Which is why meeting it keeps your authority and still will not get you booked.
$750,000 for general freight, $5,000,000 for the hazardous materials categories that require it. Both are per-incident floors set under the Motor Carrier Act of 1980, and the general freight figure has never been raised.
The short version. The federal minimum is a licensing threshold. It is the amount you must show FMCSA to hold operating authority, filed on a BMC-91 or BMC-91X by your insurer. It is not an estimate of what an incident costs and it was never intended as one.
That is why carriers routinely carry more: not because the rule changed, but because the people tendering the freight ask for more before they will hand it over.
| Operation | Minimum, per incident | Set |
|---|---|---|
| For-hire, interstate, general freight | $750,000 | Motor Carrier Act of 1980, never raised |
| Hazardous materials requiring the higher level | $5,000,000 | Same statute, higher category |
Read the current text at the eCFR, 49 CFR Part 387. Intrastate operations, passenger carriage and some commodity categories carry different figures; this page covers the interstate property-carrier case.
A carrier that meets the federal minimum exactly is fully compliant and may still be unbookable, because a broker or shipper sets its own conditions and is protecting its own exposure rather than checking yours. Meeting the floor keeps your authority. It does not make anyone tender you a load.
We are deliberately not printing a typical broker requirement here. Those figures vary by broker, commodity and lane, and we have not surveyed them; publishing a number we have not verified is the failure this site keeps finding in other people's comparison pages. What we can tell you is where to look: the requirement is in the broker-carrier agreement you sign, before you haul, not after.
Your insurer files proof of coverage with FMCSA. If that filing lapses, authority is revoked, and this is the most common cause of an involuntary revocation. The federal revocation register holds 1,529,083 revocation orders across carriers, brokers and freight forwarders, of which the broker slice alone is 110,130.
The number is large because the cause is mundane. That cuts both ways, and it is worth holding both halves at once: a revocation on a record is rarely evidence of anything dramatic, and a revocation on your record still stops you working until it is cured. It is also why an authority revocation and an insolvency are not interchangeable, which matters when you read what a non-recourse factoring agreement actually covers.
We mail when a device leaves the FMCSA ELD registry, with the company and the date.
Get the alertIf you insure motor carriers and want your programme described accurately here, tell us what you actually publish.
Claim or correct your entryMinimum levels are as stated in 49 CFR Part 387, checked 2026-08-31. Revocation totals come from the FMCSA FMCSA, Revocation - All With History dataset, source last updated 2026-08-30, retrieved 2026-08-31.
This is not insurance advice and not a comparison of insurers. It describes a federal requirement and a public record. We have not rated, tested or been paid by any insurer, and no coverage decision should be made from this page alone.
FreightProbe. "The Federal Insurance Minimum Has Not Moved Since 1980." Requirements per 49 CFR 387 checked 2026-08-31; revocation totals from FMCSA, retrieved 2026-08-31. https://freightprobe.com/insurance
Quote the retrieval date with any figure. Vendor pricing changes without notice and we re-read it rather than carrying it forward.