25/50/15 is legal. It is not a commercial auto policy.

The honest answer is that Colorado’s minimum auto limits were written for a sedan, and a loaded Mack dump truck is not a sedan. The state minimum keeps the truck registered and keeps you out of trouble at a traffic stop. It does not come close to paying for what a tandem full of road base does when it meets a car on a wet downgrade. Every contractor who calls our commercial auto desk with a state-minimum policy on a work truck has the same reason: it was cheap and it was legal. Both true. Here’s what 25/50/15 actually buys, what a $1,000,000 combined single limit buys instead, and the two coverages that ride along with it on a dirt or snow operation.

What the numbers mean

Colorado’s financial responsibility law sets a floor for anyone who registers and drives a vehicle in the state.

Those three numbers are split limits. Each one is a separate cap, and none of them can borrow from the others.

• $25,000 per person for bodily injury. That’s the most the policy pays toward one injured person, no matter how badly they’re hurt.
• $50,000 per accident for bodily injury. That’s the most the policy pays for everyone hurt in one accident, combined, even if the per-person cap hasn’t been reached on any of them.
• $15,000 per accident for property damage. Their car, the guardrail, the fence, the parked equipment. All of it, out of one $15,000 pool.

Read the property damage line one more time. Fifteen thousand dollars. Then look at the trucks on any Front Range highway.

The loaded dump truck

Here’s the example we use on the phone. Your driver is bringing a Mack tandem loaded with road base down from a pit, headed for a driveway job near Bailey. Freeze-thaw has been working on the shoulder all week. A pickup ahead of him brakes for a deer, the truck can’t stop in the distance it has, and it puts the pickup into the ditch with two people in it.

Under a 25/50/15 policy, the carrier’s exposure looks like this. The pickup, call it a late-model half-ton worth $60,000, gets $15,000 of property damage coverage. The rest of the truck’s value is a claim against you. The driver of the pickup has a broken leg and a long recovery: $25,000, and everything past that is on you. The passenger is also hurt, and now the per-accident bodily injury cap of $50,000 is the ceiling for both of them combined. Two people with real injuries and a totaled truck, and the policy has paid out its entire limit on all three lines before the first surgery is over.

The claim doesn’t stop when the policy does. It keeps going, and it comes to the business, then to the owner. That’s what “legal minimum” means for a work truck: the truck is legal, and the business is exposed.

The same accident under a $1,000,000 combined single limit has one pool of money for everything, injury and property together. Bodily injury for both people, the pickup, the guardrail, all drawn from the same $1,000,000 until it’s gone. That’s still a limit, and a bad enough accident can pass it, which is what the umbrella is for. But it’s a limit sized for a truck that weighs what a dump truck weighs.

Split limits vs combined single limit

The practical difference isn’t just the size of the number. It’s the shape. Split limits can leave you underinsured on one line while another line has money left over. A single limit follows the claim wherever it lands. That’s why the contract world settled on the CSL, and why the fact above is careful to call $1,000,000 CSL the common contract ask rather than a legal requirement: the law sets the floor, the market sets the number.

Public work says the same thing in its own paperwork.

That auto line on a CDOT permit is the state, as a permit issuer, telling you what it thinks a truck in its right-of-way should carry. The GC exhibits we see for dump truck and aggregate hauling subs ask for the same number, and the article on reading a GC’s requirements has a table for the auto line on those exhibits. In our experience, a state-minimum policy fails every one of them.

What else a commercial auto policy does

Limits are the headline. Two other things separate a commercial auto policy from a personal one with a work truck on it, and both come up on the first serious claim.

Hired and non-owned auto

Your commercial auto policy covers the vehicles you schedule on it. It typically does not cover a vehicle your business doesn’t own unless it’s endorsed to. That’s the gap hired and non-owned auto closes.

Non-owned is the foreman who runs to the supply house in his own pickup to grab a fitting, or the laborer who drives his own car between two job sites in a day. If he hits someone, his personal policy is primary and probably has personal limits and a business-use question of its own. The injured party’s lawyer will name your business next, because the errand was for you. Non-owned auto liability is what responds for the business.

Hired is the rental. The Bell haul truck is down for a week, you rent a replacement, and the rental counter’s damage waiver covers the rental itself but not what the rental does to someone else. Hired auto liability responds for that. Physical damage to the rental is a separate coverage, and whether you need it depends on what the rental agreement makes you responsible for, which is worth reading before you sign it at the counter.

Most GC and HOA exhibits ask for “owned, hired, and non-owned” on the auto line by name, and the certificate has to be able to say all three. If your policy only schedules the trucks, the certificate can’t.

The plow truck

The plow truck is the vehicle in our trades most likely to be on the wrong policy. It’s usually the owner’s pickup, it usually has a Boss or Western blade on it from November to March, and it’s usually insured on a personal auto policy because that’s what was on it when it was just a pickup.

Personal auto policies commonly exclude or limit business use, and pushing snow for pay on an HOA lot in Breckenridge is business use. Whether the personal carrier pays a plowing claim depends on the form and the facts, and that is exactly the wrong kind of uncertainty to carry into a slide on black ice into a row of parked cars. Even where the personal policy responds, it responds at personal limits, which for a lot of pickups in this state means 25/50/15, and the slide into three parked cars just met the $15,000 property damage cap on the first one.

The plow truck article walks the whole thing through: the personal exclusion, the blade as equipment, the trailer. The short version for residential and HOA plow operators is that the plow truck goes on the commercial policy, at the same CSL as the rest of the fleet, with the blade scheduled somewhere it’s actually insured. If you landscape in summer and plow in winter, the seasonal combo article covers why that same truck is also a class code problem.

What we don’t control

Rates. Commercial auto for dump trucks and plow trucks is a hard market in Colorado right now, and what a carrier will charge for a $1,000,000 CSL on a tandem depends on the driver’s record, the radius, the GVW, the loss runs, and the carrier’s appetite that quarter. We can shop it and tell you which quote is which. We can’t make a carrier like a driver with two at-fault losses.

What we can do is make sure the policy matches the exhibit before you sign the contract, so the certificate doesn’t bounce an hour before the truck is supposed to be at the pit. That includes making sure the additional insured endorsement the GC wants on the auto policy actually exists on it, which is a different endorsement from the one on the GL and gets forgotten more often.

What to check on your own policy

Pull the declarations page for every vehicle. Find the liability line. If it reads as three numbers with slashes, it’s split limits, and you should know what the third number is. If it reads as one number, it’s a CSL. Then check three things: is every truck that works on it, including the plow truck; is hired and non-owned listed; and does the limit match the largest contract you’ve signed this year.

If any of those is a no, that’s the fix, and it’s a cheaper fix than the deer.

Where to go from here

If your trucks are on a personal policy or a state-minimum commercial one, Get Insured starts with the vehicle list, the drivers, and the contracts, so the policy is built to the exhibit instead of to the registration. If you already have a commercial auto policy and aren’t sure whether the limit is split or single, that’s a two-minute read of the dec page, and it’s one of the first things we mark up in a policy review. The excavation insurance hub covers how the auto policy fits with the rest of the stack.

Serving businesses located in Colorado. Coverage is determined by the policy language and the carrier.