser, so Indiana stays unread. Nebraska's insurance department links to portal terms that forbid robots and scrapers without written permission, so we removed the Nebraska figure. Virginia's motor vehicle department allows its information to be cited but not reproduced, which is how we use it. Oklahoma's state portal terms did not answer, so we found nothing that rules out a citation.

Where Louisiana's and South Dakota's law was read

Louisiana's figures and rules come from the Revised Statutes on the Louisiana Legislature's site, legis.la.gov, after its disclaimer page. A script filled in and sent that site's law search form, under the same declared name, to find the address of each section, so the form address was asked more than once. Sections 32:900, 32:863 and 32:866 were then fetched at their own addresses. Section 32:861 was read only in the answer to the form.

South Dakota's figures and rules come from the Codified Laws on the South Dakota Legislature's site, sdlegislature.gov. Its usual statute pages need a browser to display, and that site had not refused us, so we read the plain HTML page it serves for each section at /api/Statutes/ (sections 32-35-70, 32-35-113 and 58-11-9). We found no terms on that site, and the state's own disclaimer page sends readers to a login screen.

Idaho and Arkansas are marked not verified. A first reading of Idaho's motor vehicle page came before its state portal terms, which then did not answer. Arkansas's brochure address sent us to an outside storage host whose robots.txt we had not read. Neither figure is used anywhere on this site.

The unpaid-damages estimate

Per-person payment is the lower of the injury cost and the per-person limit, times the number of people. Injury payment is the lower of that and the per-accident limit. Property payment is the lower of the damage and the property limit. What is left unpaid is the total of damages minus those two payments. The tests in the code include these cases.

Limits of this tool

  • It ignores interest, defense costs and any other cover you hold, such as umbrella policies.
  • It treats limits as three separate caps; a combined single limit is not modeled.
  • It knows nothing about how a claim would actually settle, which depends on the facts, the insurer and the law.
  • Scenario amounts are yours and are not statistics.
  • It gives no quotes and says nothing about prices.

Reuse

We report figures and short facts from state pages and statutes, in our own words, and link to each. No table is reproduced from any third party. We read the terms or disclaimer each site links from its home page, where one was found, before relying on it.

Sources

Written by

Independent publisher of a state-by-state reference to minimum car insurance requirements in the United States

Official pages read on · Editorial policy · Contact

State minimums 2026, read on official state pages, last read on