What to Do If Your Uber Gets in an Accident in Texas

If your Uber gets in an accident in Texas, the most important fact is what the driver was doing at that moment. Texas law puts a different insurance policy behind the ride depending on whether the driver was carrying a passenger, waiting for a request, or off the app entirely — and the gap between them is $1 million.

The first thing to establish is not whose fault it was

In an ordinary wreck, the first question is who caused it. In a rideshare wreck there is a question that comes before that one, and most people never think to ask it at the scene.

What was the driver doing when it happened?

Texas treats a rideshare driver as being in one of three states, and a different pot of money sits behind each one. App off and driving for themselves: their personal policy, nothing more. App on and waiting for a ping: a modest state-mandated minimum. Ride accepted, or passenger aboard: a million dollars.

That is not a detail for the lawyers to sort out later. It decides whether a serious injury has coverage behind it or runs out of money in the first week of treatment. And the people who know the answer — the driver, and the company — are not the people whose interests line up with yours. If you were hurt and are weighing what to do next, my page on Houston rideshare accident claims covers how one of these cases gets built.

Texas anticipated this. Under Section 1954.056(b) of the Insurance Code, a rideshare driver has to carry proof of the required insurance, and after a collision has to disclose, on request, whether they were logged on to the app or engaged in a prearranged ride. That disclosure is owed to the investigating officer, to the insurers, and to any directly interested person — which includes you.

So ask. At the scene, politely and plainly: were you logged in, and did you have a ride accepted? Then get it into the crash report, because a line in the officer’s narrative is much harder to walk back three months later than your memory of a conversation.

What the insurance actually covers in Texas

Texas sets rideshare insurance minimums in Chapter 1954 of the Insurance Code. There are two tiers, and the difference between them is the whole ballgame.

Both of the app-on tiers also carry uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage and personal injury protection where Texas law requires them. Whether either one reaches your particular claim is one of the first things worth checking, and it is frequently overlooked.

Compare the middle row to the ordinary Texas minimum of 30/60/25 and you can see the legislature was not generous with the waiting period. Fifty thousand dollars sounds like a lot until you have had spine surgery.

Does Uber pay if you get in an accident?

Usually yes, when the app was on — but “Uber pays” is a loose way of putting it, and the loose version is what gets people into trouble.

What the statute actually requires is that a policy meeting those limits exists, maintained either by the driver, by the company on the driver’s behalf, or by some combination of the two. The company is not writing checks out of goodwill. There is a commercial insurer behind that trip, and it defends claims the way commercial insurers defend claims.

Two provisions are worth knowing about, because they close doors that adjusters sometimes pretend are open.

You do not have to get denied first. Under Section 1954.055, the rideshare company’s coverage is not contingent on the driver’s personal insurer denying the claim first. If somebody tells you to run the claim through the driver’s own policy and come back when it bounces, that is not what Texas law requires.

A lapsed driver policy is not your problem. Under Section 1954.054, if the driver’s own policy has lapsed or does not provide what the chapter requires, the rideshare company has to provide that coverage beginning with the first dollar of the claim.

And in the other direction, a trap. Section 1954.151 expressly allows a personal auto insurer to exclude any loss that happens while the driver is logged on or on a ride — liability, uninsured motorist, medical payments, collision, all of it. Many drivers do not know this. They assume their own policy has them covered, discover otherwise after the wreck, and the claim everyone was relying on turns out never to have existed.

The moment that decides which policy applies

This is the part I would underline if I could keep only one paragraph of this article.

Texas defines a “prearranged ride” in Section 1954.001(3) as beginning at the time the driver accepts the request — not when the car arrives, and not when the passenger gets in. It ends when the last rider leaves the vehicle.

So the million-dollar policy is live while the driver is still three miles away, crossing town to come and get you. If a driver accepts your ride and runs a light on the way to the pickup, the person they hit is dealing with a $1 million policy, not a $50,000 one.

That timestamp lives in the company’s own records, and those records are not yours. They are one of the reasons it is worth putting a preservation request in front of the company early, rather than hoping the data is still there when somebody finally asks for it.

If an Uber driver hit you and you were not the passenger

Everything above applies to you too, and most people in this position never find out.

You are in your own car at an intersection. The other driver runs the light. You exchange information, you see a personal auto policy with state-minimum limits, and you assume that is the ceiling on your claim. Nobody mentions that the car had a rideshare app running and a passenger in the back.

The tell is often visible at the scene: a phone in a dash mount with a navigation route up, a company sticker in the windshield, a passenger in the back seat who is plainly not family. If anything about the car suggests a rideshare, ask the question in the first section and make sure the answer reaches the crash report.

Driverless cars are covered the same way now

This one is new enough that most articles on the subject have not caught up.

Effective September 1, 2025, Texas added Section 1954.003 to the Insurance Code: an automated motor vehicle is treated as a rideshare driver for insurance purposes, and the coverage requirements of the chapter apply to it. The legislature made a matching change in Section 2402.005 of the Occupations Code, bringing autonomous vehicles inside the rideshare permitting framework.

In plain terms: if you are hurt in or by a driverless vehicle dispatched through one of these apps, the same $1 million requirement applies to that trip. There is no coverage gap simply because nobody was behind the wheel.

Why Texas does not treat Uber like a taxi

In a lot of states, a company that carries passengers for hire is a common carrier, and a common carrier owes its passengers a heightened duty of care. It is an old doctrine, and it favors injured passengers.

Texas took it off the table. Section 2402.002 of the Occupations Code states that rideshare companies, and drivers logged in to their networks, are not common carriers, contract carriers or motor carriers.

So the claim is built on ordinary negligence, the same as any other collision, and it is proved the same way: the police investigation, the physical evidence, the data the company holds, and a medical record that actually documents what happened to you. That makes the evidence matter more, not less.

What costs people money in these claims

Treating it as a normal fender bender. The information you need — the driver’s status, the trip ID, the timestamps — lives inside a company’s systems, and nobody hands it over because you asked nicely six months later.

Giving a recorded statement early. There may be three insurers involved here instead of one, and each has its own reason to ask you questions. What a recorded statement is actually for does not change because the car had an app in it.

Assuming the app-on minimum is the ceiling. It is a minimum, not a limit, and it is not the only policy that may apply. Your own underinsured motorist coverage can sit behind a rideshare crash exactly as it would behind any other.

Waiting. Texas gives you two years from the date of the crash to file suit under Section 16.003 of the Civil Practice and Remedies Code. The electronic records that prove which policy applies have a much shorter practical shelf life than that.

If you are still in treatment and the bills are arriving, who pays your medical bills in the meantime works the same way in a rideshare case as any other.

Questions people actually ask

This article is general information about how Texas rideshare insurance law works. It is not legal advice about your situation, it does not predict any particular result, and reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Statutes change and every case turns on its own facts.