For most interstate motor carriers hauling non-hazardous property, federal law requires just $750,000 in liability insurance—a figure Congress set in the early 1980s and has never updated. That number is the quiet cause of some of the litigation now roiling the transportation bar. It is time—well past time—for Congress to raise the floor.
A Floor Frozen in the Reagan Era
When Congress set the current minimum financial-responsibility levels, $750,000 represented meaningful protection. Medical costs, wage-loss claims, life-care plans, and jury valuations in the early 1980s bore little resemblance to what lawyers and insurers see today. Four decades later, the figure has not moved an inch.
The erosion has been quantified. In its February 2026 Report to Congress, the FMCSA estimated that the $750,000 minimum for general freight carriers would equal roughly $2.19 million in 2024 dollars using core CP—but approximately $3.73 million using Medical CPI. Updated with 2026 medical-cost data, the figure approaches $3.9 million.
Medical CPI is the honest yardstick. Catastrophic trucking cases are, at their core, medical-loss cases. From 1985 to 2024, medical inflation averaged 4.21% annually against core inflation of 2.8%. The cost of what these policies exist to pay—i.e., trauma care, surgery, rehabilitation, attendant care—has grown faster than nearly everything else in the economy. The insurance floor has not grown at all.
What $750,000 Buys in a Catastrophic Case
Consider the anatomy of a serious truck crash: emergency transport, trauma care, multiple surgeries, hospitalization and inpatient rehabilitation, future medical care, disability, lost earning capacity, home modifications, attendant care, and non-economic losses that juries routinely value in the millions. In a wrongful-death case, the arithmetic is no kinder.
Against those numbers, $750,000 can be exhausted before the patient leaves the hospital. The economics of modern catastrophic injury simply do not fit inside a forty-year-old insurance floor.
Why Raising the Minimum Matters
A modern floor would accomplish several things at once. It would protect the motoring public—financial-responsibility rules exist to ensure that those injured by commercial trucking are compensated, and a floor worth a fifth of its original value in medical dollars no longer serves that purpose. It would allocate costs where they belong: catastrophic crash costs do not vanish when coverage runs out; they shift to victims, health insurers, Medicare, and Medicaid. Adequate minimums place the cost of trucking accidents on the industry that generates them. And it would discipline the market—insurance underwriting is a de facto safety screen, and a trivial minimum lets undercapitalized, unsafe carriers compete on equal footing with responsible ones.
The objections deserve a fair hearing. Small carriers and owner-operators warn that higher premiums could push thin-margin operations out of business, and the FMCSA has cautioned that it lacks comprehensive data on losses exceeding current limits. Those concerns counsel phased implementation and continued study, not paralysis. The absence of perfect data about a forty-year-old number is an argument for studying the increase, not freezing the floor for a fifth decade.
Montgomery and Broker Liability: The Symptom, Not the Disease
Which brings us to the case the transportation bar cannot stop discussing. On May 14, 2026, a unanimous Supreme Court held in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC that a state-law claim alleging a freight broker negligently hired an unsafe motor carrier is not preempted by the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act, because such claims fall within the statute’s safety exception. The weeks since have been spent parsing the implications for brokers: litigation exposure, carrier-vetting protocols, underwriting, risk allocation.
Those conversations matter. But they are conversations about a symptom. Montgomery would may never have been litigated—let alone reached the Supreme Court—if the motor carrier had been adequately insured.
Broker-liability litigation did not become prominent because plaintiffs’ lawyers discovered a clever new theory. It became prominent because, in serious trucking cases, the responsible carrier’s available insurance is so often inadequate to cover the harm. When a catastrophically injured plaintiff faces millions in damages and the carrier tenders a minimum-limits policy, the litigation inevitably expands. Counsel asks who else helped put that truck on the road, and scrutinizes the broker’s selection process—safety ratings, crash history, out-of-service data—searching for a defendant whose pockets match the loss.
To be clear, broker-liability claims will always exist. A broker that ignores red flags and hires a dangerous carrier should answer for it, and Montgomery rightly preserves that accountability. But the prevalence of these claims is not mysterious. It is the predictable consequence of an empty primary pocket. If motor carriers carried limits commensurate with the losses they can cause, the search for deeper pockets would largely recede. Brokers would face suit in the rare catastrophic cases that exceed even a modernized limit, and not in every serious crash involving a minimally insured carrier.
A Call to Action and the Indexing Imperative
Congress is already considering the Fair Compensation for Truck Crash Victims Act, H.R. 8218, which would raise the minimum from $750,000 to $5 million and index future increases to medical-cost inflation. Reasonable people can debate the precise figure; the FMCSA’s own medical-CPI math suggests roughly $4 million simply restores the original value. What is much harder to defend is that $750,000 remains adequate in 2026.
Whatever number Congress chooses, one feature is non-negotiable: indexing. The present crisis exists precisely because the limit was set once and frozen for more than forty years. Raise the number without an inflation mechanism—preferably tied to medical costs—and we will be writing this same article in 2066.
Broker-liability litigation is not an unexplained distortion in transportation law. It is the predictable result of a system that measures catastrophic injuries in millions while fixing required coverage at $750,000. Montgomery did not create that reality. It exposed it. Congress should fix it.
Sources:
Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC, No. 24-1238 (U.S. May 14, 2026)
FMCSA, Report to Congress: Examining the Appropriateness of the Current Financial Responsibility and Security Requirements for Motor Carriers, Brokers, and Freight Forwarders (Feb. 2026)
Fair Compensation for Truck Crash Victims Act, H.R. 8218, 119th Cong. (2026)
