Uber wants states to rewrite how much commercial auto insurance it has to carry, and it's making the case in unusually blunt terms. In a policy paper published this month, titled "Fair coverage, fair fares," the company argues that coverage minimums for ride-hailing trips have drifted so far past what taxis, limos and personal cars must carry that they're now inflating fares and drawing lawsuits from attorneys chasing the biggest available payout.
The paper lands in the middle of a live fight. Several states have already rewritten their rules for transportation network companies (TNCs) this year, and Uber has spent the past two years filing racketeering suits against personal injury firms it blames for exploiting those same rules with mixed results in court so far.
Commercial auto insurance requirements for TNCs are set state by state, and Uber says the gaps between them, and between rideshare vehicles and everything else on the road, have gotten out of hand.
Its lead example is New Jersey, where a rideshare trip must carry $1.5 million in uninsured/underinsured motorist (UM/UIM) coverage which is 30 times what's required of an ordinary personal auto policy in the state. New Jersey's Transportation Network Company Safety and Regulatory Act has required at least $1.5 million in UM/UIM coverage for prearranged rides since the law took effect.
New York gets similar treatment in the paper: a $1.25 million UM/UIM requirement that Uber says is 25 times the state's personal-auto minimum, though a footnote concedes it only applies while a passenger is actually in the car.
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Stack those limits on top of an industry already grappling with nuclear verdicts, Uber argues, and rideshare vehicles become an easy target for plaintiff attorneys especially on UM/UIM claims, which pay out when a third-party driver, not the Uber driver, caused the crash.In June 2026, it says, mandated insurance ate up roughly 33% of every fare in upstate New York, 31% in New Jersey, 23% in Louisiana, 20% in Michigan, 16% in Texas and 13% in Colorado.
Uber credits eight states (Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, New York, Virginia and Washington) with recent reforms that either cut UM/UIM requirements directly or crack down on the litigation practices it says drive costs up.
California is the headline case. Governor Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 371 on October 3, 2025, cutting the state's TNC UM/UIM requirement from $1 million per incident to $60,000 per person and $300,000 per accident, which is close to a 94% cut in the per-person limit. Uber says the payoff is already visible in Los Angeles, where it says insurance had been eating up nearly 45% of a typical fare.
Not everyone reads the bill the same way. Plaintiff attorneys and consumer advocates argue the cut leaves injured riders with far less protection if they're hit by an uninsured driver, and lawmakers hedged their own bet by writing a review of the new limits' real-world impact into the law, due by 2030.
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Florida gets cited too, and but it’s worth looking more closely at that claim. The paper points to $1 billion in refunds reaching Florida drivers as proof that the state's 2022–2023 tort reforms which curbed one-way attorney fees and tightened bad-faith litigation rules are paying off.
Most of that $1 billion is actually one carrier: Progressive announced in October 2025 it would return roughly $950 million to Florida policyholders after its personal auto results beat the profit threshold set under state law - a statutory trigger tied to falling litigation costs, not a sector-wide refund mandate. USAA and a handful of other carriers have since announced smaller dividends and rate cuts of their own.
Uber's paper also leans hard on "legal system abuse" which is plaintiff-attorney marketing, questionable medical billing, third-party litigation funding as the real cost driver in states like Texas and Louisiana. It cites the American Tort Reform Association's estimate that legal abuse costs the average Louisiana resident more than $965 a year.
Other tort-reform-aligned tallies for the state, published in different years, have landed anywhere from roughly $1,000 to over $1,100, so the exact number moves depending on when and how it's calculated.
Uber has backed the argument with litigation of its own. Since 2024, it has filed civil RICO suits against personal injury firms, doctors and clinics in New York, Los Angeles and South Florida, accusing them of steering crash victims toward unnecessary treatment to inflate settlements. Their results have been mixed: a Brooklyn federal judge threw out one of the suits in August, finding Uber hadn't plausibly alleged a criminal conspiracy, while a similar case in Pennsylvania survived a motion to dismiss.
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The law firms Uber has sued point out Uber settled many of the underlying claims before ever filing suit, and argue the RICO campaign is less about individual fraud and more about building political cover for lower statutory insurance minimums, several of the suits landed in states fighting the same UM/UIM battles Uber is lobbying on.
Two separate arguments are getting bundled together here. One is a rate question: whether TNC coverage minimums set a decade ago, when ridesharing was an unproven risk, still match the loss experience platforms have actually racked up since.
The other is bigger than Uber. Social inflation and litigation funding are already reshaping commercial auto and excess casualty pricing well beyond rideshare, with commercial auto liability posting underwriting losses in the US for 14 straight years despite repeated rate hikes.
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That's why the outcome in each statehouse matters to more than Uber's balance sheet. TNC-specific UM/UIM figures tend to become reference points in broader personal and commercial auto debates, and Uber isn't alone in the litigation-funding fight. Progressive, GEICO and Allstate have all filed their own fraud suits against plaintiff firms in recent years.
