How we source this

Most pages about state insurance rules are assembled from other pages about state insurance rules, and the original figure is three or four copies back. This page describes what we do instead, including the parts that make the site look less complete than its competitors.

Every figure carries its source

A fact on this site is never stored as a bare number. It is stored with the URL it came from, the name of the body that published it, and the date we last opened that URL and saw the figure there. All three appear on the page, next to the value, so you can check our work without taking our word for any of it.

An unsourced value is not published

This is enforced by the build, not by discipline. The function that reads a block of facts returns nothing at all if that block has no source URL, and the page builder skips it. The page is never generated. There is no path through the code that puts an uncited figure in front of a reader, which means the rule survives us being tired or in a hurry.

What counts as a source

In order of preference: the section of the state code that sets the rule; then a page published by the state agency that administers it — the department of insurance, the department of motor vehicles, the state police. Below that, nothing. Law firm articles, insurer marketing pages and comparison sites are not used as the source of a value, however confident they sound. They are secondary at best, they are often stale, and several of them are visibly copying each other.

Gaps are left as gaps

When we cannot confirm a value in a primary source, we leave it empty. We do not estimate it, do not infer it from a neighbouring state, and do not borrow it from a site that has a number but no citation. So some tables here have fewer rows than the same table elsewhere. That is the honest shape of what is actually documented, and a missing row is more useful than a confident wrong one.

Some official sites block us

A number of state agency sites block automated access, so we cannot read them the way we read the rest. When that happens we go to the statute first and take the figure from the code itself, which is usually where the rule actually lives. If it is not in the code and the agency page is unreachable, the field stays empty until someone can check it by hand.

Amendments that have not taken effect

Published statute text sometimes already shows a figure that does not govern anything yet. Where a change is on the books but not yet in force, we show the current value as the value and the new one beside it with its effective date — Florida's crash reporting threshold, for example, reads $500 with $2,000 from October 1, 2026 alongside it. Until that date, the number you have to comply with is $500, and the page says so.

Premium figures

Average premiums come from the National Association of Insurance Commissioners' Auto Insurance Database Average Premium Supplement, which reports what insurers told regulators they actually charged, not modelled quotes from a rate engine. The NAIC publishes once a year, so the most recent available year lags the calendar by roughly eighteen months. We show the year on the page rather than implying the figure is current, and the extraction script refuses to run if the table it pulls is not the expected shape, so a change in the source document fails loudly instead of quietly producing wrong numbers.

Change history

Each state has a change history page recording what moved, when it took effect, and the source for the change. A reference that silently rewrites itself gives you no way to tell whether a rule changed or whether we simply had it wrong before. Keeping the history separates those two cases.

Corrections

Fifty-one jurisdictions amend their statutes continuously and we will sometimes be behind. Stale figures, dead links and states we have not covered yet are all worth reporting — send them through thecontact page. A correction that names the statute section is the fastest kind to act on.