Medical expenses, lost wages, and the rest of what follows a bodily injury, when the driver who hurt you cannot cover it.
This coverage paysIn Florida that is collision coverage, a separate line on your own policy. Not this one.
This coverage does notUninsured motorist coverage pays for injuries to you and your family when the at-fault driver has no insurance, doesn’t have enough, or their company went under. It does not fix your car in Florida. That is collision coverage, which pays for your own vehicle. Florida law sets your limits equal to your bodily injury limits unless you signed for less.
Plain-English guide · Se habla español · Serving all of Florida from Lake Worth Beach
Reviewed August 2026 · Roberto Ramos Jr., Licensed 2-20 P&C Agent · FL License #P111106 · NPN 9567168
Agency: A & J Insurance Services · FL License #L051810 · NPN 9894692 · Serving all of Florida since 2007
Who this is for. You are shopping for auto insurance, renewing, or looking at a policy somebody else set up for you, and you want to know what this line actually does before you decide anything. Who this is not for. If you were hurt in a crash and you are dealing with a claim right now, this page will not move fast enough for you. Skip to If you are in a claim right now.
No. And the name is genuinely to blame for that.
“Uninsured motorist” sounds like it covers everything about an uninsured motorist hitting you. Of course it does. That is what the words say.
But in Florida this coverage pays for injuries to people. It does not pay to repair or replace your vehicle.
It is written down in three separate places, three different ways, and none of them mentions your car. Florida Statute 627.727 creates the coverage. It protects people entitled to recover damages “because of bodily injury, sickness, or disease, including death.” The Florida Department of Financial Services says it “pays you for an accidental bodily injury, sickness, or disease, including death.” The Florida Bar’s consumer pamphlet says it “pays for medical expenses, lost wages… bodily injury, sickness, disease, or death.”
Three sources. Property damage, which is the insurance term for damage to a car or to anything else you can put your hands on, appears in none of them.
That is the whole line, and there is no version of it in Florida that reaches your bumper.
So what does fix the car? Collision coverage. That is the line on your policy that pays to repair your vehicle when it hits something, no matter who was at fault, minus your deductible, which is the part you pay yourself before the coverage starts. If an uninsured driver rear-ends you tomorrow, collision is what puts your car back together.
If you do not carry collision, and the driver who hit you has no insurance and no money, there is nothing on your own policy that repairs your car. That is the whole answer, and it is worth knowing before the day you need it rather than after.
So the two work as a pair. Uninsured motorist takes care of the people. Collision takes care of the car. Most of the confusion I see comes from expecting one line to do both jobs.
Here is what happens when somebody hears “uninsured motorist.” They picture a specific car. Older, a little beat up, expired tag, driver takes off before the police get there. Then they run the odds in their head, decide they probably will not meet that person, and move on to the next line on the quote.
I understand it. That picture is exactly what the words put in your head. It is also only one of four. Florida Statute 627.727 spells out when a driver counts as uninsured, and the list is longer than you would guess.
The one you were picturing.
The statute counts a driver as uninsured when their insurer "is unable to make payment... because of insolvency."
Limits "less than the total damages sustained." That is what "underinsured" means, and Florida folds it into this same coverage.
The far more ordinary oneThe other insurer "excludes liability coverage to a nonfamily member" who was driving the car that injured you.
Why that changes the math. You were weighing the odds of meeting a driver with nothing. The far more ordinary version is a driver who had insurance, and whose money ran out before your bills did.
Florida does not require anybody to carry bodily injury liability at all to register a car. So the person in front of you may be carrying exactly what the state asked of them, which is nothing that pays for your injuries. They were not reckless. They were legal.
That is not a story about bad people. It is arithmetic, and this coverage is the answer to it.
First, the word. A limit is the most a coverage will pay. It is the ceiling, and on this one Florida law does something it does not do anywhere else on your policy: it picks that ceiling for you, and it picks generously.
The statute says your uninsured motorist limits “shall be not less than the limits of bodily injury liability insurance purchased by the named insured.” “Named insured” means you, the person the policy is written for.
So whatever you carry to protect other people, you get the same amount protecting yourself. Automatically. Nobody has to sell it to you. You can go lower if you ask. You cannot go higher. Florida caps this coverage at your bodily injury limits, or one million dollars, whichever is less.
Florida writes them equal automatically. Every option runs downward from there.
The consequence hiding in that sentence. Your uninsured motorist limit is tied to a coverage Florida does not require you to carry. Carry no bodily injury liability, and there is nothing for this coverage to match. Carry the smallest bodily injury limits you can find, and your protection against a driver with nothing is capped at that same small number.
The number you picked to protect strangers is the exact number protecting your own family. Those are one decision, not two, and it is worth knowing that while you are still making it. If you want the full picture on that first number, I wrote a separate guide on bodily injury liability.
This is the most reasonable objection on the page, and it deserves a real answer rather than a brush-off. The reasoning goes: I have health insurance. I have disability. I have collision on the car. What is left for this to do?
The statute answers it directly. It says this coverage “shall be over and above, but shall not duplicate,” the benefits available under workers’ compensation, personal injury protection, disability benefits law, automobile medical expense coverage, and motor vehicle liability coverage. Uninsured motorist covers “the difference, if any, between the sum of such benefits and the damages sustained.”
(Personal injury protection, usually shortened to PIP, is the coverage Florida does require. It pays a portion of your own medical bills after a crash no matter who caused it.)
In plain words: it is built to sit on top, not to repeat what you already have. It is the layer that starts where your other coverage stops. And there is a second line right after it that matters just as much. The statute says the amount available “shall not be reduced by a setoff against any coverage, including liability insurance.” Nobody gets to shrink it because you were responsible enough to carry other things.
Where health insurance genuinely stops. Your health plan pays medical bills. It does not replace the paycheck you miss. It does not pay for a permanent injury, or for what a serious crash costs you beyond the treatment itself. Your deductible and your out-of-pocket maximum are still yours to pay. And it covers you, not the friend riding in your passenger seat.
Honest qualifier, because you should hear it from me and not later. If you have strong health coverage and you never carry passengers, this coverage is doing less for you than it does for somebody with a high deductible and a full car. It is still doing something. It is just a smaller something, and you are allowed to weigh that.
Here is the good news, and it is real: uninsured motorist coverage comes attached to your policy automatically, at the same limits as your bodily injury liability. You do not have to ask for it. Nobody has to sell it to you.
Bodily injury liability is the coverage that pays other people when you hurt them in a crash. Uninsured motorist is the mirror image. It pays you, when somebody else hurts you and cannot cover it. Florida ties the two together on purpose. Whatever you carry to protect them, you get the same amount to protect yourself.
Unless you signed a form saying no. That is the only way to have less. One page, signed once. And Florida law requires that page to carry this heading, in 12-point bold type, at the very top:
The heading Florida Statute 627.727 requires on the form, in 12-point bold type. Not my words. The state's.
What happens after you sign. The law says it is “conclusively presumed” that you knew exactly what you were doing. Read that again. Not presumed. Conclusively presumed. There is no arguing later that you did not understand it.
It does not only bind you, either. The statute says the rejection counts “on behalf of all insureds under the policy.” Your spouse. Your kids, if they are on your policy. People who never saw that form and never signed anything.
Then it sits there. It does not expire when your policy renews. Florida law says it carries through any policy that “renews, extends, changes, supersedes, or replaces” the one you signed it on. Four renewals and ten years later, that signature is still working.
I am not telling you this to make you feel bad about a form. It gets signed in the same five minutes as everything else you sign, and it looks like paperwork because it is paperwork. I am telling you because there is a second half to this, written into the same statute, and it is the part I would want somebody to tell me.
Florida law requires your insurance company to remind you about this coverage. Not once, when you bought the policy. Every year. The statute says your insurer “shall notify the named insured at least annually” about the options on this coverage. That the notice “shall be part of, and attached to, the notice of premium.” And that it has to “provide for a means to allow the insured to request such coverage.”
The named insured is you, the person the policy is written for. Your premium notice is your bill. So that reminder arrives stapled to your bill, once a year, every year, with instructions for how to say yes.
Receiving it "does not constitute an affirmative waiver." Reading it changes nothing. Ignoring it changes nothing. Tossing it out with the envelope changes nothing.
Which means the door never closed. It has been open this whole time... and it is open right now.
Your declarations page is the summary at the front of your policy. It lists every coverage you have and what you are paying for each one. It arrives with every renewal, and it is in your insurance company’s app or your online account.
Find the line that says Uninsured Motorist, or UM. Some policies fold in the underinsured motorist too, meaning the driver who did carry insurance and nowhere near enough of it, and they label that line UM/UIM. You will be looking at one of three things.
You are carrying the most Florida allows on this coverage, because the law caps it at your bodily injury limits. Nothing to do.
Somebody selected lower limits at some point. That was allowed. It is also reversible.
A rejection form was signed. It is still in force today.
All three can be changed, and the statute is specific about how: in writing. A signature is what got you here. A signature is what changes it back.
If you are looking at your declarations page right now and you cannot tell which of the three you are looking at, email me a photo of it and I will read it with you. That is a two minute answer, not a sales call.
Somebody has probably said “stacked” or “unstacked” to you about this coverage. Here is what those words are actually pointing at, and why the choice exists at all.
Florida law prohibits stacking. There is a statute with that exact title, 627.4132, “Stacking of coverages prohibited.” It says that if you have more than one vehicle, you are protected “only to the extent of the coverage” on the vehicle in the accident, and that coverage on your other vehicles “shall not be added to or stacked upon that coverage.”
And then that same statute carves out one exception. The ban “does not apply… to uninsured motorist coverage,” which Florida governs under a statute of its own instead. Uninsured motorist is written out of the ban by name. It is the one coverage on your auto policy where adding your limits together is on the table at all.
Which one do you have? Stacked, unless you signed for the other one. The Florida Department of Financial Services puts it plainly: Florida law requires a company to “add together, or ‘stack'” your uninsured motorist coverage unless you choose otherwise.
Two cars with $100,000 in coverage each means $200,000 available to an injured person.
The limited version keeps those dollars in separate boxes. Only the vehicle in the accident counts.
What accepting “non-stacked” actually signs you up for. It is not one idea. The statute lists five separate limitations, and two of them matter more than the rest.
The trap. Your uninsured motorist coverage “does not apply” to you or a family member in your household who is hurt “while occupying any vehicle owned by such insureds for which uninsured motorist coverage was not purchased.” Own a vehicle. Skip this coverage on that one vehicle. Get hurt in it. Your other cars’ coverage does not apply. Not reduced. Does not apply.
That is the answer to a question a Florida driver asked out loud on a public forum:
“if I have multiple vehicles, say three for example, do I only need to purchase stacked insurance for one of those because it covers the other two?”
No. And under the non-stacked option, the vehicle you skipped is the one you are least protected in.
The part that is better than you would expect. Say you are hurt while riding in a car that is not yours and not a household member’s. You get “the highest limits” of uninsured motorist coverage on your own policy, and it sits “excess over” the coverage on the car you were riding in. Even on the limited version.
The same trap, a second time. If you accepted the non-stacked limits, the statute uses the identical machinery as the rejection form. Signing it is “conclusively presumed” to be an informed, knowing acceptance on behalf of all insureds. It applies to every policy that “renews, extends, changes, supersedes, or replaces” the one you signed on. And it stays that way “unless the named insured requests deletion of such limitations.” Two different forms. Same words. Same permanence. Same one-sentence fix.
Which one I would rather you have: stacked. I would rather give you my position than pretend I do not have one. If you own more than one vehicle, the case makes itself. You are carrying this coverage on each vehicle. Stacked is the version that lets all of it show up for you on the worst day of your life. The limited version is the one that keeps those dollars in separate boxes.
If you own one vehicle, read the trap above one more time. It does not say your other car. It says any vehicle owned by you or by a family member in your household that does not carry this coverage. It is easy to count the cars in the driveway and stop there. The test is not how many cars you drive. It is whether every vehicle your household owns carries this coverage, because the limited form is written around vehicles rather than around policies.
The limited version does cost less, and to be exact about it, less on this one coverage rather than on your policy as a whole. That is a real trade and I am not going to pretend it is not. What I will tell you is what you give up to get it, which is everything in the two paragraphs above.
Send me your declarations page and I will tell you which version you are carrying and what the other one would run on your policy. That is a five minute answer.
A driver hits you and leaves. There is no name, no plate, no policy to make a claim against. Uninsured motorist coverage is how that gets paid, and the reasoning is simple: a driver who cannot be identified cannot be billed. The Florida Bar’s consumer pamphlet says this coverage “also applies in a hit-and-run situation, or in a ‘phantom’ vehicle accident.”
One honest caution. Some policies attach their own conditions to a claim involving a vehicle that was never identified, and those conditions are in your policy language rather than in the statute. If a hit and run is the scenario you are worried about, read that part of your own policy, or send it to me and I will read it with you. I would rather you know now than find out later.
Your car, in that same crash, is still collision. Same as above.
On a car, this coverage is one layer among several. Personal injury protection pays first, then health insurance, then this. On a motorcycle, in Florida, the first layer does not exist. Florida’s no-fault law applies to vehicles with four or more wheels. A motorcycle is not one, so personal injury protection does not sit behind you the way it does in a car.
Which means that when a driver with nothing hits you on a bike, there is no automatic first layer catching the medical bills. This coverage stops being one option among several and starts being most of what you have. A Florida motorcyclist described what that looks like:
“Police found him fully at fault, seeing as he ran a red light, but I was stuck paying my own medical bills out of pocket.”
Fault was never the question in that story. Collectibility was. He won and still paid. More on how motorcycles sit outside Florida’s no-fault system is on the motorcycle insurance page.
Boat policies offer their own version, usually called uninsured boater coverage, and the shape is the same. It pays for bodily injury to you and your passengers when the operator who caused it has nothing. It does not pay for damage to your boat. Your hull and physical damage coverage handles that.
The difference is what is missing. There is no statute behind it the way 627.727 stands behind the auto version. No 12-point warning heading. No annual reminder attached to your bill. And no default turning it on for you. If it is not on the policy, no law requires anyone to write you once a year about it. That makes this one worth asking about out loud rather than assuming.
An umbrella policy sits above your auto and home coverage and adds limits when a claim runs past them. People reasonably assume that includes this coverage. It generally does not, not by itself. A standard personal umbrella is built to protect you when you injure somebody else. Extending it to cover your own injuries from an uninsured driver is a separate feature, and it is not on every umbrella.
Where it is available, the insurer will usually require high underlying limits on your auto policy before they will add it. This is a question to ask about your specific policy rather than a fact to assume, in either direction. If you carry an umbrella, the answer is in your policy, and it is worth knowing which way it goes.
This page was written for somebody deciding what to carry, not for somebody in the middle of a claim. If you have been injured and you are dealing with an adjuster, a settlement, or a question about what you are owed, that is a legal question and it belongs with a licensed Florida attorney.
I am an insurance agent. I can tell you what a policy says and what it was designed to do. I cannot advise you on a claim in progress, and you should be careful about anybody who offers to.
If you have read this far, you probably want to know where you actually stand. That takes two minutes and it does not cost anything. Find your declarations page, take a photo of it, and email it to me. I will tell you what your uninsured motorist line says, whether it matches your bodily injury limits, whether it is stacked, and whether somebody rejected it years ago on your behalf.
If everything is where it should be, I will tell you that and you can get on with your day.
Roberto Ramos Jr. · A & J Insurance Services · 807 Lucerne Ave. East Unit, Lake Worth Beach, FL 33460 · Mon–Fri 9am–6pm · Sat 10am–4pm EST
This guide applies statewide. Uninsured motorist coverage works the same way under Florida Statute 627.727 whether the policy is written in Lake Worth Beach or anywhere else in Florida. Policy language still varies between companies, which is why this page keeps pointing you back to your own declarations page.
Your next question: Bodily Injury Liability · Personal Injury Protection (PIP) · Property Damage Liability (PDL) · All guides
A & J Insurance Services, Inc.
807 Lucerne Ave. East Unit,
Lake Worth Beach, FL 33460
(561) 586-4955
Mon–Fri 9am–6pm · Sat 10am–4pm EST
Roberto Ramos Jr. · Licensed 2-20 Property & Casualty Agent · FL License #P111106 · NPN 9567168
Agency FL License #L051810 · NPN 9894692 · Se habla español
Written by Roberto Ramos Jr., 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.
Sources. Florida Statute 627.727: what the coverage pays for, the four conditions that make a driver uninsured, the relationship between these limits and bodily injury limits, the rejection form and its 12-point warning heading, the annual notice requirement, the over-and-above and no-setoff rules, and the five non-stacked limitations. Florida Statute 627.4132: the stacking prohibition and the fact that uninsured motorist coverage is excluded from it by name. Florida Statute 627.732: the definition that keeps motorcycles outside Florida’s no-fault system. Florida DFS, Personal Automobile Insurance Overview: the state’s description of what this coverage pays, the confirmation that stacked is the default, and the definitions of collision and comprehensive. The Florida Bar, Consumer Pamphlet: Automobile Insurance: the confirmation that the coverage applies in hit-and-run and phantom vehicle accidents, and a second independent description of what it pays.
This page is provided for informational and educational purposes only and reflects Florida insurance standards 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, tax, or financial planning advice. For advice about accident liability, lawsuits, settlements, or any legal matter, consult a licensed attorney. Coverage terms, availability, and requirements may vary by insurer, policy language, and individual circumstances.
Reviewed August 2026 against the Florida Statutes. Next review: after the 2027 legislative session.
