Motor carrier classes by state
Louisiana does something no other state in this census does. It does not merely set its own weight line for intrastate carriage; it reaches inside the adopted federal text and substitutes one number for another throughout. And the number that actually binds a hot shot first is neither the safety figure nor the substituted one — it is a 24,000 pound rating in a financial-responsibility statute that says “acquire” rather than “file.”
The parts of light-combination hauling that are identical everywhere — the tight window, the securement duty on mixed freight, the mismatch between a cargo limit written for an average load and the load that produces the claim — belong to the class and sit on the hot shot trucking insurance page rather than being repeated here.
Louisiana contributes three distinct weight lines and a mechanism. The safety rule extends federal regulation to intrastate carriage above 26,000 pounds. A separate statute requires continuous liability coverage at 24,000 pounds of rating. And Louisiana’s ordinary compulsory motor vehicle minimum sits underneath both. Which of the three governs an operation depends on a single unresolved word in the middle statute.
The mechanism is the more interesting half. La. Admin. Code tit. 33, § V-10305(C)(1) instructs the reader to substitute one weight figure for another “for all references” inside the adopted federal regulations, for the intrastate cohort. That is a rewrite rule, not a threshold. It changes what the borrowed text says rather than deciding whether it applies.
There is a fourth thing, and for a general-freight operator it removes a whole layer of the usual apparatus. Louisiana deregulated intrastate general property in 1995, and it did so by narrowing a definition rather than by adding an exemption — which means there is no exemption list to search, because general freight simply never enters the chapter.
Running a gooseneck for hire inside Louisiana and looking for the weight that starts the obligations? There are three of them, in three different bodies of law, and the lowest one turns on whether a combination counts as “a vehicle.”
Send the gross vehicle weight rating of the power unit on its own, and the combination rating separately. In Louisiana that distinction is the whole question rather than a detail.
The first obligation to attach to a Louisiana hot shot is a financial-responsibility obligation, and it is set in the hazardous materials and motor carrier safety chapter of Title 32 rather than in any safety rule.
La. R.S. 32:1503(C), verbatim: “Each carrier, other than a rail carrier, which transports hazardous materials or hazardous waste in any vehicle, and each carrier, other than a rail carrier, which transports freight in a vehicle with a gross vehicle weight rating of twenty-four thousand pounds or more shall acquire a minimum continuous coverage of three hundred thousand dollars public liability and two hundred thousand dollars property damage insurance for each unit regulated by this Chapter.”
Three hundred thousand and two hundred thousand, split rather than combined, per unit. The class it binds is broad: “carrier” is defined in the chapter’s definitions section to include a common, contract or private carrier, and “freight” is defined as anything that is loaded for transportation. Almost anything on a hot shot deck is freight on that definition, and almost any operator moving it is a carrier.
The trigger, though, is drawn narrowly and this is the largest open question in this state. The subsection says “a vehicle with a gross vehicle weight rating of twenty-four thousand pounds or more.” It says rating rather than actual weight. It says gross vehicle weight rating rather than gross combination weight rating. And it says “a vehicle” rather than “a vehicle or combination of vehicles.”
A typical hot shot power unit does not, on its own, carry a rating that reaches that figure. So on the face of the statute the trigger may not be met by the truck alone, even where the loaded combination comfortably exceeds it. Whether Louisiana reads a gooseneck combination into the words “a vehicle” was not resolved by anything read for this page — no rule, order or construing authority was located establishing it in either direction.
That is not a small ambiguity. The practical exposure flips between the chapter’s $300,000 and $200,000 split and the state’s ordinary compulsory minimum on that single unresolved word. This page states the tension rather than choosing a side, because choosing a side would present a reading as a finding.
Two more features of the subsection matter operationally. The verb is “acquire,” not “file” — the duty is to obtain and maintain continuous coverage, and no filing is named anywhere in the sections read. And the financial responsibility “may be established by any one or a combination of the following: (1) Evidence of liability insurance. (2) Self-insurance, but the level of self-insurance may not be less than twenty percent of equity. (3) Other evidence of financial responsibility acceptable to the secretary.” The self-insurance limb has a real numeric condition attached to it, and the third limb is discretionary.
The section has been stable for a long time, which is worth knowing when weighing a secondary summary against it. Its history block records that it was added by Acts 1979, No. 83, and amended in 1980, 1982, 1987, 1990 and finally by Acts 1992, No. 567. Nothing since.
Most states that extend federal safety regulation to intrastate carriage do it by adopting the text and then stating who it applies to. Louisiana does that and then does something further.
La. Admin. Code tit. 33, § V-10305(B) sets the extension: “For the purpose of this Chapter, the federal motor carrier safety regulations, as adopted or amended herein, shall also govern all carriers, drivers, persons or vehicles not subject to the federal regulations, if the operated vehicle has a single or combined gross vehicle weight or gross vehicle weight rating, greater than 26,000 pounds and is used in commerce or industry.”
Notice how differently that sentence is drafted from the one in the previous section. It says “single or combined.” It accepts either actual weight or rating. And it adds a use condition — “used in commerce or industry” — that has nothing to do with weight. Louisiana had the vocabulary for combinations available and used it here, which makes its absence from the 24,000 pound sentence more conspicuous rather than less.
Then § V-10305(C)(1), verbatim: “For the adopted regulations governing all carriers, drivers or vehicles as specified in Subsection B, substitute ‘26,000 pounds’ for all references made to ‘10,000 pounds.’”
That is a textual amendment applied to somebody else’s regulations. For the intrastate cohort described in Subsection B, the adopted text is to be read with one figure replaced by another wherever the first appears. It is not an applicability rule and it is not an exemption; it changes the words the reader is reading.
The consequence for anyone working from an ordinary copy of the federal parts is that the copy on the desk is not the text that governs a Louisiana intrastate carrier in that cohort. Every threshold expressed in the substituted terms reads differently. A compliance conclusion drawn from unmodified text is drawn from the wrong document.
Subsection A of the same section preserves the ordinary reach alongside all of this: the regulations continue to govern carriers, drivers, persons and vehicles to which the federal regulations apply, anything engaged in the transportation of hazardous materials within the state, and anything designed or used to transport sixteen or more people including the driver. So Subsection B is an extension outward from A rather than a replacement of it.
Here is the part that has to be carried rather than tidied, because tidying it in either direction would be a fabrication.
The substitution instruction operates on “all references made to ‘10,000 pounds.’” The federal definition that sets the property line for a commercial motor vehicle is not written that way. It is written as “10,001 pounds or more.” Those are different strings, and a substitution rule that operates on the first does not, read literally, touch the second.
So a strictly literal reading of § V-10305(C)(1) does not reach the definition that a reader would most expect it to reach. On that reading the substitution does real work wherever the adopted parts do use the exact phrase it names, and no work at all on the definition itself — and the operative floor for the intrastate cohort is set directly by Subsection B, which states its own figure without needing the substitution to get there.
There is also a reading on which the rule is plainly meant to catch the definition and the drafting is simply loose. That reading is the more natural one if the question is what the department intended, and it is the less natural one if the question is what the rule says.
Nothing read for this page resolves it. There is no departmental guidance in the sections read, no construing authority was located, and the rule itself does not address the mismatch. What follows for an operator is a practical instruction rather than a legal conclusion: the reach of the substitution is not settled by the text, so a compliance question that turns on it should be put to the Office of State Police rather than answered from the rule, and the answer should be dated.
It is worth saying why a page would bother to name a discrepancy of one pound. It is not the pound. It is that a substitution rule is a powerful and unusual instrument, and its reach determines how much of an entire federal body of text reads differently inside this state. A reader who assumes the substitution sweeps everything has assumed something the words do not say; a reader who assumes it sweeps nothing has assumed something equally unsupported.
Send the power unit’s gross vehicle weight rating on its own, the combination rating separately, and what the heaviest routine load is worth. In Louisiana the first two numbers decide which tier the operation sits in before any coverage discussion begins.
The substitution is one of five changes § V-10305(C) makes to the adopted text, and the section enumerates them. Reading all five is what licenses a statement about what Louisiana did not change.
The second is a rewrite of the driver minimum-age provision. Subsection C(2) revises it to read that a driver “is at least 21 years old, or is at least 18 years old and lawfully possesses an appropriately classified driver’s license secured from the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections.” Louisiana therefore admits an eighteen-year-old to intrastate operation on the condition of holding an appropriately classified Louisiana license, rather than by disapplying the age rule outright.
The third is a set of grandfathered driver-qualification and medical exemptions tied to fixed historical dates — drivers with a period of continuous employment preceding a date in January 1988 for named driver-qualification provisions, and commercial motor vehicle operators with prior service before a date in 1992 for named physical-qualification provisions. Those are closed classes that shrink with time rather than open reliefs.
One detail inside that third change is worth carrying verbatim because it is unusual and it has a documentary consequence. Where a grandfathered driver holds a condition that would otherwise disqualify, the medical examiner’s certificate must display on its face the inscription “medically unqualified outside louisiana.” A certificate carrying that inscription is a document an underwriter should expect to be shown a copy of rather than told about, and it is by its own terms a state-limited qualification.
The fourth and fifth changes are agency-name substitutions and form substitutions, replacing federal bodies and federal form designations with Louisiana ones.
What is not on the list is the hours-of-service part. None of the five changes touches it. So Louisiana adopts the hours part and applies it to the intrastate cohort without rewriting its numbers — which is the opposite of the approach some neighboring states take, and it means an hours answer for a Louisiana intrastate operation is an adopted-text answer rather than a state-numbers answer. That negative is licensed by reading the whole of the subsection that enumerates the changes, rather than by searching for a Louisiana hours figure and not finding one.
Louisiana’s adoption clause pulls in two directions at once and does not reconcile itself.
La. Admin. Code tit. 33, § V-10303(A), verbatim: “The following federal motor carrier safety regulations and hazardous materials regulations promulgated by the United States Department of Transportation, revised as of January 1, 2021, and contained in the following parts of 49 CFR as now in effect or as hereafter amended, are made a part of this Chapter.”
One clause fixes an edition. The other makes the adoption ambulatory. They sit in the same sentence, separated by the list-introducing phrase, and the section does not say which governs where they conflict. A page that reported only the January 2021 date would describe a frozen regime Louisiana may not have; one that reported only the rolling clause would describe a moving one the sentence also contradicts.
There is a piece of statutory text that bears on it and that the research record did not carry. La. R.S. 32:1503(B) — the subsection immediately above the 24,000 pound sentence — supplies a rule of construction for the entire chapter and for the regulations issued under it: “Whenever in this Chapter or regulations issued pursuant thereto a reference is made to another law or regulation, the reference also applies to any amendment of the referenced law or regulation.”
That statutory rule leans toward the rolling limb, because it is a general instruction that references in the chapter’s regulations carry amendments with them. It does not settle the question — a general rule of construction and a specific stated edition date can be argued against each other, and the regulation itself contains both limbs already — but it is a real piece of the answer and it lives in a different title from the rule that raises the problem, which is exactly why it is easy to miss.
The adopted list itself is long, and it is the list the substitution rule operates on: the hazardous materials parts, and then the motor carrier parts running through the general, driver-qualification, driving, parts-and-accessories, hours and hazardous-materials-routing parts, together with the registration, financial responsibility and related parts.
The practical instruction is the same one this page gives about the substitution. When a Louisiana answer turns on the edition of the adopted text, the edition question has to be asked rather than assumed, and the answer has to be dated, because the rule supports two readings on its face.
For a general-freight operator, the largest thing Louisiana does is something it stopped doing, and the way it stopped matters.
La. R.S. 45:162(5)(a) defines the central class: “‘Common carrier by motor vehicle’ means any person, other than a contract carrier by bus, the essential nature of whose business comprises engaging in, soliciting, or accepting household goods, passengers, or waste, for intrastate transportation for hire, charge, or compensation as an employment or holding himself out as so available to the public generally and indiscriminately for such business.”
Household goods, passengers, or waste. General property is not in the list. And the commission’s power is drawn to match: La. R.S. 45:163(A) provides that “the commission has the power and authority necessary to supervise, govern, regulate, and control motor carriers, other than a contract carrier by bus, which transport household goods, passengers, or waste intrastate.”
That is a deregulation accomplished by narrowing a definition rather than by adding an exemption, and the difference is not cosmetic. Where a state exempts a class, there is an exemption list an operator can read and conditions they can fall out of. Where a state narrows the definition, the class never enters the chapter at all, and there is nothing to read and no condition to fail.
The narrowing has a hedge attached to it that is worth carrying verbatim, because it explains what happened to instruments issued before the change. La. R.S. 45:162(5)(d) provides that all common carrier certificates and contract carrier permits then issued and validly outstanding for the carriers defined in that paragraph “shall continue in full force and effect until the further orders of the commission,” and then: “Those portions of certificates of public convenience and necessity issued and validly outstanding prior to January 1, 1995, which are subject to the preemption as provided by Section 601 of the Federal Aviation Administration Act of 1994 are null and void and shall have no continuing value.”
A certificate held from before that date is therefore not simply grandfathered; the parts of it caught by that preemption were extinguished by the statute and given no continuing value. An operator who inherited or purchased an old Louisiana certificate should not assume it carries authority it may no longer carry.
The commission does retain real enforcement powers over the classes it still reaches, and they are worth knowing about because they describe roadside reality. La. R.S. 45:163(C)(2) authorizes its officers, on reasonable belief of a violation, to require a driver to stop and exhibit the registration certificate, to submit bills of lading, waybills, invoices or other evidence of the character of the lading, and to permit inspection of the contents for comparison against those documents. Subsection (C)(3) allows those documents to be impounded.
Louisiana does write a cargo figure, and it writes it for a class this operator is not in.
La. R.S. 45:164(E)(1) requires all intrastate movers of household goods to apply for and secure a common carrier certificate from the commission, to secure and maintain the insurance policies the commission requires for household goods movers, to comply with the commission’s other requirements, to “carry motor truck cargo carriers insurance of at least fifty thousand dollars per truck and one hundred thousand dollars per catastrophe,” to secure and maintain workers’ compensation insurance, and to file a five thousand dollar surety bond with the commission before engaging in any activity related to moving household goods.
Every element of that sentence is keyed to household goods. The same paragraph goes on to require such a carrier, whether domiciled in Louisiana or outside it, to maintain a permanent establishment in the state — a fixed place of business at a particular building or physical location, open and staffed during regular business hours by one or more permanently employed persons.
For a general-freight light combination none of it applies, and the reason is the definitional narrowing described above rather than an exemption. There is no cargo filing for this operator in Louisiana, no cargo minimum, and no form.
That leaves the cargo question entirely to the contract stack and to the operator’s judgment about what is on the deck. In a state that has removed itself from the question, the shipper agreement is the whole of the external pressure, and the internal pressure is the value of the heaviest load actually carried rather than the average one. This class carries value out of proportion to its weight, and a limit set against the average fails against the load that generates the claim.
It is worth noticing that Louisiana knows exactly how to set a cargo minimum when it wants to — it has done so, with a per-truck figure and a per-catastrophe figure, for the class it still regulates. The absence for general freight is a decision rather than an oversight.
Pulling the threads together produces a picture of Louisiana as three tiers stacked on one truck, with the boundary between two of them genuinely uncertain.
The top tier is the safety extension. Above 26,000 pounds, single or combined, on either weight or rating, and used in commerce or industry, the adopted federal safety regulations govern an intrastate operation that federal law would not otherwise reach — read with the substitution applied.
The middle tier is the financial-responsibility duty. At 24,000 pounds of gross vehicle weight rating, a carrier of freight must acquire continuous coverage of three hundred thousand dollars public liability and two hundred thousand dollars property damage for each unit regulated by the chapter. Whether a gooseneck combination is inside that trigger is the unresolved question.
The bottom tier is Louisiana’s ordinary compulsory motor vehicle minimum, which binds every registered vehicle in the state. La. R.S. 32:900(B)(2) sets it at fifteen thousand dollars for bodily injury to or death of one person in any one accident, thirty thousand dollars for bodily injury to or death of two or more persons in any one accident, and twenty-five thousand dollars for damage to or destruction of the property of others in any one accident.
That bottom tier is not a motor carrier standard and this page does not present it as one. It is named because it is what remains if the middle tier’s trigger is not met, and because the practical distance between the two tiers is the single largest number on this page — an order of magnitude on the liability limb.
The same section carries one provision worth flagging for a fleet operator: R.S. 32:900(B)(2)(d) permits an owner to exclude a named person as an insured under a commercial policy only if the owner obtains and maintains another motor vehicle policy providing that person coverage equal to what the excluding policy provides, and requires the alternative coverage for both primary and excess insurance. A named-driver exclusion in Louisiana therefore carries a replacement obligation rather than simply removing a risk.
The honest summary of the state is that a Louisiana operator in this class should be able to answer one question before anything else: what is the gross vehicle weight rating of the power unit, standing alone. That figure decides which tier the operation is arguably in, and no other single number does more work here.
There is no rate table for this class and no honest way to quote one from a page. What follows is what gets read before a number exists.
The power unit’s own gross vehicle weight rating is first and it is first for a reason that is peculiar to this state. The financial-responsibility trigger is drafted on “a vehicle” with a gross vehicle weight rating, and the argument about whether a combination is inside it starts from that figure. An operation whose power unit rating already reaches the trigger has no argument to have.
The combination rating is second and it is a different number for a different purpose — it is the figure that matters for the safety extension, where the rule expressly says “single or combined.”
Whether the operation is intrastate in fact is third. Everything on this page is about Louisiana intrastate carriage, and the safety extension is written for carriers, drivers, persons and vehicles “not subject to the federal regulations.” An operation that is subject to them is in Subsection A rather than Subsection B, and the substitution rule is written to the Subsection B cohort.
Driver ages and files are fourth, because Louisiana rewrote the age provision rather than disapplying it, and because the grandfather classes carry a specific documentary artefact. A file containing a certificate inscribed as state-limited is a file with a known boundary, and an operation that has never checked whether it holds one should check.
Cargo is fifth and it is entirely contractual here. No Louisiana instrument sets a limit for general freight; the shipper agreement and the value of the heaviest load do.
Radius is sixth and should be a distribution rather than a maximum, and the routes actually run matter more than the theoretical range — recovery distance, bridge and coastal routing, and how far a breakdown is from a service point all move the exposure without moving any legal threshold.
And underneath everything, the contract stack: own authority or another carrier’s, additional-insured and primary-and-non-contributory requirements, and whether a waiver of subrogation has been given. In a state that has stepped back from general-freight economic regulation, those terms carry more of the load than they do elsewhere.
Two questions about Louisiana are genuinely open on the sources read, and both are named rather than smoothed.
The first is whether a combination is inside the words “a vehicle with a gross vehicle weight rating of twenty-four thousand pounds or more.” The subsection says rating rather than weight, says gross vehicle weight rating rather than gross combination weight rating, and does not use the word combination — while the safety rule two titles away does use it, in the same state, for the same kind of equipment. Nothing read establishes the answer, and the difference between the two answers is an order of magnitude on the liability limb.
The second is the reach of the substitution rule, for the reason set out above: it operates on a phrase the federal definition it would most naturally target does not contain. Both a literal reading and a purposive one are available, and the rule does not choose.
There is a third thing that is settled but easy to misread, and it is worth stating in the negative. The absence of a Louisiana cargo requirement for general freight and the absence of a Louisiana operating-authority requirement for general freight are not gaps in the reading. They follow from the definitions read in the commission’s own chapter — the classes it regulates are enumerated, and general property is not among them.
Nothing read for this page names this trade. There is no defined term for it, no class of certificate written for it, no separate schedule and no weight band drawn around it. Louisiana reaches the work through a freight-and-rating sentence in a safety chapter, a weight-and-use sentence in a safety rule, and a compulsory minimum that reaches everything on the road.
For an operator the working conclusion is unusually simple to state and unusually hard to act on: know the rating on the power unit, know the rating on the combination, and get the two open questions answered in writing by the agency that administers them if either one is load-bearing for the operation.
The state minimum is a licensing threshold. The program an operator actually needs is built from these lines:
We write hot shot and expedited hauling as a named class rather than as an exception to general trucking, and we read each account against the weight and authority regime of the state it operates in. For a Louisiana operator that means starting from the rating of the power unit and the trailer separately rather than from the combination, sizing cargo against the heaviest load actually carried rather than the average one, and treating the state line as a rating fact because a single crossing can change which driver file the operation owes.
If the operation also runs freight under separate authority, the Louisiana trucking insurance page covers the state’s broader motor carrier picture, and the hot shot trucking insurance page covers the class mechanics that apply wherever the operator runs.
La. R.S. 32:1503(C) requires each carrier, other than a rail carrier, transporting freight in a vehicle with a gross vehicle weight rating of twenty-four thousand pounds or more to acquire minimum continuous coverage of three hundred thousand dollars public liability and two hundred thousand dollars property damage for each unit regulated by the chapter. The same subsection permits financial responsibility to be established by evidence of liability insurance, by self-insurance at a level not less than twenty percent of equity, or by other evidence acceptable to the secretary.
That is the open question in this state and this page does not resolve it. The subsection says “a vehicle with a gross vehicle weight rating,” using rating rather than actual weight, using gross vehicle weight rating rather than gross combination weight rating, and not using the word combination — while the state’s safety rule, in a different title, expressly says “single or combined” for the same kind of equipment. No rule, order or construing authority establishing the answer was located.
The statute does not name one. La. R.S. 32:1503(C) says the carrier shall “acquire” minimum continuous coverage, and no filing requirement appears in the sections of that chapter read for this page. The obligation as written is to obtain and maintain the coverage rather than to lodge proof of it, which is a different shape from the certificate-and-form regimes many states run.
La. Admin. Code tit. 33, § V-10305(B) extends the adopted federal motor carrier safety regulations to carriers, drivers, persons or vehicles not subject to the federal regulations “if the operated vehicle has a single or combined gross vehicle weight or gross vehicle weight rating, greater than 26,000 pounds and is used in commerce or industry.” That sentence accepts either actual weight or rating, expressly counts combinations, and adds a use condition.
It rewrites the adopted federal text for the intrastate cohort. Section V-10305(C)(1) directs: “For the adopted regulations governing all carriers, drivers or vehicles as specified in Subsection B, substitute ‘26,000 pounds’ for all references made to ‘10,000 pounds.’” It is not an applicability rule; it changes what the borrowed regulations say for that cohort, which means an ordinary printed copy of the federal parts is not the operative text for a carrier inside Subsection B.
Not on a literal reading, and this page carries the tension rather than resolving it. The substitution operates on references to “10,000 pounds,” and the federal property definition is written as “10,001 pounds or more” — a different string. On the literal reading the substitution does not touch that definition and the operative floor for the cohort comes from Subsection B directly. A purposive reading would say the rule was meant to catch it and is loosely drafted. Nothing read settles it, so a compliance question turning on this should be put to the Office of State Police and the answer dated.
The state rewrote the age provision rather than disapplying it. La. Admin. Code tit. 33, § V-10305(C)(2) revises the driver qualification so that a driver “is at least 21 years old, or is at least 18 years old and lawfully possesses an appropriately classified driver’s license secured from the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections.” The younger route is conditioned on holding the appropriately classified Louisiana license, and it does not bind an insurer, which prices youthful operators on its own terms.
No. Section V-10305(C) enumerates every change Louisiana makes to the adopted text for the intrastate cohort — the weight substitution, the minimum-age rewrite, the grandfathered driver-qualification and medical exemptions, the agency-name substitutions and the form substitutions — and none of the five touches the hours part. That negative is established by reading the whole of the enumerating subsection rather than by searching for a Louisiana hours figure and failing to find one.
The sentence says both. La. Admin. Code tit. 33, § V-10303(A) adopts the listed regulations “revised as of January 1, 2021, and contained in the following parts of 49 CFR as now in effect or as hereafter amended.” The two qualifiers pull in opposite directions and the section does not reconcile them. A statutory rule of construction leans toward the rolling limb: La. R.S. 32:1503(B) provides that whenever the chapter or its regulations refer to another law or regulation, the reference also applies to any amendment of it.
The commission’s chapter does not reach general property. La. R.S. 45:162(5)(a) defines a common carrier by motor vehicle in terms of household goods, passengers or waste, and La. R.S. 45:163(A) gives the commission power over motor carriers “which transport household goods, passengers, or waste intrastate.” Louisiana deregulated general property in 1995 by narrowing the definition rather than by adding an exemption, so there is no exemption list to satisfy — the class never enters the chapter.
For household goods movers, with figures. La. R.S. 45:164(E)(1) requires an intrastate mover of household goods to hold a common carrier certificate, to carry motor truck cargo carriers insurance of at least fifty thousand dollars per truck and one hundred thousand dollars per catastrophe, to carry workers’ compensation insurance, to file a five thousand dollar surety bond, and to maintain a permanent staffed establishment in the state. For general freight there is no Louisiana cargo requirement, no minimum and no form; the limit comes from the shipper contract and the value of the heaviest load.
Louisiana’s ordinary compulsory motor vehicle minimum, which binds every registered vehicle rather than being a motor carrier standard. La. R.S. 32:900(B)(2) sets it at fifteen thousand dollars for bodily injury to or death of one person in any one accident, thirty thousand dollars where two or more persons are injured or killed in one accident, and twenty-five thousand dollars for damage to or destruction of the property of others in any one accident. The distance between that and the chapter’s split limits is the largest practical gap on this page.
No table exists and any figure offered without seeing the operation would be invented. What an underwriter reads is the power unit’s own rating against the twenty-four thousand pound trigger, the combination rating against the safety extension, whether the operation is genuinely outside federal reach, driver ages against the rewritten age provision and whether any file carries a state-limited medical certificate, cargo limits set against the heaviest load in a state that sets none, radius as a distribution with recovery distance on the routes actually run, and the additional-insured and waiver terms flowing down from shipper agreements.
Every figure on this page was read at the source below on September 1, 2026, with the effective date of the version read. Treat each as current as of that date rather than as permanent.
Send the power unit and trailer ratings separately, the radius distribution, and whether any dispatch crosses a state line. We will size the program against the work the trucks actually do rather than against a statutory floor.
