Virginia No-Fault Insurance: What the Law Actually Says

Virginia is not a no-fault insurance state. There is no Virginia law making your own insurer pay your medical bills regardless of who caused a crash: liability follows fault, which is why Va. Code § 38.2-1905 forbids an insurer from raising a premium or charging points for an accident the insured did not cause wholly or partly. Coverage itself is compulsory.

Is Virginia a no-fault state for car insurance, and what does it do instead?

In a no-fault state, a driver’s own policy pays a defined set of expenses after a crash whatever the cause, and the right to sue the other driver is limited in exchange. Virginia has no such scheme. Fault decides who pays, an injured person’s claim runs against the driver responsible, and Virginia’s insurance code is written on that assumption throughout.

The clearest evidence is in the statute that protects drivers from being charged for other people’s mistakes. Section 38.2-1905 A opens: “No insurer may increase its insured’s premium or may charge points under a safe driver insurance plan to its insured as a result of a motor vehicle accident unless the accident was caused either wholly or partially by the named insured, a resident of the same household, or other customary operator.” A no-fault system would have no use for that sentence.

Some drivers use “no-fault” loosely to mean the medical-expense or uninsured-motorist coverage their own policy provides. Those are coverages a policy may include, not a statutory no-fault system, and what they pay for is a question for the policy and the insurer rather than for Virginia’s traffic code.

What an insurer may not charge you for

Section 38.2-1905 sets four limits, and they are worth knowing before accepting a surcharge:

Limit	What the statute says
Accidents you did not cause	No premium increase and no safe-driver-plan points unless the accident was caused wholly or partially by the named insured, a household resident, or another customary operator
Accidents caused by someone insured elsewhere	No increase and no points where the operator causing the accident is a principal operator insured under a separate policy
Which vehicle carries the points	Points may be assigned only to the vehicle customarily driven by the operator responsible for incurring them
On-duty police officers	No increase and no points for an accident in the course of employment as a law-enforcement officer, driving an agency vehicle and engaged in a law-enforcement activity

The 60-day appeal most drivers never use

The same section gives a remedy, and it is unusually specific. An insurer that raises a premium or charges points after a motor vehicle accident must notify the named insured in writing, and in the same notice must tell the insured that the decision may be appealed to the Commissioner of Insurance if the insured believes it was done without just cause. The notice must state that the appeal has to be in writing and made within 60 days of receipt.

What follows is set out in subsection B. On receiving the request the Commissioner “shall promptly initiate a review” of whether the increase or the point charge is justified. The charge stays in force during the review. If the Commissioner rules that it was not justified — or that the points were not assigned in accordance with the insurer’s filed rating plan — the insurer must promptly refund any premium paid as a direct result of the increase or the point charge, and adjust future billings.

Two practical points. The deadline runs from receipt of the notice, so the notice itself is the document to keep. And the ground for appeal is not that the surcharge feels unfair; it is that the accident was not caused by a person the statute lists, or that the insurer departed from its own filed rating plan.

Insurance points are not DMV points

The two systems are entirely separate, and confusing them leads drivers to worry about the wrong number.

• DMV demerit points are assigned by the DMV under the Uniform Demerit Point System after a conviction, count for two years from the offense date, and decide whether the DMV requires a clinic or suspends a license. They are explained in DMV demerit points on a Virginia license.
• Insurance points are the insurer’s own creation under its filed safe-driver plan, are limited by § 38.2-1905, and decide the premium. The DMV notifies an insurer of a conviction only on request.

A driver can therefore have a clean DMV point balance and a surcharged premium, or a heavy point balance and an unchanged premium, depending on what the insurer has looked at and when. An insurer reading the driving record sees the last five years of it for insurance purposes, as described in the last five years of a Virginia driving record.

Why Virginia no-fault car insurance does not exist, and what must be carried instead

Because there is no no-fault scheme, the compulsory liability policy is what stands behind a claim. Every applicant registering a vehicle must certify under Va. Code § 46.2-706 A that it is an insured motor vehicle, or hold a DMV certificate of self-insurance, and Va. Code § 46.2-472 sets what an owner’s policy must cover. For policies effective on or after 1 January 2025, the minimum limits are:

• $50,000 for bodily injury to or death of one person in any one accident;
• $100,000 for bodily injury to or death of two or more people in any one accident;
• $25,000 for injury to or destruction of the property of others in any one accident.

For policies effective between 1 January 2022 and 1 January 2025 the figures were $30,000, $60,000 and $20,000. Driving an uninsured Virginia-registered vehicle is a Class 3 misdemeanor under Va. Code § 46.2-707 — a fine of not more than $500 and no jail — with a mandatory DMV suspension and a $600 noncompliance fee behind it, as set out in the penalties for an uninsured vehicle, and there is no grace period between policies — see whether you can drive uninsured in Virginia at all.

If the other driver was at fault

Because fault governs, the claim is made against the responsible driver’s insurer, and the evidence of fault does the work. If that driver turns out to be uninsured, the compulsory limits above are no help, and the coverage that matters is whatever uninsured-motorist protection the injured driver’s own policy carries — a question for the policy documents and the insurer.

If a surcharge arrives for a crash that someone else caused, the answer is the 60-day appeal above rather than an argument with a call center. And where an injury claim is involved, the amount at stake usually justifies a Virginia attorney’s advice; how a particular claim will be valued is not something a website can tell you.