How split liability limits are written and read

What the three numbers cover

The first number is the most the policy pays for bodily injury to any one person in one accident. The second is the most it pays for bodily injury to everyone hurt in that accident combined. The third is the most it pays for damage to other people’s property, which usually means their vehicle but also covers fences, buildings and street furniture.

All three are limits on what the insurer pays, not estimates of what a claim will cost. A claim above the limit does not stop at the limit. The difference is the at-fault driver’s personally, and that single subtraction is the entire reason the numbers are worth reading.

The two bodily injury figures apply per accident rather than per year, and none of the three covers the policyholder’s own injuries or their own vehicle. Coverage for those comes from separate parts of the policy carrying their own limits, which is why a state minimum can be met in full and still leave a driver exposed.

The per-accident limit is not always twice the per-person limit

In most states the second number happens to be double the first, and code written on that assumption appears to work. It is an accident of drafting rather than a rule. Utah sets a per-accident bodily injury limit that is not twice its per-person limit, so any calculator deriving one figure from the other returns a wrong answer there and gives no sign of it.

This site stores the three limits as three independent statutory values and never derives one from another. New York adds a further wrinkle: a separate, higher pair of limits applies where the accident causes death, which a plain three-number schema loses entirely unless it is modelled deliberately.

Combined single limits

Some states allow a combined single limit as an alternative: one pool of money covering bodily injury and property damage together, with no internal split between them. It is written as a single figure rather than three, and it is not the sum of the split limits it replaces.

Where a state permits that alternative, it is a separate statutory value with its own amount, and this site records it as one rather than folding it into the split limits or presenting it as an equivalent.

Two states the pattern does not describe

Florida mandates no bodily injury coverage at all. Its compulsory requirements are property damage liability and personal injury protection, and bodily injury liability becomes compulsory only after a triggering event such as certain at-fault crashes or licence actions. Writing Florida as a three-number limit set states a requirement that does not exist, and printing a zero in the bodily injury column is worse, because zero is a limit and no requirement is not a limit.

New Hampshire mandates nothing. Its statute sets limits that apply where liability insurance is required under the financial responsibility chapter, and a driver may instead satisfy the state by depositing money with the state treasurer. The state has numbers, and those numbers are not a purchase mandate, which is why New Hampshire renders here with a different block rather than a limit set.

Requirements of this kind are tracked across all 51 jurisdictions, each value carried at the verification status of its source. 45 publish figures here and 6 render a statute link instead, because only a secondary reproduction of the limits could be found for them, and secondary reproductions are demonstrably stale on the states that changed most recently.

Questions

Does the second number always mean twice the first?

Usually, but not always. At least one state sets a per-accident bodily injury limit that is not double its per-person limit, so the two figures are carried independently here and never derived from one another.

What happens to a claim above the limit?

The insurer pays up to the limit and the remainder is the at-fault driver’s personal liability. That subtraction is exactly what the coverage gap calculator on this site performs against each state’s statutory limits.

Is a combined single limit the same as adding the three numbers together?

No. It is one pool covering injury and property damage together, written as a single figure, and its amount is set separately in statute wherever a state allows it as an alternative.