Texas Bodily Injury Liability Limits: How Much Is Enough?

The two numbers on the front of your auto policy — the ones that look like 30/60 or 100/300 — decide how much of a serious wreck your auto insurance company handles and how much lands on you personally. Most Texans have never chosen them deliberately. They inherited them from whatever quote they accepted years ago.

I'm a Farmers agent in Richardson, and I worked corporate claims before that, so I've watched this from both ends. The pattern is consistent: nobody thinks about bodily injury limits until an adjuster explains that the policy has stopped paying and the injured party's attorney is still asking questions.

This guide is about picking those numbers on purpose. If you want the underlying legal requirement — what's mandatory, what counts as proof, what a lapse costs — that's the Texas car insurance requirements guide, and I won't re-tread it here.

What does Texas require, and why isn't that the answer?

The short answer: $30,000 per injured person and $60,000 per accident. It's the minimum the state will accept, which is a different question from what protects your household.

Texas Transportation Code §601.072 sets liability minimums of 30/60/25 — $30,000 for bodily injury to one person, $60,000 total for bodily injury per accident, $25,000 for property damage. The first two numbers are what this guide is about.

Two structural facts about how those numbers behave, because they trip people up:

They're separate buckets, not one pot. The $60,000 is the ceiling across everyone injured in a single crash, and no individual can draw more than $30,000 from it regardless of how badly they're hurt. If one person's injuries reach $70,000 and nobody else is hurt, your policy pays $30,000 and stops. The $30,000 sitting unused in the per-accident limit doesn't help them, because there's no second claimant to use it.

Property damage can't subsidize injuries. The $25,000 for property damage is its own limit and can't be borrowed against.

The Texas Department of Insurance is direct about the consequence in its consumer guide: minimum limits might be too low if you cause a multi-vehicle accident, and if you don't have enough liability coverage to pay for the damages you cause, you might have to pay the rest yourself — and the other driver could sue you.

So the state minimum answers the question "may I legally drive?" It doesn't answer "will my family be alright if I cause a bad wreck?" Those are genuinely different questions, and only one of them has a legal answer. What a policy costs at each level is a separate matter, covered in what drives a Texas auto premium.

What does a bodily injury claim actually cost now?

The short answer: The average is already close to the state minimum per person, and averages hide the cases that matter most.

Sit with that comparison for a moment. The typical bodily injury claim consumes roughly four-fifths of the per-person minimum. That's the average — a claim in the middle of the distribution, involving ordinary injuries that resolve.

The claims that break households aren't average. A surgery, a hospital stay, months of physical therapy, lost wages during recovery — those numbers move into six figures without anything exotic happening. And medical costs have been rising through the same period that claim severity has.

The practical way to think about it: your per-person limit is what stands between an injured stranger's medical bills and your personal assets. If that number is $30,000 and their bills are $180,000, the difference isn't absorbed by anyone. It's pursued.

What's actually at risk if you're underinsured?

The short answer: Broadly, what you own and what you'll earn. The right limit is a function of your balance sheet, not your income.

This is the calculation almost nobody runs, and it's the one that should drive the decision. Add up what a judgment could reach:

The rule of thumb I'd offer: your bodily injury limits should at minimum approach your net worth, and for households with meaningful future earnings, comfortably above it. If your household has $400,000 of equity and savings and you're carrying $30,000 per person, the gap isn't a coverage question — it's an exposure you're carrying personally without having decided to.

Which limits do people actually choose?

The short answer: 100/300 is the common working answer for a household with a house and savings. Below that you're relying on nothing bad happening; above it you're usually into umbrella territory.

I want to be fair about the bottom row of that table. For someone driving an older paid-off car with no home equity, little savings, and a genuinely tight budget, minimum liability is a legal, honest choice — and the alternative to a thin policy is often no policy, which is worse in every direction.

What I push back on is the minimum by default. Most people I meet at 30/60 didn't weigh it against their circumstances. They chose it once, when their circumstances were different, and nothing has prompted a second look since.

Why is raising limits cheaper than people expect?

The short answer: Because most claims are small. The first $30,000 of coverage gets used constantly; the layer between $100,000 and $300,000 almost never does — so it costs relatively little to add.

This surprises people, so it's worth explaining the mechanism. Insurance is priced on expected losses. Small and moderate claims happen frequently, which makes the bottom layer of coverage expensive to provide. Large claims are rare, so the upper layers cost far less per dollar of protection.

The practical result: tripling your limits does not triple your premium. It typically costs a fraction of that. I won't publish a percentage here, because the actual difference depends on your household, your vehicles, your record, and the carrier — and I'm not going to invent a figure that sounds authoritative and isn't yours.

What I'd rather do is show you the two numbers side by side for your own policy. That comparison takes me a few minutes and it reframes the decision entirely, because the choice most people think they're making — "meaningful savings versus meaningful protection" — usually isn't the choice at all.

When does an umbrella policy make sense?

The short answer: Once you've pushed auto liability to around 250/500 and still have exposure left, an umbrella is generally the cheaper way to buy the next layer.

A personal umbrella policy sits above your auto and home liability and pays after those underlying limits are exhausted. Carriers require you to carry specified underlying limits first — commonly in the 250/500 range on auto — which is why umbrella is a step you take after maxing sensible auto limits, not instead of it.

Households that tend to benefit: those with home equity and savings that exceed their auto limits, anyone with rental property, families with teen drivers, and people whose future earnings are substantial enough to be worth protecting from a long-tail judgment.

One thing worth knowing: an umbrella usually extends beyond auto. It typically sits above your homeowners liability too, which means it responds to incidents that have nothing to do with driving. For a lot of households that broader coverage is the part that justifies it.

What happens if a claim exceeds your limits?

The short answer: Your insurer pays up to the limit and its defense obligations, and the balance becomes your personal responsibility — pursued through your assets and potentially your future income.

Here's the sequence, plainly. Your carrier investigates, defends you, and pays up to your policy limit. When the limit is reached, the policy's payment obligation ends. What remains is a claim against you personally.

That claim can be settled or litigated. If it results in a judgment, Texas collection remedies apply, and a judgment can persist and be enforced over time. This is why the "I don't have anything worth taking" reasoning is weaker than it sounds — future income is a real target, and most people's largest asset is their earning capacity rather than anything in a bank account today.

There's also a quieter consequence: your relationship with your own insurer changes. Once a claim clearly exceeds coverage, your interests and the carrier's stop being perfectly aligned. Adequate limits keep everyone on the same side of the table, which is worth something on its own.

The bottom line

The short answer: Pick limits against your balance sheet, not the state minimum — and find out what the upgrade costs before assuming you can't afford it.

The state minimum was set in 2011 and hasn't moved. Medical costs and claim severity have moved a great deal in that time — the average bodily injury claim went from $14,690 in 2012 to $24,211 in 2022. A floor that was thin then is thinner now.

Meanwhile the fix is one of the least expensive meaningful upgrades available on an auto policy, because you're buying the layer that rarely gets used. That's an unusual combination: a large improvement in protection for a small change in price, available to almost anyone, and largely unclaimed because nobody asks.

So do the arithmetic once. Add up your equity, savings, and what a judgment could reach in future income. Compare it to the number on your declarations page. If the second is smaller than the first — and for most homeowners it is by a wide margin — send me the page and I'll price the alternatives. I'm in Richardson, I do this in English and Spanish, and it takes about fifteen minutes.

Last reviewed by Jaime Mendez on September 9, 2026. This guide is educational and is not personalized insurance advice or legal advice — questions about creditor protection, homestead exemptions, and judgment enforcement belong with a qualified attorney. Texas insurance law, rates, and carrier appetites change often, and this guide is refreshed quarterly.