In 38 States, the Car Insurance You're Legally Required to Carry Won't Cover One Hospital Stay

The average injury-related hospital stay costs $25,179. Thirty-three states require drivers to carry $25,000 in bodily injury coverage.

By Nathan Paulus

Updated: August 12, 2026

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Florida requires drivers to carry exactly one thing for bodily injury coverage: nothing. The state's registration law sets no bodily injury liability minimum at all. New Hampshire goes further still. It's the only state that doesn't require a driver to carry auto insurance in the first place.

Every other state does set a number, and so does Washington, D.C. We compared all 50 of those minimums against the average cost of an injury-related hospital stay, and the number rarely matters as much as it sounds like it should. The average injury-related hospital stay in the United States costs $25,179. Thirty-three states, more than two-thirds of the country, require drivers to carry exactly $25,000 in bodily injury liability coverage per person. That's not close enough to round away. It's a $179 shortfall, and it sits at the center of American auto insurance law.

Widen the lens to what hospitals bill, rather than what they cost to treat, and the shortfall isn’t close. The average injury stay is billed at $114,448. Not one state's minimum, including the five states requiring the country's highest legal floor of $50,000, covers half of that.

These aren't edge cases. An estimated 210 million Americans, 61% of the country, live somewhere their state's legally required minimum doesn't cover the average cost of a single hospital admission for a car accident injury. Measured against what hospitals bill, that number rises to 340 million. Nearly the entire country.

NOTABLE FINDINGS

The country's most common insurance minimum is $179 short of the average hospital bill. Thirty-three states plus Washington, D.C., home to 166 million people and just under half the U.S. population, require exactly $25,000 in bodily injury liability coverage per person. The average injury-related inpatient hospital stay costs $25,179.
No state's minimum clears even half of what hospitals bill for an injury stay. Measured against average billed charges of $114,448, the five states with the nation's highest bodily injury minimum ($50,000: Alaska, Maine, Michigan, North Carolina and Virginia) cover 44% of the bill. Every other state covers less.
Seven states raised their minimums in the past 18 months. Verification of all 51 states' own statute text turned up only three comparable changes in the ten years before that, Delaware in 2017, Connecticut in 2018 and Michigan in 2019, a pace roughly seven times faster than the prior decade. California, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Utah and Virginia moved in 2025, and Hawaii and New Jersey followed on January 1, 2026.
Florida requires $0 in bodily injury coverage. The state mandates personal injury protection and property damage coverage, but sets no bodily injury liability floor for most private drivers. It's the only state in the country with a mandatory-insurance system that requires zero dollars of this specific coverage.
Michigan's minimum looks unusually high in casual research, and it isn't. Michigan auto policies default to $250,000 in bodily injury coverage unless a driver signs a state form electing a lower limit, but the legal floor, the least any Michigan driver may carry, is $50,000, identical to four other states. It's a common point of confusion in secondary research on this topic, including, initially, our own.

No state's required bodily injury minimum reaches $114,448, the average hospital bill for one injury; even the top tier, $50,000, covers under half.

The Highest and Lowest State Minimums

Florida's $0 floor and the five states requiring $50,000 sit at opposite ends of this ranking. Measured against the same two benchmarks, cost and charges, even the best case falls short.


Per-person BI minimum	$50,000 (Alaska, Maine, Michigan, North Carolina, Virginia)	$0 (Florida)	$50,000
Coverage vs. average cost	199%	0%	199 points
Coverage vs. average charges	44%	0%	44 points
Shortfall vs. average charges, in dollars	−$64,448	−$114,448	$50,000

"Best" is relative. The distance between the top-ranked tier and full coverage of the average bill is larger than the distance between the top tier and the bottom.

Why $25,000 Isn't Enough

Florida anchors the bottom of this ranking not because of a data quirk but because of a legislative choice. The state requires no bodily injury liability coverage for most private drivers, mandating personal injury protection and property damage coverage instead. Against a $25,179 average hospital cost, it's the entire bill, every time.

The more consequential story is in the middle. Thirty-three states plus D.C. sit at exactly $25,000, a floor that predates recent medical inflation by years in most of these states and hasn't moved since. That $179 shortfall against the average cost figure is practically a rounding error, which is exactly the point. This isn't a story about a handful of outlier states with unusually low minimums. It's a story about the number most of the country is living under right now, a number that falls short of a moving target.

At the other end, the five states requiring $50,000 look like outliers of generosity until you check them against what hospitals bill rather than what they cost to treat. There, coverage tops out at 44%. There's no tier in this ranking, at any dollar amount currently in force in any state, where the legal minimum covers what a hospital charges for the average injury stay.

Where the Lowest Minimums Cluster

The $25,000 modal tier is not evenly distributed. Eleven of the 34 jurisdictions in it are in the South (Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, West Virginia and Washington, D.C.), and seven of the eight Mountain West states are in it too (Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico and Wyoming). Together those two regions are a slight majority of the tier, 18 of 34, with the rest scattered across the Midwest and Northeast in states that haven't revisited the figure in decades.

How Many Americans Are Affected

An estimated 210,330,591 people, 61.5% of the U.S. population, live in one of the 38 jurisdictions where the state's bodily injury minimum doesn't cover the average cost of an injury-related hospital stay. Measured against average billed charges instead of cost, that figure rises to 340,369,515, or 99.6% of the country, since every ranked jurisdiction falls short under that measure.

Population figures are U.S. Census Bureau Vintage 2025 resident population estimates (July 1, 2025), matched to each state's current bodily injury minimum.

Here are the five most populous states in the shortfall-vs-cost group, selected for contrast across tiers rather than raw size:

Florida (23.5 million): the $0 structural floor
New York (20.0 million): the $25,000 modal tier
Pennsylvania (13.1 million): one of only two states at the $15,000 floor, the lowest in the country
Illinois (12.7 million): the $25,000 modal tier
Ohio (11.9 million): the $25,000 modal tier

By contrast, New Hampshire, the one state excluded from this comparison entirely, accounts for roughly 1.4 million people, under half a percent of the national population. The exception is a rounding error next to the rule.

Why State Minimums Don't Track Medical Costs

State bodily injury minimums aren't indexed to medical costs, and most weren't set with a specific hospital bill in mind at all. They're legislative figures, often set decades ago and revisited rarely. Louisiana and Pennsylvania's $15,000 floors, the lowest in the country, have no fixed schedule for review. When a state does move the number, as seven states have in the past 18 months, it's usually after years of advocacy, a high-profile underinsured-motorist case, or a broader no-fault system overhaul, not a routine adjustment for medical inflation.

That disconnect is structural, not a fluke of any single state's politics. HCUPnet data shows the average cost of an injury-related hospital stay rose from $19,033 in 2019 to $25,179 in 2023, a 32% increase in five years. Most state minimums didn't move at all in that window. A number that was arguably adequate a decade ago erodes every year it isn't revisited, even in states that have never changed a thing.

THE MICHIGAN EXCEPTION

One state's minimum is confusing to research, and it's worth walking through. Michigan's 2019 no-fault reform set a default bodily injury limit of $250,000 per person, which is a policy issues at that level unless the driver takes action. But the same law lets a driver elect a lower limit, "but not lower than $50,000," with a signed state form. That $50,000 figure is the floor, the least any Michigan driver may legally carry, which is the same kind of number every other state in this ranking reports. $250,000 is what happens if you don't ask for less, not the legal minimum. Michigan's true floor places it in the $50,000 tier alongside Alaska, Maine, North Carolina and Virginia, not the outlier its default figure would suggest.

How Much Coverage Should You Buy

The minimum is a floor set by law, not a recommendation based on what a serious accident costs. If you carry only the state minimum, you're betting that a crash serious enough to hospitalize someone lands under a number that, in most of the country, is $179 short of the average case before accounting for physician fees, ambulance transport, rehabilitation, or lost wages, none of which are included in the hospital cost and charges figures above and all of which draw against the same per-person limit.

Coverage above your state minimum is priced incrementally, not per multiple of the base policy, so raising a $25,000 bodily injury limit to $100,000 costs a fraction of what the fourfold increase might suggest. MoneyGeek's guide walks through how much coverage fits your situation by state and driver profile. And raising the liability limit only covers half the exposure. It's still a bill for what you owe someone else, not for your own vehicle, which is where full coverage rather than a higher liability number comes in.

Every State's Bodily Injury Minimum, Ranked

Grouped by coverage tier rather than alphabetically. 43 of 50 ranked jurisdictions collapse into three tiers, which is part of the finding. Precision at the state level mostly doesn't exist, because most states are clustered on one of eight numbers. For the specific dollar figures and effective dates behind each state's current requirement, see MoneyGeek's breakdown of what each state currently requires. This table adds the cost comparison that page doesn't cover.


$0: structural zero	Florida	−$25,179	0%	−$114,448	0%
$15,000	Louisiana, Pennsylvania	−$10,179	60%	−$99,448	13%
$20,000	Iowa	−$5,179	79%	−$94,448	17%
$25,000: the modal floor	Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Vermont, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Wyoming	−$179	99%	−$89,448	22%
$30,000	California, Maryland, Minnesota, Texas, Utah	+$4,822	119%	−$84,448	26%
$35,000	New Jersey	+$9,822	139%	−$79,448	31%
$40,000	Hawaii	+$14,822	159%	−$74,448	35%
$50,000: the ceiling	Alaska, Maine, Michigan, North Carolina, Virginia	+$24,822	199%	−$64,448	44%

NEW HAMPSHIRE IS NOT INCLUDED IN THE RANKING

New Hampshire is the only state that does not mandate auto liability insurance at all. The frequently cited 25/50/25 figure applies only to drivers who voluntarily purchase a policy. There's no legal floor to compare, so scoring it, even at zero, would misstate what the state requires. Florida, by contrast, has a floor, and the floor is zero. That's why it's ranked and New Hampshire isn't. It's a distinction worth stating plainly, because it's easy to lump the two together as "the states without normal insurance rules," and they aren't the same kind of case.

Methodology

Minimum coverage shortfall reflects the difference between each state's legally required per-person bodily injury liability limit and the average cost of a single injury-related inpatient hospital stay in the United States.

Sourced from state statute and Department of Insurance notices, then individually verified all 51 jurisdictions against a primary or state-official source as of 8/11/2026. That verification surfaced nine citation corrections along the way. In every case the dollar figure in this dataset was correct and only the cited section was wrong, most often because the original citation pointed to an enforcement, penalty or proof-of-insurance provision rather than the section that sets the amount. No dollar value in this piece changed as a result of verification. Where a state's minimum has changed since January 2025, the enacting act and effective date alongside the current figure are cited.
These come from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality's HCUPnet tool, filtered to principal-diagnosis CCSR categories INJ001 through INJ027 and INJ032, 2023 National Inpatient Sample, accessed August 2026. Values are discharge-weighted composites across the 28 injury categories. We report two measures: mean cost, which reflects the hospital's cost to produce the service ($25,179), and mean charges, which reflects the amount billed before any payer discount or negotiation ($114,448). We decided to use both because a liability insurer's payment is grounded in a billed or negotiated amount rather than a hospital's internal cost, and we only treat a finding as solid where it holds under both.

Both cost figures exclude physician fees, ambulance transport, rehabilitation and lost wages, all of which the same per-person liability limit must also cover, so the published shortfall understates rather than overstates the true difference.

AHRQ's 2023 National Inpatient Sample uses an adjusted charge element (TOTCHG_2023) that accounts for five states not participating in that year's sample. AHRQ advises against strict year-over-year comparison of this specific element, so we report the 2023 charges figure on its own rather than as part of a multi-year trend. The cost figure doesn't carry this caveat.
Florida: requires no bodily injury liability coverage for standard vehicle registration. It mandates personal injury protection and property damage coverage instead (Fla. Stat. §§ 627.733, 627.736), and we score and rank it at $0. A separate provision, Fla. Stat. § 324.021, imposes a $10,000/$20,000 bodily injury requirement only retroactively, after a driver causes an at-fault injury accident without coverage. That's a penalty triggered by an accident rather than a condition of registration, so it's not the figure reported here.

New Hampshire: We exclude from the ranking rather than score at zero: no statute requires a driver to purchase liability coverage at all, so there's no floor to compare (RSA 264:20 sets $25,000/$50,000/$25,000 only for drivers who do purchase a policy).

Michigan: We report at its statutory floor of $50,000 per person under Mich. Comp. Laws § 500.3009(1)(a) (the default minimum of $250,000/$500,000) and § 500.3009(5) (the reduced-limit election), not at its $250,000 default. We considered the default, since it's the coverage most Michigan drivers carry absent a signed election form. But every other state in this study is measured by its legal floor, not by what a driver without one happens to carry, and running Michigan on its default would compare a carried-coverage figure against 50 legal minimums. The floor is the number that's comparable across all of them. See "The Michigan Exception" above for why this trips up casual research on the topic.
These are U.S. Census Bureau Vintage 2025 resident population estimates for July 1, 2025.
This analysis measures each state's third-party bodily injury liability minimum only, the amount a driver's insurer must pay someone else the driver injures. A number of states separately mandate first-party personal injury protection or no-fault medical benefits, or set uninsured/underinsured motorist floors that don't match the base liability limit, on top of the figure reported here. New York requires $50,000 in first-party no-fault PIP benefits in addition to its 25/50/10 liability minimum; Minnesota and North Dakota carry similar first-party requirements; Vermont's UM/UIM floor of 50/100 is higher than its own 25/50 liability minimum. None of that changes the comparison in this piece, since the question here is specifically what a driver is required to carry to cover someone else's injury. We state it plainly so someone in one of those states doesn't read this as the whole of what their state requires.

A supplementary descriptive figure, average length of stay for injury-related inpatient admissions by state in 2022, from AHRQ's HCUP Summary Trend Tables, appears in state-level local coverage but isn't used to derive any dollar figure in this analysis, since it uses a different data vintage and measures a different quantity than the cost and charges figures above.
Four states get an individual citation in Sources, Florida, New Hampshire, Michigan and California, since each carries a specific citation worth linking in its own right. Every other state I source from state statute and Department of Insurance notices, cited per jurisdiction in the full dataset; all 51 jurisdictions are individually verified against a primary or state-official source as of 2026-08-11.

About Nathan Paulus

Nathan Paulus is the Senior Director of Content and SEO at MoneyGeek, where he leads content strategy and produces original data research across insurance, consumer costs, transportation safety, housing, public policy and personal finance. He also reviews published studies for methodology, source quality and factual accuracy before they reach readers.

Research and Analysis

In more than six years at MoneyGeek, Nathan has published more than 100 original studies and explanatory guides. His insurance research includes 50-state comparisons of health care outcomes, costs and access, plus an analysis of how uninsured rates track with state Medicaid expansion decisions and electoral patterns. He has analyzed full coverage auto rates across major insurers in all 50 states and tracked how premium trends relate to industry underwriting losses. The analysis draws on combined ratio data from Fitch Ratings and AM Best, plus Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI figures. Beyond insurance, his work spans vehicle pricing trends across the U.S. new car market, summer traffic fatality rates by state, homeowner underinsurance ratios using mortgage and policy data, and housing affordability across all 50 states.

His research has been cited by Bloomberg, the Los Angeles Times, Forbes, Fast Company, the San Francisco Chronicle, USA Today and NBC Los Angeles. Harvard, MIT, Stanford and Yale have referenced his work.

Career

Nathan traces his interest in personal finance back to his grandmother, who ran her household on a simple rule: spend less than you make and save the difference before anything else. That rule shows up in his work today. His writing skips jargon and complex strategy in favor of the basics that help someone living paycheck to paycheck.

He joined MoneyGeek in July 2020 as Director of Content Marketing, where he led the content team and oversaw data journalism production across insurance and personal finance verticals. A promotion to Head of Marketing and Communications followed in December 2023. The new role added digital PR and communications strategy to his scope. He has held his current position, Head of Content and SEO, since January 2025.

Before MoneyGeek, Nathan served as Director of Content Marketing and SEO at Ventrix Advertising, where he helped build two content sites from scratch, contributed to link-building programs that generated more than 1,500 unique referring domains within a year and co-managed a marketing team of more than 20 people. Two and a half years at ABUV Media preceded that role. He advanced from Marketing Research Analyst to Senior Marketing Tactics Analyst, where he developed skills in audience research, content strategy and SEO.

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Sources

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. "HCUPnet, National Inpatient Sample, Diagnoses and Procedures Dashboard." Accessed August 11, 2026.
U.S. Census Bureau. "Annual Estimates of the Resident Population for the United States, Regions, States, District of Columbia and Puerto Rico: April 1, 2020 to July 1, 2025 (NST-EST2025-POP)." Accessed August 11, 2026.
The Florida Senate. "The 2024 Florida Statutes, Sections 627.733 and 627.736." Accessed August 11, 2026.
New Hampshire General Court. "New Hampshire Revised Statutes Annotated, RSA 264:20." Accessed August 11, 2026.
Michigan Legislature. "Michigan Compiled Laws, Section 500.3009." Accessed August 11, 2026.
California State Legislature. "Senate Bill 1107 (2021-2022 Regular Session)." Accessed August 11, 2026.