By Roberto Ramos Jr., Licensed 2-20 Property and Casualty Agent, serving Palm Beach County since 2007
Florida requires two coverages to register a car: personal injury protection and property damage liability, $10,000 of each. The coverage the generic national answer starts with, bodily injury liability, is not required for ordinary registration here. Your own PIP pays first after a crash, whoever caused it. That one swap explains nearly everything else.
Reviewed August 2026 · Roberto Ramos Jr., Licensed 2-20 P&C Agent · FL License #P111106 · Serving Palm Beach County since 2007
A lot of the people who land on this question arrived in Florida with a working knowledge of insurance from somewhere else, and the two refuse to line up. Here is a couple in exactly that spot:
“Still baffled” is not a knock on them. They have read enough to ask precisely the right question, and the reason it will not resolve is that Florida rearranged the furniture: what the state requires, who pays first, and when a lawsuit can reach you all moved. This walks through each one, statute first, in the order that makes the rest make sense.
Start with the registration counter. The Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles, FLHSMV from here on, states the floor on its own insurance page, verbatim:
In plain English, two coverages put a plate on a car here. Personal injury protection, PIP, pays toward your own medical care and lost income after a crash, no matter who caused it. Property damage liability, PDL, pays for damage you do to other people’s property. That is $10,000 of each, and both figures are set by Florida law, not by anyone’s marketing.
Now look at what is missing from that list. Bodily injury liability, the coverage that pays the people you injure, is not required for ordinary registration in Florida. That negative is scoped and checked: F.S. 324.022 and F.S. 627.733, the two statutes that would carry the requirement, were both read in full, and neither imposes it for ordinary registration.
It is required in specific named situations, after certain crashes and violations, and that ladder has its own pages. Read that again. The coverage the rest of the country treats as the definition of car insurance is the one Florida leaves to your judgment.
The mistake this produces is quiet and reasonable. People assume the move here is additive, that Florida just means buying one more thing:
The real change is not what you add. It is what this state does not require, and what that leaves resting on your own choices. One more piece of the floor worth knowing: the duty is continuous. Under F.S. 627.733, the security has to stay in effect throughout the registration period, not just on the day you show a card at the counter.
And if the whole vocabulary feels like alphabet soup, you are in good company:
Simple terms is the assignment, and the sections below take the coverages one at a time. What I will not do, here or anywhere on a web page, is tell you what to set your limits at. The true answer depends on things a page cannot see, which is exactly what a licensed agent looks at with you on the phone.
No-fault is a payment order, not a verdict about blame. After a Florida crash, your own PIP pays first, whoever caused it. Fault still gets decided, and it still matters, for other questions. This one correction untangles more Florida confusion than any other, so let me make it carefully.
The second half of the correction is what PIP actually pays, because it is not “your bills.” Under F.S. 627.736, PIP pays eighty percent of reasonable expenses for medically necessary care, and sixty percent of lost gross income, against a shared $10,000 ceiling, with a $5,000 death benefit. Every number in that sentence is statutory. Two named exclusions ride along in the same statute: massage therapy and acupuncture, regardless of who provides them. Here is what the gap between “covers my bills” and eighty-percent-of-medically-necessary looks like from inside:
Four years of paying for a coverage, and a completely understandable wrong picture of what it does. Their figures are their own account of their own claim; the mechanics are the statute’s. The eighty percent and the medical-necessity test were both sitting in F.S. 627.736 the whole time… which is the argument for learning the rules before the crash instead of after.
Two more mechanics live inside the same statute, and each one surprises people.
I do not tell anybody how to obtain that determination, and I never characterize an injury; what you are entitled to know is that the statute makes the ceiling turn on it. Both of these matter at a moment when reading statutes is the last thing on anyone’s mind. The after-a-crash page walks the same clocks in the order they arrive.
The phrase “no-fault state” gets stretched into meanings the law never gave it, and this is where I pull it back to size. Florida’s no-fault law does include a tort exemption, a shield against some lawsuits. Its reach is written into F.S. 627.737: the exemption applies to the extent that PIP benefits are payable for the injury.
In plain English, the shield extends exactly as far as the no-fault benefits do, and no further. It is not blanket immunity from being sued over a crash.
What the famous “threshold” gates is a specific category: pain, suffering, mental anguish, and inconvenience. Under F.S. 627.737(2), those are recoverable where the injury involves significant and permanent loss of an important bodily function, permanent injury within a reasonable degree of medical probability, significant and permanent scarring or disfigurement, or death.
Florida’s threshold is verbal, not financial: the test is the nature of the injury, the working word in three of the four is permanent, and no pile of bills opens it by size alone. It gates pain-and-suffering damages, not lawsuits in general. Watch what happens when the pieces blur together in real life:
Two true facts, welded with a false because. Florida does leave bodily injury liability optional for ordinary registration, and Florida is a no-fault state, and neither causes the other. Whether this person can pursue anything is a question about their specific case, which belongs to a licensed Florida attorney, not to me or to any page. What I can state is the statute’s own scope, above.
And the mirror image, which deserves to be as famous as the exemption: under F.S. 627.733(4), an owner who was required to carry the coverage and did not has no immunity from tort liability. The statute makes that owner personally liable for the benefits an insurer would have paid, with all of an insurer’s rights and obligations. Skip the coverage and you do not escape the system. You become the insurance company, with none of its capital.
If somebody once told you Florida got rid of no-fault, they were not making it up. It happened. Florida’s no-fault law expired on October 1, 2007. The Legislature brought it back effective January 1, 2008, and the statute that did it, F.S. 627.7407, uses this phrase twice, verbatim:
In plain English: revived is the Legislature’s own word, because the law had actually died. For the three months in between, Florida ran without it. The transition statute handled gap-period crashes with a strange, telling rule: the no-fault limitations applied to a lawsuit if, and only if, both the plaintiff and the defendant were still carrying qualifying PIP coverage. For one season, whether no-fault applied to your crash depended on two private insurance decisions.
That history is why the half-memory keeps circulating. Search results still surface an archived state legislature page from 2018 saying no-fault “was repealed,” and archived statute versions float around beneath it. If you read one of those and came away confused, you read a real page that was true once. One note of scope: F.S. 627.7407 is a transition statute, quoted here as history only; the obligations that bind a driver today live in the current sections cited above.
As for today: a 2026 bill that would have replaced major parts of the no-fault system died in committee on March 13, 2026. The law above is the law in force.
There is an ordering problem in Florida’s system that snares people who did nothing reckless. It shows up after a plate is surrendered, after a coverage lapse, and after a move: the state will not issue a tag without insurance in force, while the insurance side needs the vehicle. Each desk is waiting on the other.
I am deliberately not publishing a step-by-step for escaping it, because the right sequence depends on which side of the loop you are standing on and what paperwork exists. It is, honestly, a few minutes of untangling on the phone with someone who does it often. That is not a sales line so much as a description of the job.
For the reader keeping score against the state they came from, here is the compact version. The Florida column is primary source, cited throughout; the other column is the usual answer elsewhere, drawn from trade-association summaries rather than fifty statutes, so treat it as orientation rather than law.
| The usual answer elsewhere | Florida | |
|---|---|---|
| What the state makes you buy | Bodily injury and property damage liability | PIP and property damage liability; no bodily injury liability for ordinary registration |
| Who pays your medical bills first | The at-fault driver's liability coverage, after fault is sorted | Your own PIP, whoever caused it |
| How much of the bill gets paid | Varies by state and policy | 80 percent of medically necessary expenses, to the $10,000 or $2,500 ceiling |
| A clock on getting treated | No comparable universal deadline | 14 days |
| Suing for pain and suffering | Broadly available in tort states | Only above a verbal threshold, where permanence is the test |
And since the question behind the question is often “how bad is the uninsured problem here,” here is the sourced answer. The Insurance Research Council’s latest published estimate puts Florida at 15.9 percent uninsured, fifteenth highest of fifty-one jurisdictions, on 2022 data, as published by the Insurance Information Institute. Worth knowing before you decide the state minimums are all the protection you want.
This is for the driver who just moved here and cannot make Florida match the state they learned insurance in, and for the longtime Floridian who has been paying for PIP for years without anyone explaining what it actually does. Both arrive at the same page for the same reason: the system is genuinely different, and the differences are load-bearing.
Who this is not for: anyone in the middle of a claim or deciding a legal question. A mid-claim reader talks to their claims adjuster or a licensed Florida attorney. I am a licensed insurance agent, not a claims adjuster and not an attorney, and this explainer stops exactly where those professions begin.
Here is where the web page hits its limit, honestly stated. The rules above are the system… what the system means for you depends on your household, your vehicles, your old policy, and choices Florida now leaves in your hands.
That translation is a conversation, and it is the one my office has with people who just moved here all the time. Bring your current declarations page, the summary sheet at the front of a policy, and the questions you collected on the way down. A licensed agent answers the landline below during business hours, in English and Spanish, and if your question belongs to an attorney or an adjuster instead, I will tell you that in the first minute.
Yes, Florida runs a no-fault system: after a crash, your own personal injury protection pays first, whoever caused it, under F.S. 627.736. The law expired on October 1, 2007 and was revived effective January 1, 2008, and it has been in force ever since.
Not for ordinary registration. F.S. 324.022 and F.S. 627.733 were both read in full, and neither imposes a bodily injury liability requirement to register a car; the floor is PIP and property damage liability. Specific named situations, after certain crashes and violations, do require it.
Florida registration requires a minimum of $10,000 in personal injury protection and $10,000 in property damage liability, per FLHSMV’s own insurance page. The coverage must stay in effect continuously throughout the registration period, not just on registration day, under F.S. 627.733.
No, and the gap surprises people. PIP pays eighty percent of medically necessary expenses and sixty percent of lost income, against a shared $10,000 ceiling, and the ceiling drops to $2,500 without a qualified provider’s emergency-medical-condition finding, per F.S. 627.736.
Florida’s tort exemption reaches only as far as PIP benefits are payable, so it is not blanket immunity. The threshold in F.S. 627.737(2) gates pain-and-suffering damages specifically, using a permanence-based test. Whether any particular case can proceed is a question for a licensed Florida attorney.
Florida genuinely did, once: the no-fault law expired October 1, 2007, and the Legislature revived it effective January 1, 2008, in F.S. 627.7407’s own words. A 2026 bill that would have replaced major parts of the system died in committee on March 13, 2026.
Roberto Ramos Jr. is a Licensed Florida 2-20 Property & Casualty Insurance Agent (License #P111106), serving Palm Beach County since 2007. A & J Insurance Services, agency license L051810. Verify the license with the state at the Florida DFS licensee search.
Legal disclaimer. Everything here is provided for informational and educational purposes only and reflects Florida law as of the review date. Roberto Ramos Jr., Florida Licensed 2-20 Property & Casualty Insurance Agent, and A & J Insurance Services provide insurance information and insurance-related services only; we do not provide legal advice, and nothing here applies any statute to any particular person’s claim or case. For advice about a specific situation, consult a licensed Florida attorney.
Reviewed August 2026 by Roberto Ramos Jr. against the Florida Statutes and the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles. Next review: after the 2027 legislative session.
