Maryland Car Insurance Requirements

All motor vehicles registered in Maryland must carry insurance under Maryland law (Transportation Code §17-103), and all motor vehicles registered in Maryland must carry insurance.

What Is the Minimum Required Car Insurance in Maryland?

The minimum car insurance required is:

• $30,000 for bodily injury per person (and for uninsured motorist coverage),
• $60,000 for bodily injury for two or more persons (again, also for uninsured motorist coverage)
• $15,000 for property damage.
• No minimum for PIP coverage

Uninsured motorist coverage is also required. This coverage protects you and your passengers if you are involved in an accident with an uninsured driver or if the at-fault driver’s insurance coverage is insufficient to cover your expenses.

Maryland requires minimums that mirror the minimum liability coverage:

Why are Maryland’s car insurance requirements so low? The truth is Maryland is in line with most states.

A few outliers, like Maine and Alaska, have higher limits. But most states are in line with or even behind Maryland. California, remarkably, is 15/30/50.

Why You Shouldn’t Get Minimum Auto Coverage?

You should carry far more insurance than the minimum policy limits in Maryland for two reasons. The first reason for taking just the minimum coverage is foolish is obvious. You also might get in an accident that is your fault, and the claim’s value could exceed your policy limits.

Protecting Yourself from Liability

One of two things can happen when this happens, and they are both terrible for you. First, the victim can get a verdict against you that exceeds your insurance limits. In this case, the victim can go after your assets and future wages and otherwise make your life miserable.

The second scenario is less understood and more likely to come back to bite you in real life. If you do not have enough insurance, the victim’s uninsured motorist coverage pays the victim for the difference between the claim’s value and your insurance policy.

That works for a moment. But the victim’s insurance company may reserve the right to bring a claim against you for whatever they paid out. This concept is called subrogation. These insurance companies have an entire cottage industry with lawyers who do nothing but beat down people who find themselves in this situation of not having enough coverage.

With medical costs these days, $30,000 disappears fast. One ambulance ride, emergency room visit, MRI, specialist visit, and a few months of physical therapy can exhaust $30,000 before anyone even starts talking about lost wages, future medical care, surgery, pain, or permanent injury.

So the Maryland minimum policy is not really protection in a serious crash. It is a thin raincoat in a hurricane. It may satisfy the law, but it may not keep you dry when the claim is real.

More Insurance Coverage for You

But the risk of personal exposure in many ways pales compared to this more critical risk: the other driver does not have enough insurance to cover your loss. Like the second scenario above, your insurance company does step in under this scenario if your insurance coverage exceeds the person who caused your injuries. (On most policies, your uninsured motorist coverage mirrors your liability coverage, so if you have, for example, a $300,000 policy limit for your negligence, that would be the same policy limit for your uninsured motorist coverage.)

Our lawyers cannot underscore the gravity of this. We have had clients in death cases and paraplegia cases, where they only got the minimum insurance limits. People don’t realize this. They get so angry that the person who hit them was so irresponsible to have so little coverage without truly appreciating that they could have protected themselves if they had had better insurance coverage themselves.

What is most frustrating for victims in these cases is just how little it would have cost to get the coverage that would have provided more protection. In most cases, you can dramatically increase your coverage limits for less than $100 a year. Remember that most people have much less insurance coverage than they think they do

What to Do When You Have an Accident with a Driver with the Minimum Coverage?

If the at-fault driver has minimum coverage and you have minimum coverage, your options are slim. But if you have a larger policy, there may be a path to recovery beyond the at-fault driver’s policy.

Underinsured Motorist (UIM) coverage in Maryland is designed to provide protection when you are involved in an accident with a driver whose insurance coverage is insufficient to cover the costs associated with the accident. This coverage protects you and your passengers if the at-fault driver’s policy limits are inadequate.

UIM coverage comes into play when the at-fault driver’s insurance policy limits are exhausted, and the compensation received is insufficient to cover your damages. For example, if your medical expenses and lost wages amount to $100,000, but the at-fault driver’s liability coverage limit is $30,000, if you have $300,000 in UIM coverage, it would help cover the remaining $270,000, up to your policy limits. If you opted for coverage that stacks (which few people do), the coverage would increase to $330,000.

How Much Car Insurance Should You Carry in Maryland?

Our lawyers think most Maryland drivers should carry far more than the minimum required coverage. Maryland’s minimum limits may satisfy the law, but they are not enough to protect you in a serious crash. If you can afford it, you should strongly consider carrying at least $250,000 per person and $500,000 per accident in both liability coverage and uninsured/underinsured motorist coverage.

If you own a home, have savings, have a good income, own a business, have retirement assets, or have a teenage driver in the house, you should also ask your insurance agent about an umbrella policy. An umbrella policy can provide additional protection above your auto policy limits. But you need to ask the right question: Does the umbrella include uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage? Some umbrella policies protect you if you hurt someone else, but do not protect you if an underinsured driver seriously hurts you.

The biggest mistake people make is thinking about car insurance only as something that protects them if they cause a crash. As we explain at the beginning of this page, that is only half the story. Yes, you need enough liability coverage to protect your assets, your wages, and your family if you make a mistake and seriously injure someone. But you also need enough uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage to protect yourself when someone else makes a mistake.

This is where Maryland families get blindsided. You can do everything right. You can stop at the red light, wear your seat belt, drive safely, and still get hit by someone carrying the minimum policy. If that driver causes a life-changing injury, their $30,000 policy may be gone almost immediately. Emergency care, imaging, orthopedic treatment, injections, surgery, lost wages, and future medical care can run far beyond that amount.

Your uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage is the coverage that steps in when the person who hit you has no insurance or not enough insurance. In our cases, this is often the difference between a family receiving meaningful compensation and a family being stuck with a serious injury and a small policy. We have seen death cases, paralysis cases, surgery cases, and permanent injury cases where the available insurance was nowhere near enough. The tragedy is that many of those families could have protected themselves with better coverage on their own policy.

In many cases, increasing your limits costs far less than people expect. A few dollars more each month can be the difference between real protection and finding out after the crash that your policy is mostly paper. If you can afford higher limits, buy them. You are not just buying insurance for a fender bender. You are buying protection for the worst day you hope never comes.

Call Us Today for a Free Consultation

If you suspect the other driver’s insurance coverage may be insufficient to cover your expenses, consult a Maryland personal injury attorney who can help you understand your options and navigate the legal process.  You can call us 24 hours a day at 800-553-8082 or get a free consultation online. 

Relevant Maryland Case Law

There has not been any new case law in recent years that drills down on Maryland’s car insurance requirements, but these cases are related to how coverage works in our state:

• Wilson v. Nationwide, 395 Md. 524, 910 A.2d 1122 (2006). The Maryland high court affirms that public policy permits fellow-employee exclusions because they are liability exclusions in automobile policies. This exclusion prevents an employer from maintaining employee coverage under workers’ compensation and business automobile insurance policies.
• Larimore v. American Ins. Co., 314 Md. 617, 552 A.2d 889(1989). The court held that the minimum coverage still applied because the fellow employee exclusion was authorized by the Maryland requirement that all vehicles maintain insurance. So if the policy says there is no coverage, you still have the minimum.
• West American Ins. Co. v. Popa, 352 Md. 455, 723 A.2d 1 (1998). The court found that a provision excluding a vehicle owned and operated by a self-insurer, governmental unit, or agency was void as against sound public policy.
• Leonard v. Sav-A-Stop Services, 289 Md. 204, 424 A.2d 336 (1981). The Maryland high court found that an employer had no duty to inform an employee that a fellow-employee exclusion in a commercial car insurance policy could result in only minimal coverage.