California's new insurance minimums, and why they are still not enough
For fifty-eight years, the least insurance you could legally carry in California was $15,000 per injured person. That changed on 1 January 2025. It is a real improvement, and it is nowhere near sufficient.
What changed
The previous figures had been unchanged since 1967. To put that in perspective: $15,000 in 1967 would be worth well over $140,000 today. The minimum policy had been quietly eroding for most of a lifetime.
What $30,000 actually buys
Consider an ordinary moderate injury — not catastrophic, just the kind of thing that happens in a decent-speed rear-end collision.
- Ambulance transport and an emergency department visit
- A CT scan and an MRI
- Twelve weeks of physical therapy
- An orthopedic consultation and one epidural steroid injection
That sequence routinely exceeds $30,000 in billed charges before anyone has discussed lost earnings or the effect on the person's life. The new minimum, in other words, covers the medical bills of a moderate injury and nothing else — and only if there is one injured person rather than three.
The practical consequence for your own policy
The number that matters most to you is not the minimum you must carry. It is your own uninsured and underinsured motorist limit, because that is what responds when the person who hits you carries the minimum or nothing at all.
And remember how California UIM works: it is offset, not stacked. Your insurer pays the difference between the at-fault driver's limit and yours. If you carry $30,000 of UIM and they carry $30,000, there is no underinsured claim at all. Raising your UM/UIM limit is one of the cheapest meaningful things most drivers can do, and it is routinely declined.
Questions people ask
Does the new minimum apply to a crash that happened in 2024?
No. The limits that apply are those in force under the policy at the time of the collision. A crash before 1 January 2025 involving a minimum-limits driver is still a 15/30/5 claim.
Should I increase my own coverage?
The figure worth looking at is your uninsured and underinsured motorist limit, because that is what protects you from the large number of drivers carrying the minimum or nothing. It is usually inexpensive to raise and is the coverage people most often decline.
Related
Reviewed October 2026 by Simon Aziz Budhwani, Esq., the attorney responsible for this site. Legal statements here name the California code section they rely on, so you can check them rather than trust them. This is information about the law in general, not advice about your situation.
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