Car accident claims and truck accident claims look similar on paper. They are not.
The difference comes down to insurance. Federal law requires commercial trucking companies to carry far more liability coverage than any passenger vehicle driver does.
We look at this question first in nearly every truck crash case we handle. Knowing the minimums, and how they actually work once a claim is filed, tells you what compensation might realistically be on the table.
This article covers general legal information about Illinois and federal law. If you are dealing with a specific case, talk to a licensed Illinois attorney about your situation.
Federal Minimum Insurance Requirements Under 49 CFR 387.9
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, the FMCSA, sets the minimum insurance a commercial motor carrier has to carry. The rule lives in 49 CFR Section 387.9, and it traces back to the Motor Carrier Act of 1980.
The number is not one flat figure. It changes based on what the truck is hauling:
- $750,000 for general freight carriers, the most common type of commercial truck
- $1,000,000 for carriers transporting oil by truck
- $5,000,000 for carriers hauling the highest-hazard materials, explosives, poison-inhalation-hazard cargo, and certain radioactive shipments
- $300,000 for smaller non-hazardous cargo trucks under 10,001 pounds gross vehicle weight
Treat these numbers as a floor, not a ceiling. Plenty of large carriers, especially ones hauling high-value freight or working under shipper contracts, carry policies well above the minimum. It is common to see $1,000,000 or more in coverage even for standard general freight.
Here is the part that matters for your claim: the federal minimum is not a cap. It just guarantees a baseline. If the carrier that hit you carries a bigger policy, that is what is available to you.
Illinois Intrastate Requirements: 625 ILCS 5/18c
Not every truck on Illinois roads is governed by federal rules. A truck that never leaves the state, one that runs a route entirely within Illinois, falls under state law instead: the Illinois Commercial Transportation Law, 625 ILCS 5/18c.
For the most part, Illinois mirrors the federal FMCSA minimums for these intrastate carriers. The Illinois Commerce Commission can also layer on additional requirements for carriers operating under its authority. If the truck is big enough to require a commercial driver’s license and it is running commercial loads inside Illinois, this law applies.
In practice, most of the freight moving through Chicago crosses state lines. A truck coming in from Indiana or Wisconsin, which describes a large share of the trucks on our interstates, falls under the federal FMCSA rules in 49 CFR Part 387 instead.
The MCS-90 Endorsement: A Critical Victim Protection Mechanism
There is a piece of this most people never hear about until they need it: the MCS-90 endorsement.
Federal law requires every motor carrier covered by 49 CFR Part 387 to attach an MCS-90 endorsement to its primary liability policy. It is not a separate insurance policy. It is a mandatory add-on that changes how the existing policy behaves in one specific, important way.
Here is what it actually does. The insurer agrees to pay a judgment against the carrier up to the federal minimum, even if something in the carrier’s own policy would normally let the insurer walk away.
Say the driver was using the truck for a trip the policy did not cover, or the carrier never disclosed the route it was actually running. Normally, that kind of exclusion is exactly what an insurance company uses to deny a claim. The MCS-90 takes that option off the table when a third party, the injured victim, is the one asking to get paid.
This is not a favor to the carrier. It exists so a crash victim never loses a case simply because the trucking company broke a rule buried in its own policy.
Understanding liability in truck accidents means accounting for every layer of coverage: the carrier’s primary policy, any MCS-90 obligations sitting on top of it, umbrella or excess policies, and the insurance carried by anyone else who might share the blame, like a freight broker or the company that loaded the cargo.
How Umbrella and Excess Policies Actually Get Triggered
An umbrella or excess policy is not a second pool of money you can tap into any time. It sits above the primary policy and only activates once the primary limit is exhausted.
Say a carrier’s primary policy covers $750,000 and it also holds a $2,000,000 excess policy. If your damages come to $900,000, the primary insurer pays its full $750,000 first. The excess carrier then covers the remaining $150,000. It does not pay a dollar before the primary layer is used up.
This stacking order matters for timing. Excess insurers often will not seriously engage in settlement talks until the primary insurer has confirmed how much of its own limit is actually going toward your claim. A case that looks straightforward on paper can take longer than expected simply because two insurers are waiting on each other to move first.
A Multi-Layered Claim in Practice
The following is a hypothetical example to illustrate how these coverage layers can work together. It does not describe an actual case or client.
A fully loaded semi carrying general freight rear-ends a stopped vehicle on I-90, causing a spinal cord injury with a lifetime of medical care ahead. The carrier’s primary policy is the federal minimum, $750,000. That alone will not come close to covering future medical costs, lost earning capacity, and pain and suffering in a case like this.
The investigation turns up three more layers: the carrier also holds a $2,000,000 excess policy, the freight broker who arranged the load carries its own liability coverage because it failed to vet the carrier’s safety record, and the shipping company that overloaded the trailer beyond its rated capacity has coverage of its own. Four separate insurers, four separate negotiations, and a total available coverage picture that looks nothing like the $750,000 minimum the carrier started with.
Why Truck Accident Claims Are Fundamentally Different from Car Accident Claims
Start with the baseline. Illinois requires drivers to carry at least $25,000 per person and $50,000 per occurrence in bodily injury liability coverage, under 625 ILCS 5/7-203. A single serious injury can burn through that entire policy in one hospital stay.
Trucking insurance is not that same coverage scaled up to a bigger vehicle. It is a fundamentally different category of coverage entirely, built around a fundamentally different scale of potential harm.
A $750,000 federal minimum is thirty times that car insurance floor. A $5,000,000 hazmat policy is two hundred times it.
Sit with that gap for a second. It is not a rounding difference. It is the difference between a policy sized for an ER visit and a policy sized for a wrongful death claim.
That gap exists for a reason. Truck crashes tend to produce the kind of injuries that do not have a ceiling: traumatic brain injuries, spinal cord damage, amputations, wrongful death. The economic losses in cases like these routinely blow past what any car insurance policy was ever built to handle.
Congress set the higher federal minimums because a fully loaded commercial truck does more damage than a passenger car. That is also why we tell clients a truck accident claim deserves a real investigation. When the coverage behind a crash can run into the millions, it is worth finding out exactly what is there.
What Happens When the Carrier Is Underinsured or Uninsured?
Carrier insolvency is not the same as a lapsed policy. If a carrier files for bankruptcy after your crash, its liability insurer typically still has to respond to a covered claim, since insurance proceeds are usually treated separately from the carrier’s other assets in a bankruptcy proceeding. That is a different legal question than the coverage minimums discussed here, and it is worth reading in more detail if the carrier involved has since gone out of business.
Federal requirements do not guarantee compliance. Smaller or newer carriers sometimes let a policy lapse, and it is not always caught right away.
When that happens, the MCS-90 endorsement is the first line of defense. It obligates the insurer to pay victims even if the carrier failed to keep continuous coverage in place.
If there is truly no insurance behind the carrier, the case does not necessarily end there. You may have claims against the freight broker who hired the carrier, the shipper who arranged the load, or the company that owned the cargo. Your own uninsured motorist coverage under Illinois law may also come into play, depending on the facts.
Why Carriers Do Not Volunteer Their Policy Limits
There is a practical reason trucking companies and their insurers are slow to confirm coverage amounts: once you know the real number, your settlement expectations change.
An adjuster who has not confirmed policy limits can negotiate as if $750,000 is the ceiling, even on a carrier holding $3,000,000 in combined coverage. Getting the actual declarations page, and confirming every excess or umbrella policy behind it, is not a formality. It is often the single step that changes what a fair settlement number even looks like.
How Long You Have to Pursue These Insurance Layers
Finding every applicable policy does not matter if you wait too long to act. Illinois’ general personal injury statute of limitations, 735 ILCS 5/13-202, gives you two years from the date of the crash to file a lawsuit. That deadline applies regardless of how many insurance layers are involved, and identifying an excess policy after the fact does not extend it.
There is a shorter deadline in one specific situation: if a local government entity is a defendant, a garbage truck owned by a municipality, for example, the Illinois Tort Immunity Act requires written notice within one year under 745 ILCS 10/8-101, well before the two-year filing deadline even arrives.
Multi-defendant, multi-insurer cases take real time to investigate properly. That is exactly why starting early matters. Waiting until close to a deadline to even begin identifying which policies apply can leave real coverage on the table simply because there was no time left to find it, and courts generally will not extend a filing deadline just because an investigation into additional insurers is still ongoing.
How These Policies Actually Get Identified
Knowing that multiple layers of coverage might exist is one thing. Finding them is another.
Before a lawsuit is filed, an attorney can send a preservation and information letter to the carrier and its known insurer, requesting confirmation of the policy in place at the time of the crash. Carriers are not always cooperative at this stage, and a letter alone does not guarantee a response.
Once a lawsuit is filed, formal discovery changes the picture. A request for production can compel the carrier to turn over its declarations page, which lists every policy, primary and excess, along with the named insurer for each. Interrogatories can ask directly whether any additional party, a broker, a shipper, an equipment lessor, carries coverage that might apply to the same crash.
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration also maintains public safety and registration data on interstate carriers, including basic authority and insurance filing status, through its SAFER system. That public data will not tell you the exact policy limit, but it confirms whether a carrier’s federally required filing is current, which matters if a lapse is suspected.
Depositions can go further still. A carrier’s safety director or claims representative can be questioned under oath about every policy that was active on the date of the crash, including any layered or excess coverage the company may not have disclosed voluntarily.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does the trucking company have to tell me its policy limits?
Not automatically. Illinois does not require a carrier to volunteer this information before a lawsuit is filed. Once litigation begins, policy information becomes discoverable, but getting there earlier usually requires a formal request or an attorney who knows how to press for it.
What if the trucking company is based in another state?
Federal minimum requirements under 49 CFR 387.9 apply to any carrier operating in interstate commerce, regardless of where it is headquartered. An out-of-state carrier does not get to carry less coverage just because the crash happened in Illinois.
You can read more about how an out-of-state carrier can move your case into federal court, which is a separate issue from insurance but often comes up in the same cases.
Does my own health insurance factor into this at all?
Your health insurance pays your medical bills as they come in, but it is not a substitute for the trucking company’s liability coverage. Depending on your policy, your health insurer may also have a right to reimbursement from any settlement, separate from the liability-coverage question addressed here.
Can willful misconduct by the carrier lead to more than the policy limit?
Punitive damages are a separate legal remedy from liability insurance, and Illinois law allows them in certain trucking cases involving willful and wanton conduct, such as falsifying logbooks or knowingly dispatching a driver in violation of hours-of-service rules. That is a distinct topic from the coverage minimums described here; see our page on punitive damages against trucking companies for how that works.
What if there are multiple insurers and they disagree about who pays first?
This happens more than people expect, especially between a primary carrier and an excess insurer, or between a motor carrier and a freight broker who each carry separate policies. Sorting out payment priority between insurers is exactly the kind of dispute that benefits from experienced legal representation rather than direct negotiation.
How soon should I have a lawyer start looking into the carrier’s insurance?
As early as possible. Some of the same records used to preserve evidence, like dispatch records and driver logs, can also reveal which insurer and broker were involved, and that information gets harder to obtain the longer you wait.
Do I need to know the exact policy limit before I can settle my case?
No, but it changes how a settlement gets evaluated. Settling before confirming every applicable policy risks accepting far less than a case is actually worth, particularly when an excess or umbrella policy has not yet been identified.
Talk to a Chicago Truck Accident Lawyer for a Free Consultation
Identifying all available insurance coverage after a truck crash requires pulling policy declarations, reviewing MCS-90 endorsements, investigating whether the carrier had umbrella or excess coverage, and examining whether any other parties contributed to the crash and carry their own insurance. These are tasks that require access to information carriers and insurers do not volunteer.
Phillips Law Offices represents truck accident victims throughout the Chicago area. Our attorneys understand the federal insurance requirements that apply to commercial carriers and how to pursue every available source of coverage. Call (312) 346-4262 or visit our free consultation page to discuss your case at no cost.
This article has been prepared for general informational purposes and is subject to attorney review. It does not constitute legal advice and does not create an attorney-client relationship.
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