No-Fault Insurance States: What Changes When You Move In

A rear-end collision at a red light in Grand Rapids sends your hospital bill to your own car insurance company, not to the driver who hit you. Same thing in Orlando, Brooklyn, St. Paul or Salt Lake City. And in most of those places you also give up the right to sue that driver for pain and suffering unless the injury crosses a line the state drew, sometimes a dollar figure, sometimes a list of injuries. That is the no-fault insurance bargain. You accept both halves of it once your car becomes a resident car. In three states you also pick between versions of the trade, on a form that is easy to sign without reading.

Checked: 9 October 2026 against the statutes and insurance-department pages linked in each row, read on that date. No-fault law is under constant pressure: Florida's legislature has filed repeal bills repeatedly, and the 2026 version, SB 522, died in committee on 13 March 2026. Open the linked section before you rely on a number below.

The twelve no-fault insurance states and the floor each one sets

"No-fault" means two things at once. First, every policy written in the state carries personal injury protection (PIP), which pays the medical bills and lost income of the people in your car, and often pedestrians you hit, regardless of who caused the crash. Second, the state limits when an injured person can sue another driver for non-economic damages. A state that does the first without the second is not a no-fault state, and plenty of summaries blur that.

Each row below links the statute or the state insurance department's own guide it was checked against. Twelve states do both things.

A note on Pennsylvania: the General Assembly's official statute pages could not be loaded for this check on 9 October 2026, so the Pennsylvania rows are read from the onecle reprint of Title 75, an unofficial copy that carries the amendment history. Confirm those sections at palegis.us before you rely on them.

Seven of the twelve put a dollar figure in the lawsuit test, running from $1,000 in Kentucky to $5,000 in Hawaii (Hawaii counts PIP benefits incurred rather than bills). Florida, Michigan, New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania use injury descriptions only. So "minor injury" means something different at every state line.

Utah lines the two numbers up. Its PIP minimum is $3,000 of medical expenses, and its lawsuit test is medical expenses in excess of $3,000, so a driver who carries only the minimum and runs through it is at or near the point where the right to sue comes back.

Oregon and Delaware are the usual source of confusion. Both require a PIP-style benefit on every policy, $15,000 for medical expenses in Oregon (ORS 742.524) and $15,000 per person and $30,000 per accident in Delaware (21 Del. C. § 2118(a)(2)). Neither state restricts suits for pain and suffering. Delaware's only tort-side rule is that you cannot claim in court the expenses PIP is available to pay (§ 2118(h)); Oregon sets no threshold at all. You gain a first-party benefit in those states without giving up the pain-and-suffering claim, so they are not counted above.

Three states put a lawsuit choice on the application

Kentucky, New Jersey and Pennsylvania let you decide whether to accept the lawsuit limit. The decision happens on paperwork, usually on the day you buy the policy, and the paperwork works differently in each of the three.

Kentucky. Acceptance is automatic. The state's own advisory on the rejection form says that anyone who uses, owns or maintains a car in Kentucky must carry $10,000 of basic no-fault coverage, and that having it limits your right to sue unless the injury involves a broken bone, permanent disfigurement, medical expenses over $1,000, permanent injury or death. To keep a full right to sue, you file the No-Fault Rejection Form with the Department of Insurance in Frankfort. The cost is spelled out on the same page: you are not entitled to no-fault benefits, other drivers keep the right to sue you for small injuries, and your premium may be higher. The rejection takes effect when the department receives it and stays in force until you revoke it in writing. The form asks for a Social Security number, and the department explains why: the rejection stays effective until revoked, so it needs an identifier that does not change when a name does.

New Jersey. There are two layers of choice. You pick a policy type, Standard or Basic, and inside the Standard Policy you pick a lawsuit option. The 2026 DOBI guide describes the Limitation on Lawsuit Option as an agreement not to sue for pain and suffering unless the injury is on a short list: loss of a body part, significant disfigurement or scarring, a displaced fracture, loss of a fetus, permanent injury, or death. The No Limitation option keeps the right and costs more. Neither option touches suits for medical bills and lost wages. The Basic Policy is the thin one: bodily injury liability is not included at all (a $10,000 per-accident option is available), property damage is $5,000, and PIP is $15,000, with up to $250,000 for certain permanent injuries.

Pennsylvania. Every applicant has to be given a chance to choose between full tort and limited tort before the policy issues (§ 1705(a)(4)). On renewals, if the named insured ignores both the first and the "second and final" notice until ten days before the renewal date, the household is conclusively presumed to have chosen full tort (§ 1705(a)(3)). And one line works against people who let insurance lapse: an owner of a registered private passenger car who has no financial responsibility is deemed to have chosen limited tort (§ 1705(a)(5)).

Pennsylvania also has the exception that matters most to someone mid-move. A limited-tort insured can recover as if they had full tort when the driver at fault "is operating a motor vehicle registered in another state" (§ 1705(d)(1)(ii)). Read that from both sides. If you have just arrived and your car still carries the old state's plates, you are the out-of-state driver that exception describes, and a Pennsylvania resident you injure can sue you without meeting the serious-injury bar. That is one more reason the registration date is the real insurance deadline.

Michigan's PIP choice and the expensive default

No other state asks you to set your own injury-coverage ceiling. For a policy issued or renewed after 1 July 2020, MCL 500.3107c(1) gives four levels:

• $50,000 per person, available only if you are enrolled in Medicaid and everyone else in the household has qualified health coverage, Medicaid, or their own Michigan PIP
• $250,000
• $500,000
• no limit

A fifth path sits in section 3107d: someone with Medicare Parts A and B can elect to carry no PIP medical coverage at all, provided the spouse and resident relatives also have qualified health coverage or their own PIP.

Now the part people miss after a move. Subsection (4) says that if you never make an effective selection, and the premium you paid does not support a presumption of some other level, the policy is treated as unlimited. Moving to Michigan with a policy from a carrier that writes there, and letting an agent "switch it over" without the selection form, can land you at the top tier. Sometimes that is exactly right. It should be a decision, though, and the form is what makes it one.

The level you pick binds the named insured, the spouse, and relatives in the household (§ 3107c(5)). If two household policies both pay, the benefit is capped at the highest single limit among them (§ 3107c(6)); stacking two $250,000 policies does not give you $500,000.

Michigan's clock for newcomers is also shorter than most. A nonresident whose car is not registered in Michigan may not operate it there for more than 30 days in a calendar year in total without maintaining Michigan security (MCL 500.3102(1)). Thirty days, counted across the year, not consecutively.

One more Michigan difference shows up in fender-benders. Even inside the no-fault system, a driver remains liable for up to $3,000 of damage to another car that insurance does not cover, for crashes after 1 July 2020 (§ 3135(3)(e)). Locals call it mini-tort, and it is usually an inexpensive add-on.

Your health plan becomes part of the car policy

Two states write your health insurance into the car-insurance decision. If you are also changing health plans because of the move, settle the health side first.

Michigan defines qualified health coverage in § 3107d(7)(b): either Medicare Parts A and B, or health coverage that does not exclude car-accident injuries and carries an annual deductible of $6,000 or less per person, adjusted each July for medical inflation. That definition decides who in the household may sit at the $50,000 level or opt out. The form also has to warn you that if the qualifying health coverage ends mid-policy, you have 30 days to add PIP, and that otherwise you are excluded from PIP medical benefits for the period without it (§ 3107d(3)(e)). An injury inside that 30-day window, before PIP is added, goes to the assigned claims plan rather than your policy (§ 3107d(6)(c)).

New Jersey offers a Health Care Primary option on the Standard Policy: your health insurer pays first for accident injuries, and the premium drops. The DOBI guide adds a warning that is easy to skip: Medicare and Medicaid cannot be used for the Health Care Primary option, and you should confirm your health plan covers auto-accident injuries before choosing it.

If your health coverage is in flux, see how the 60-day special enrollment window after a move lines up against your registration deadline. The health policy you will hold in month two, not the one you are leaving, is the one that has to qualify in Michigan.

Florida's PIP pays 80 percent and starts a 14-day clock

Florida's $10,000 is not $10,000 of medical bills. Under § 627.736(1)(a), PIP pays 80 percent of reasonable medical expenses, and only if the injured person receives initial services and care within 14 days after the accident. The full $10,000 is available only if a physician, dentist, physician assistant or advanced practice registered nurse finds an emergency medical condition; without that finding, reimbursement is limited to $2,500. Massage therapy and acupuncture are excluded outright.

So the practical rule for a new Florida resident is blunt: get seen within two weeks of any crash, even if nothing seems wrong, and make sure the record states whether there is an emergency medical condition. A newcomer from a tort state, used to waiting to see how a sore neck develops, can lose most of the benefit by waiting.

Florida also reaches cars that never get Florida plates. Under § 627.733(2), a nonresident owner whose car has been physically present in Florida for more than 90 days during the preceding 365, driven or not, must maintain Florida security continuously after that. Seasonal residents tend to discover this rule late.

When the no-fault rules start applying to you

The trigger is the car, not your mailbox. Every PIP statute above attaches to a vehicle registered or required to be registered in the state, and Florida and Michigan add a day count for cars on out-of-state plates: more than 90 days present in Florida, or more than 30 days of driving in a calendar year in Michigan. In practice the first moment it bites is the registration counter, which asks for proof of a policy that satisfies that state. A policy written for your old state almost never includes the new state's PIP, and in Michigan, New Jersey and Pennsylvania it cannot contain the selections those states require because you never made them.

That means your insurance deadline is really your registration deadline. The states differ widely on how long you get after moving; our registration deadline table for 20 states has the counts and what each one starts from. And the gap between policies, the days when your old carrier has stopped and the new one has not started, is covered in car insurance across state lines.

One sequence works in all twelve states:

1. Before the move, ask whether your current carrier writes policies in the new state. If not, get quotes there early.
2. Decide the state-specific choices in advance: Michigan PIP level, New Jersey policy type and lawsuit option, Pennsylvania tort option, Kentucky rejection or not.
3. Bind the new-state policy with a start date on or before the day you register, and cancel the old one only after that; the overlap details are in the coverage-gap guide linked above.
4. Keep the signed selection form. It is your proof of what you chose if a claim turns on it.

Leaving a no-fault state takes something away quietly

Moving the other way, from one of the twelve to a state outside the table, nobody hands you a form, because there is nothing to elect. The first-party injury benefit simply stops being mandatory. After a crash, your medical bills go to your health plan, or you wait for fault to be settled and the other driver's liability insurer to pay.

Medical payments coverage is the usual optional substitute. It is smaller and simpler than PIP and generally does not cover lost wages, so read its limits on the quote before treating it as a replacement. If your household relied on Michigan's unlimited PIP for an expensive long-term condition, that is the single biggest coverage loss in the move, and no tort-state policy recreates it.

The one piece of no-fault paperwork that follows you out is the Kentucky rejection. It stays on file with the Kentucky Department of Insurance until revoked in writing. If you rejected no-fault years ago and later move back, that old filing may still be the one that controls your right to sue and your benefits.

Before you sign anything at the new insurer, open the statute row for your destination in the table above, write your registration deadline on the calendar, and have your choice on the state's form already made when the agent slides it across.