When a law changes, the statute changes on the day the legislature says so. Everything else — agency FAQs, printed handbooks, the guide that ranks first on Google — changes whenever somebody gets around to it. Sometimes that is years. Sometimes never.
These are not hypothetical. Each one below is something we ran into while building the state pages on this site in September 2026.
1. Michigan’s own insurance regulator understates the mini-tort by $2,000
Michigan is a no-fault state, but a narrow exception — the mini-tort — lets you sue an at-fault driver for vehicle damage your insurance did not cover, typically their collision deductible.
The cap was raised from $1,000 to $3,000 for crashes after 1 July 2020, as part of the same reform package that rebuilt Michigan’s PIP system. The statute is unambiguous.
A consumer FAQ page maintained by Michigan’s own Department of Insurance and Financial Services still describes the figure as $1,000. It is a surviving page from before the reform. A Michigan driver reading their regulator’s website would ask for a third of what they are entitled to.
We took the statute. See Michigan’s fault page.
2. North Carolina’s printed driver handbook shows the old minimums
North Carolina raised its minimum liability limits to 50/100/50 effective 1 July 2025 — one of the largest jumps of any state, up from 30/60/25.
The state’s own Driver Handbook still prints the old numbers. Not a third-party summary — the handbook the state hands to new drivers.
The statute carries the new figures, and so does the DMV’s insurance requirements page. Three official sources, two of which agree, one of which is a year behind. See North Carolina’s minimums.
3. “Ohio SR-22: three years for a first offence, five for a repeat”
That sentence appears across a great many insurance guides. It was true. It stopped being true on 9 April 2025, when Ohio cut the proof-of-financial-responsibility period to one year for every suspension class.
The same amendment lengthened the coverage-lapse grace period from 15 to 45 days and cut the repeat-offence lookback from five years to one. A separate 2023 change had already dropped the first-offence reinstatement fee from $100 to $40.
So the commonly quoted Ohio figures — three years, five years, $100 — are three separate repealed provisions being recited together. See Ohio’s SR-22 page.
4. Texas still gets billed for a surcharge that was abolished in 2019
Search for the penalty for driving uninsured in Texas and you will be told about an annual $250 surcharge for two years, on top of the fine.
Texas abolished the Driver Responsibility Program on 1 September 2019. The repeal wiped out past, present and future surcharges and lifted roughly a million licence suspensions. The surcharge does not exist and cannot be assessed.
Seven years later it is still routinely listed as a consequence of driving without insurance in Texas. See the Texas page.
5. Illinois raised its minimums — except it didn’t
This one runs the other way, and it is the more interesting failure.
A widely repeated claim holds that Illinois raised its minimum liability limits to 30/60/25 on 1 January 2025. It did not. Illinois still requires 25/50/20, and the last real increase was in 2015. A 2025 bill proposing 50/100/40 did not pass.
A false increase is worse than a stale figure, because the person repeating it sounds current. We recorded the non-change as an entry in the Illinois change history, since “this did not happen” is the useful fact here.
6. Florida’s statute showed a number before it was in force
The published 2026 Florida Statutes show the crash reporting threshold as $2,000. Read the chapter law and the increase takes effect 1 October 2026; crashes before that date are governed by the old $500 figure.
So through September 2026 the statute page and the law disagreed. Anyone who read the statute text and wrote down $2,000 in that window was publishing a number that did not yet govern anything.
Our Florida page carries the effective date with the figure and switches from $500 to $2,000 on the day the law does. See Florida’s reporting page.
The pattern
Four of these six are stale figures. One is a fabricated change. One is a real change published early. They fail in different directions, but they share a cause: somebody wrote a number down once and nobody scheduled a reason to look at it again.
It is why every figure on this site carries the source it came from and the date we last checked it, and why each state has a change history rather than a silent edit. A page that cannot tell you when it was last verified is asking you to trust that someone remembered.
If you find something here that has gone stale, that is a bug, and we would rather hear about it.