Virginia Personal Lines Study Guide

Two pieces of Virginia personal-lines law moved in the last two years, and a great deal of study material has not moved with them. One is a number that changed. The other is a whole concept that was abolished. Both are exactly what an item writer reaches for when they want to separate a current candidate from one working out of a used textbook, so we are going to start there and then build the rest of the chapter around the doctrine that makes all of it matter.

The auto minimums are 50/100/25 — and 30/60/20 is not simply wrong

Va. Code § 46.2-472 now sets Virginia’s minimum motor vehicle liability limits at $50,000 per person, $100,000 per accident, and $25,000 for property damage — 50/100/25 — for policies effective on or after January 1, 2025.

The old schedule was 30/60/20, and it governed policies effective from January 1, 2022 through December 31, 2024. So the honest position is not that 30/60/20 is wrong; it is that 30/60/20 is the right answer for a policy written before 2025. A well-built question gives you an effective date, and a candidate who has memorised only one schedule cannot use it.

There is no longer any alternative to buying coverage

This is the most dangerous stale fact in Virginia personal-lines material, because what changed is not a figure but an option.

For decades Virginia genuinely allowed a vehicle owner to pay an uninsured motor vehicle fee to the DMV and register the car without liability insurance. It bought no coverage — the owner remained personally liable for everything — but it was a lawful way to comply with the financial responsibility law, and plenty of material still presents it as one of two routes.

It was eliminated effective July 1, 2024. Every vehicle registered in Virginia must now carry a policy meeting the state minimums, or a certificate of self-insurance. What survives of the old fee is a $600 noncompliance fee — the same money, pointing the other way. Operating an uninsured vehicle is a Class 3 misdemeanour under § 46.2-707, and the driver’s licence, registration certificates and plates stay suspended until that $600 is paid and proof of future financial responsibility is filed. The same $600 and filing requirement attach under § 46.2-706(B) where a vehicle owner fails to verify insurance when the DMV asks.

Uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage is compulsory, and it is an add-on

Virginia departs from the national script twice here, and both departures point the same direction: toward more coverage than you expect.

First, the endorsement cannot be eliminated. Under § 38.2-2206, no auto liability policy may be issued or delivered in Virginia without a UM/UIM endorsement, and its limits default to the policy’s liability limits. National material teaches that UM must merely be offered and may be rejected in writing; in Virginia there is no rejecting it.

What a named insured can do is reduce it, and this is where the precise boundary earns marks. Section 38.2-2202(B) prescribes the notice an insurer must give, in capitals, and it says a named insured “has the right to reduce the limits of the uninsured/underinsured motorist coverage to less than the liability limits on the policy but no lower than the financial responsibility limits required by § 46.2-472.” So an insured carrying 250/500 of liability may take UM down to 50/100/25 — the state minimum — and no further. One named insured’s election binds the policy. Both “UM can be rejected outright” and “UM must always equal the liability limits” are wrong, and the second is the more plausible-sounding trap.

Second, and more recently, UIM is an add-on rather than an offset. The classic teaching is that underinsured coverage “fills the gap” — you subtract the at-fault driver’s liability limits from your own and collect the difference. Since the 2024 amendment to § 38.2-2206, effective July 1, 2024, the underinsured coverage applies with no credit for the liability coverage available from the at-fault driver, unless a named insured signs an election to reduce it. The at-fault driver’s policy buys your insurer nothing.

Contributory negligence — the lens, not just a rule

Virginia is one of a small handful of surviving pure contributory negligence jurisdictions. A claimant who is even 1% at fault recovers nothing — from anyone, however badly the other driver behaved.

There is no threshold to compare against. States with modified comparative negligence bar recovery at 50% or 51%, which invites a question about which side of the line a claimant falls on. Virginia does not apportion at all, so there is no line. And unlike almost everything else in this chapter, contributory negligence is common-law doctrine rather than statute — you will not find it in Title 38.2.

Hold it next to the previous section and the two facts explain each other. A state where a slightly careless claimant recovers nothing from the other driver is a state where your own uninsured and underinsured coverage is doing far more work than it does elsewhere. That is not a coincidence, and it is why Virginia made the coverage compulsory.

Cancellation and nonrenewal — two lines, two sets of numbers

The commonest error here is treating “the initial window” as one rule. Virginia runs two, and they belong to different lines.

Owner-occupied dwelling and fire policies get 90 days (§ 38.2-2114(E)(1)). Private passenger auto gets 60 days (§ 38.2-2212(F)(3)). In each case the cancellation restrictions simply do not apply while the policy has been in force for less than that period — unless it is a renewal policy, in which case they apply from the start.

Past the window, the rules diverge again:

| Rule | Property (owner-occupied) | Private passenger auto | | Permitted grounds | Six enumerated grounds, exhaustive | License or registration suspended or revoked, nonpayment, or the named insured moves out of Virginia | | Notice, nonpayment | At least 10 days | Less than 45 but at least 15 days | | Notice, other grounds | 30 days | At least 45 days | | Nonrenewal notice | 30 days | 45 days |

The property grounds are worth knowing as a list because the statute makes it exhaustive: nonpayment; conviction of a crime increasing the peril; fraud or material misrepresentation; willful or reckless acts increasing the peril; physical changes rendering the property uninsurable; and foreclosure sale under a recorded deed of trust. The two inspection-based grounds require an actual physical inspection — an underwriter’s hunch will not do.

On the auto side, the prohibited bases for nonrenewal run long: age, sex, residence, race, colour, creed, national origin, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, occupation, driving experience, accidents or violations more than 48 months old, certain uninsured-motorist claims, not-at-fault medical expense claims, and comprehensive or towing claims. Forty-eight months is the number to keep.

The Commissioner review right, which almost no other state has

Section 38.2-2212 gives an auto insured who receives a cancellation or nonrenewal notice the right to request in writing, within 15 days, that the Commissioner review the insurer’s action — and here is the part that makes it real: the policy remains in full force and effect during that review. The one exception is cancellation for nonpayment of premium, where the coverage does not survive.

It is a genuinely distinctive consumer protection, and it is the kind of provision an exam reaches for precisely because a candidate studying nationally has never met anything like it.