$25,000.00 in coverage is not enough for Ohio injury victims in 2026

If you’re injured in a car accident in Ohio today, the driver who hit you is only required to carry $25,000 in bodily injury coverage per person ($50,000 per accident) and $25,000 in property damage coverage. That’s the law under Ohio Revised Code 4509.51.

It’s also, in 2026, nowhere close to enough.

The math hasn’t kept up with the medicine

Twenty-five thousand dollars sounds like real money until you see what a single trip through the emergency room and follow-up care costs after a moderate collision. A basic ER visit with imaging can run several thousand dollars before a patient sees a specialist. Add an MRI, a round of physical therapy, and a single outpatient procedure, nothing exotic. Just the standard course of treatment for a disc injury, a fracture, or a torn ligament. It is routine for medical bills alone to clear $25,000 before lost wages, pain and suffering, or property damage are even factored in.

Every personal injury attorney in this state has had the same conversation with a client: “This is a clear liability case, but the other driver only carried the state minimum, and your medical bills already exceed their entire policy.”

The at-fault driver did nothing legally wrong by carrying the minimum — the minimum is exactly what Ohio law tells them is enough. The problem is that the number was never actually calibrated to what injuries cost, it was calibrated to what regulators believed the insurance market could bear.

Settlement and verdict data

Look at the range of outcomes in Ohio personal injury claims involving real, documented injuries. Not fender benders with a stiff neck that resolves in a week, but cases with objective diagnostic findings, real treatment, and real time away from work:

• Soft-tissue injury claims with ongoing physical therapy commonly settle in the $20,000–$40,000 range once treatment concludes.
• Cases involving a herniated disc, a fracture requiring hardware, or a surgery frequently settle well into six figures, often $75,000 to $250,000 or more, depending on the surgery, recovery, and residual impairment.
• Even “moderate” claims, the ones that don’t make headlines, regularly land in the $40,000–$60,000 range once we account for medical specials, wage loss, and general damages.

The state minimum sits at the very bottom of this distribution, or below it. That means in a large share of Ohio crashes involving real injuries, the at-fault driver’s insurance simply runs out before the case is anywhere close to fairly valued, regardless of how clear liability is or how legitimate the injury is.

Underinsured means uncompensated

This is where Ohio’s minimum coverage requirement becomes more than an abstract policy debate, but instead the reason an injured person isn’t made whole. When the at-fault driver’s policy is exhausted:

• The injured party can turn to their own underinsured motorist (UIM) coverage, IF they can afford to carry it themselves.
• If they didn’t purchase UIM coverage, often because no one explained why it mattered, or because it wasn’t required. The gap between what they’re owed, and what they can collect simply disappears.
• Providers still expect to be paid. Lost wages still have to be absorbed. The injured party, not the at-fault driver, ends up carrying the financial consequences of someone else’s negligence.

In other words, the state’s minimum requirement doesn’t just fail to fully compensate victims, it quietly shifts the risk of underinsurance onto the very people the tort system is supposed to protect.

Shifting toward $50,000 – $75,000 minimums

Raising Ohio’s minimum bodily injury requirement to somewhere in the $50,000–$75,000 per-person range wouldn’t fully cover every serious injury case. Nothing short of much higher limits would do that. Nevertheless, it would meaningfully close the gap for the broad middle of cases: disc injuries, fractures, surgeries, that don’t make the news but make up the bulk of what plaintiff’s firms see every day.

This specific range makes sense as a legislative target:

1. It tracks actual treatment costs. $50,000–$75,000 floor would cover the typical cost of a single surgical intervention plus a reasonable course of conservative treatment, the actual, unremarkable reality of a serious-but-not-catastrophic injury.
2. It reduces reliance on UIM as a backstop for basic adequacy. UIM coverage should protect against the truly catastrophic case, not function as a patch for a minimum that was set too low in the first place.
3. Other states have already moved this direction. Several states have raised their minimums in the last decade specifically because legislators recognized that decades old limits no longer reflected the cost of modern medical care or vehicle repair.
4. The cost to responsible drivers is modest. Raising minimum liability limits generally increases premiums by a relatively small amount compared to the increase in protection because most drivers who carry minimum limits never end up needing to pay out anywhere near a higher cap. The people who benefit most from the increase are the ones who unfortunately are seriously injured.

Ohio’s $25,000 minimum was not designed with 2026 medical costs, 2026 vehicle repair costs, or 2026 verdict ranges in mind. It is a number that made sense years ago but was simply never revisited with the seriousness it deserves. Every year the legislature leaves it in place, more injured Ohioans are told that the driver who hit them was “fully insured,” and then find out while trying to pay a hospital bill, that “fully insured” and “adequately insured” are not the same.

Raising the minimum to $50,000–$75,000 wouldn’t solve every problem in Ohio’s auto insurance system. But it would bring the law into line with the basic, unglamorous reality of what it costs when someone is injured in a car accident today. That alone would be a meaningful step forward for accident victims across the state.