18-wheeler insurance in Texas: the legal floor and the real risk

By law, auto liability filed with the agency that granted your authority. Everything else on a typical tractor-trailer program is required by someone else: the broker who tenders the load, the bank that financed the truck, the owner of the trailer, or the carrier you lease to.

Cargo deserves a second look. Federal and Texas rules require cargo coverage only of household goods movers; for everyone else the limit is a contract term, so read our guide to what motor truck cargo insurance covers and excludes before you sign a broker agreement.

Employee coverage has its own Texas rules, which our guide to workers' comp for Texas truck drivers covers. For a full menu of coverages and how they fit together, see types of commercial truck insurance coverage.

Your insurer files it, and you carry it. TxDMV won't grant intrastate authority until it receives the filing electronically from your insurer, and buying the policy alone doesn't count.

• Form E: proof of liability insurance, filed by the insurer with TxDMV. Only your insurance company can file it or cancel it.
• Forms H and I: proof of cargo insurance, for household goods movers.
• Form K: the insurer's notice that liability coverage is being canceled.
• Insurance cab card: a current copy, paper or electronic, in every truck at all times. Transportation Code 643.103(b) puts that duty on the carrier.

TxDMV emails you when a filing posts and warns you when one is removed, so the address on your application should be one you read. Anyone, including a broker, can check your filings on the state's public lookup.

The federal side

For interstate authority, your insurer files proof with FMCSA within 20 days of your application's publication in the FMCSA Register, or the application heads toward dismissal. The policy also carries the MCS-90 endorsement, kept with your proof of coverage at your principal place of business under 49 CFR 387.7, where the public may ask to see it.

The MCS-90 is not extra coverage for you. As IRMI explains, when a claim would not be covered except for the endorsement, the insurer pays the injured party and then has the right to seek reimbursement from you.

Because the minimum is what the state requires you to carry, not what a serious crash costs. A judgment above your limit is your company's to pay, and Texas has its own rules for how truck crash lawsuits are tried.

Since September 1, 2021, Subchapter B of Civil Practice and Remedies Code chapter 72, enacted as House Bill 19, governs suits for injury or death caused by a commercial motor vehicle. Three parts of it matter to a carrier's risk:

• A split trial. On the defendant's motion, generally filed within 120 days after its original answer, the court must try compensatory damages first and exemplary damages second.
• Violations must be causal. In the first phase, evidence that you broke a regulation comes in only if it tends to prove the violation helped cause the injury.
• Photos speak for themselves. A properly authenticated photo or video of the vehicles is presumed admissible, with no expert needed.

Your driver file is part of your defense

If you stipulate that the driver was your employee acting within the scope of the job, your liability for the driver's ordinary negligence rests on that relationship, and in a split trial the claimant's first-phase case for negligent entrustment is limited to a list in section 72.054(c). Read it and it looks like an audit checklist: was the driver licensed and not disqualified, medically certified, road-tested, within hours of service, including Texas's intrastate limits, off the handheld phone, and not under an out-of-service order? Did you have the employment application and the prior-employer inquiries in the first year, and the drug and alcohol testing?

Those are the records in a driver qualification file and your hours-of-service logs; for Texas-only drivers, our guide to Texas intrastate hours of service covers the state limits the statute names. Keep them complete and your policy and your paperwork defend you together.