SR-22 insurance in Texas

Texas is the state where the filing statute names no dollar amounts at all. It points at another section, and that section says 30/60/25. This sounds like a drafting footnote. It is the reason a Texas SR-22 quietly revalues itself whenever the Legislature moves the minimum, without a single certificate being reissued.

A pointer, not a number

Read the Texas financial-responsibility chapter in the order the drafter wrote it and the structure becomes obvious. One section sets the minimum amounts of motor vehicle liability coverage required to establish financial responsibility. A second section says a person may provide evidence of financial responsibility by filing a certificate from an insurer authorized to write motor vehicle liability insurance in the state. A third says that the bond or policy behind that certificate must cover the amounts required to establish financial responsibility under Section 601.072.

It never restates the figures. It cites them.

That is why a Texas SR-22 does not have a number on it in the way people imagine. The certificate attests to compliance with a section, and the section currently reads $30,000 per person / $60,000 per accident / $25,000 property damage. Change the section and every live filing in the state follows the same day.

The expired subsection, and why it still confuses people

Section 601.072 is a small monument to how statutes age. Subsection (a) is still there in the published code, and it is marked, in one word, Expired. The live amounts sit in subsection (a-1), which took effect on 1 January 2011 and reads 30/60/25.

Anyone reading the chapter quickly, or scraping it, or asking a language model about it, has a fair chance of returning the dead subsection or of blending the two. It is the same failure mode this site was built around: the text of the old rule and the text of the new rule sitting in the same section, with nothing but a single italicised word separating them.

The figure to hold onto is $30,000 for injury to or death of one person, $60,000 where two or more people are hurt in the same collision, and $25,000 for damage to other people's property. Authority: Tex. Transp. Code sec. 601.072(a-1).

Two years, and what the two years are counted from

Texas is a two-year state where California is a three-year state, and the difference is not cosmetic — it is a third of the time you spend inside a restricted insurance market.

The statutory expression is worth reading because it is not a simple countdown either. The suspension framework releases at “the second anniversary of the date of the collision”, conditional on the department being satisfied that no action for damages arising out of that collision was brought during the two-year period. Tex. Transp. Code sec. 601.162(a)(2).

Two things follow. The clock is anchored to an event, not to your paperwork. And the release is conditional: it is not merely elapsed time, it is elapsed time plus the absence of a claim. That is a structurally different promise from “file for 24 months and you are done”, and it is the reason it is worth confirming your own end date with the department rather than counting on a calendar.

What this page does not tell you about Texas interlocks

An ignition interlock order in Texas comes out of the criminal case, not out of the financial-responsibility chapter, and this site has not read the Texas interlock provisions from their primary source. So it does not describe them. There is no estimate here, no “typically”, and no borrowed table.

What can be said from the chapter that was read is the part people actually get wrong: the interlock condition and the SR-22 filing are separate obligations with separate end dates, and satisfying one does nothing for the other. If a court has ordered a device, the order says how long. If the department has required a filing, the department's notice says how long. Those two documents are not required to agree with each other, and frequently do not.

Why Texas quotes move so much for the same driver

The filing fee an insurer charges to send the certificate is small and roughly the same across carriers. Everything else about the quote is a judgment about you, and in Texas two specific things widen the spread.

The first is the pointer structure described above. Because the certificate attests to a section rather than to a number, a carrier writing at the statutory floor and a carrier writing well above it both satisfy the filing identically. There is no compliance advantage to the more expensive policy, which means the price difference you are looking at is entirely a difference in what you would actually recover. $25,000 of property damage cover is the highest of the four states this site has read in detail, and it is still less than a replacement pickup.

The second is that the population of carriers willing to file is not the population advertising on television. A driver who has just been told to file is, from an underwriting desk, a driver with a documented event. Some carriers price that; some decline it. The reason this search exists at all is that working out which is which, one quote at a time, is slow.

Common questions about the Texas SR-22