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By P & P Texas Insurance Group
Texas Only Makes You Carry 30/60/25, and That's Not a Lot You're leaving the H-E-B parking lot off Bandera Road, someone backs out without looking, and ...
You're leaving the H-E-B parking lot off Bandera Road, someone backs out without looking, and now there's a real crunch in your bumper. Nobody's hurt, thank goodness. But then the number in your head is this: if the other driver only carries what Texas legally requires, and this had been worse, would it have been enough? For most San Antonio families, the honest answer is no.
Texas law sets the floor at 30/60/25. That means $30,000 for bodily injury per person, $60,000 total per accident, and $25,000 for property damage. It's the minimum a driver can legally carry to keep their car registered and stay on the road. It is not the amount that actually protects a family when a bad wreck happens. Those are two very different things, and the gap between them is where a lot of people get caught off guard.
Break the numbers apart and they get smaller fast.
The $25,000 property damage piece is the one that dates the fastest. That's the coverage that pays for the other person's vehicle when you're at fault. Take a drive up 281 or Loop 1604 during rush hour and look at what's around you. Late-model trucks, three-row SUVs, the occasional luxury car heading toward The Dominion or La Cantera. A new full-size pickup can run well past $25,000 all by itself. If you total one and you're carrying the state minimum, your policy pays up to that limit, and the rest is coming out of your pocket.
The bodily injury side is where it gets serious. That $30,000 per person is meant to cover the other driver's medical bills if you injure them. One ambulance ride, an ER visit, some imaging, and a short hospital stay can blow through $30,000 without much trouble. San Antonio sits right next to the South Texas Medical Center, one of the largest medical complexes in the country. Care here is excellent. It is also not cheap. Serious injuries generate serious bills, and when they exceed your limits, the injured party can come after your assets to make up the difference.
Texas is an at-fault state, which is the whole reason this matters. The driver who causes the wreck is responsible for the damage. So the question isn't really "am I legal." The question is "if I cause a bad accident, does my coverage stand between my savings and a judgment, or does it run out halfway through the bill."
Here's the part that surprises people the most. Even if you carry solid limits, you're only protected against your mistakes. The state minimum tells you nothing about the driver who hits you.
Texas has a lot of uninsured and underinsured drivers on the road. When one of them runs a light on Loop 410 and their insurance is either nonexistent or capped at that same skinny 30/60/25, your own policy is what fills the gap, but only if you carry uninsured/underinsured motorist coverage. Without it, you can do everything right, get hit by someone who did everything wrong, and still be stuck covering your own medical bills and car repairs.
That's the coverage we push San Antonio families to look at hardest, because it protects you from other people's decisions. You control your own limits. You don't control the guy merging onto I-10 with a lapsed policy. The Texas Department of Insurance walks through how auto liability and uninsured motorist coverage actually work if you want to read the plain version straight from the regulator. And keep in mind, Texas insurance rules can change, so it's worth verifying the current requirements when you review.
We see this all the time with folks who set up their first policy years ago, picked the minimum because it was the cheapest way to get legal, and never touched it again. That's not carelessness. That's just what happens when life gets busy and the policy is doing its quiet job in the background. The car got paid off, the family grew, a house got bought in Alamo Ranch or Helotes, and the coverage stayed frozen at the same numbers from day one.
The problem isn't the policy. The problem is that your life outgrew it and nobody flagged it. A family with a home, some savings, and two working parents has a lot more to lose in a lawsuit than a college kid with a used Civic. Your liability limits are what a court looks at first. If they're thin, everything you've built behind them is exposed.
This is where higher liability limits, and eventually an umbrella policy, start to make real sense. An umbrella sits on top of your auto and home coverage and kicks in when a claim blows past those limits. For families on the Northwest Side with assets to protect, it's often the most coverage you can buy for the least amount of worry.
You don't need to guess at the right numbers. That's the whole point of working with a local independent agent instead of a website that just asks how much you want to spend.
When you sit down with us at the office off IH-10 near The Rim, we look at what you're actually driving, what you own, who's on the policy, and what a realistic worst case would cost you here in Bexar County. Then we build the liability limits to match that, add uninsured motorist coverage so the other guy's bad choices aren't your financial problem, and talk about whether bundling your home and auto makes the whole thing more affordable. It takes a lot less time than most people expect, and you walk away knowing your coverage fits the life you have now, not the one you had when you first signed up.
Thirty, sixty, twenty-five keeps you legal. That's all it was ever built to do. If you want to know what it would actually take to protect your family on San Antonio roads, give Anthony a call at (210) 536-5990 and let's look at your numbers together. We speak English and Spanish, and the conversation costs you nothing but a few minutes.