Uninsured and Underinsured Motorist Claims

What UM and UIM Coverage Do When the Other Driver Can't Pay

Uninsured motorist coverage stands in for the insurance the at-fault driver should have carried.

Underinsured motorist coverage bridges the gap when their policy is real but too small for your injuries.

Whether you have either one, and what it actually pays, depends on rules that change at the state line.

About twenty jurisdictions make UM mandatory; the rest require insurers to offer it and let you reject it, usually in writing.

The table below carries every jurisdiction's rule with the governing statute.

Last verified: August 15, 2026. Maryland, North Carolina, and New Jersey all changed their rules since mid-2024, and the phase-ins turn on your policy's issue or renewal date.

Call (888) 713-6653 for a free case review that starts with what your own policy actually promises.

UM and UIM Rules in All 50 States and D.C., Verified for 2026

"Mandatory" means the coverage cannot be rejected. "Must-offer" means the insurer has to offer it and the buyer may turn it down, with the rejection formality noted. The key-rule column carries the fact most likely to decide a claim in that state.

A Bad Rejection Form Can Create Coverage the Carrier Never Priced

In every must-offer state, somebody signed something, and that document is worth reading closely after a serious crash.

The statutes take the formality seriously. Pennsylvania voids any rejection that does not follow the statutory wording, and a void rejection means coverage at the full liability limits.^[1] Washington implies coverage at the liability limits when no written rejection is on file. New Mexico's courts read UM in at full limits when the rejection was never endorsed onto the policy. Iowa demands the rejection live on its own separate sheet of paper. Oklahoma and Louisiana require the insurance commissioner's own form.

New York runs the logic in the other direction: supplementary UM/UIM must be provided at limits equal to your liability coverage unless the first named insured signs down, which converted the state's most valuable optional coverage into a default.^[2]

An adjuster saying you declined the coverage is a claim, not a fact. The form either satisfies the statute or it does not. We have read enough of them to know the failure points by heart. When the form does not match what the statute requires, the coverage exists whether the carrier priced it or not.

What happens once the claim is accepted is a different fight, the one where your own carrier sits across the table, and our guide to accidents with uninsured drivers maps that terrain, along with every other source of recovery when the at-fault driver cannot pay.

Added-On or Reduced-By: The Offset Rule Decides What UIM Pays

Two drivers with identical injuries and identical 50/100 UIM policies can recover wildly different amounts, because states disagree about what UIM sits on top of.

Say your damages are $100,000 and the at-fault driver carries a 25/50 minimum policy that pays you $25,000. In a reduced-by state, your UIM pays at most its limit minus that $25,000: another $25,000 on a 50/100 policy. In an add-on state, the same policy pays its full $50,000 on top of the tortfeasor's money, because the statute forbids the setoff. Florida wrote that rule directly into its statute, along with a default that stacks coverage across vehicles unless the insured signs it away.^[3] Georgia made add-on the default in 2008 and lets buyers elect the cheaper reduced-by version in writing; Arkansas, Colorado, Nevada, and Oregon sit on the add-on side too.

The harshest version is the limits-to-limits offset. In New Mexico, UIM pays your limits minus the tortfeasor's limits, so minimum-limits UIM against a minimum-limits driver pays nothing at all. New Hampshire's structure has the same sharp edge: UM matches your liability limits automatically, but a tortfeasor whose limits equal yours leaves no UIM claim to make.

Virginia and North Carolina both abandoned their offsets recently, which moves them from the stingy column to the generous one, and shows how quickly this table moves. How much coverage there is to offset against starts with what the other driver was required to carry; our verified table of car insurance minimums by state holds that half of the math.

Consent-to-Settle Clauses and the Other Traps Inside a UM Claim

A UM or UIM claim is a contract claim against your own insurer, and the contract has terms a tort claim never taught anyone to expect.

• Consent-to-Settle Clauses: Accepting the at-fault driver's policy limits without your UIM carrier's written consent can forfeit the UIM claim entirely, because the settlement extinguishes the subrogation rights the carrier bargained for. Kentucky codified its notice-and-substitution procedure in 2024; Kansas gives the carrier sixty days to substitute its own payment. Never sign a liability release with UIM money on the table until the carrier has been put on notice.
• Notice Deadlines: Policies impose their own reporting windows, sometimes measured in days, that run separately from the statute of limitations.
• Contract Limitation Periods: Some states treat UM claims as contract actions with different, sometimes shorter, filing deadlines than the injury lawsuit.
• Examinations and Arbitration: Examination-under-oath demands and arbitration clauses live in the UM provisions, and both shape how the claim gets decided.

When a carrier leans on those terms to slow-walk or lowball its own insured, the conduct has consequences of its own. Our guides to insurance bad faith and suing your own insurance company cover where hard bargaining ends and liability begins.

 

Six States Changed Their UM/UIM Rules Since 2024

This corner of insurance law is moving, and a chart from even a year ago is wrong in several rows.

Virginia removed the UIM offset for policies issued or renewed on or after July 1, 2023, then made insurance itself mandatory a year later.^[4] North Carolina's 2025 overhaul made UIM mandatory in every policy and eliminated the liability setoff outright.^[5] Maryland flipped enhanced, add-on UIM to the default for policies issued since July 1, 2024, waivable only in writing and scheduled to revert in 2029. Kentucky rewrote its UIM credit in 2024, Louisiana moved commercial policies to opt-in UM the same year, and Massachusetts, Utah, California, Hawaii, and New Jersey all raised the floors their UM coverage tracks between 2025 and 2026.

The phase-in mechanics decide real claims: most of these changes attach at policy issue or renewal, so two drivers in the same crash can hold policies governed by different rules. The declarations page and the policy's renewal date, not the calendar year, tell you which version applies.

The State UM/UIM Pages Behind These Rows

Five states get a full page on how their UM and UIM rules play out in real claims, from the rejection forms to the offsets.