Trucking insurance isn't one policy. It's a program: primary liability, physical damage, cargo, and endorsements that close the gaps most operators find out about at claim time. What you need depends on your authority structure, what you haul, your operating radius, and whether you're running your own authority or leased to a motor carrier.
Talk to an expertGet a quote
ContinueThe stack
A complete trucking program typically includes several coverage lines stacked together. Here's how the full stack breaks down, and who is asking you to carry each part of it.
Third-party bodily injury and property damage when your truck is at fault. Required by FMCSA for interstate carriers, and the line the agency cares about most. It is also the policy the MCS-90 endorsement attaches to.
Your truck after a collision with another vehicle or object. Optional federally, and required by every lender on financed or leased equipment.
Your truck for theft, fire, vandalism and weather events. Optional federally, and required by every lender on financed or leased equipment.
Freight in your care, custody and control while in transit. Optional federally, and required by most shippers and freight brokers, usually at a limit that matches the value of the load.
Liability when your truck is used for personal purposes outside dispatch. It applies to owner-operators leased to a motor carrier, and it is the policy that answers when the carrier's cover has stopped.
Liability when you are driving a tractor without a trailer, between loads or after a drop. Separate from non-trucking liability and not a substitute for it.
Off-road incidents: loading dock injuries, property damage at customer locations, and injury claims that never involved the truck in motion. Required by many shippers and terminal agreements.
Physical damage to trailers you don't own while they are under an interchange agreement. Required whenever you haul under one, and not something your cargo form does for you.
Three of these deserve more than a row. Motor truck cargo covers the freight itself and not the truck, and commodity class drives both your eligibility and your rate, so the carve-outs on the form matter more than the limit does. The bobtail and non-trucking liability split is the most misunderstood in trucking: bobtail covers a tractor operating without an attached trailer, typically between loads or after a drop, and non-trucking liability covers a tractor used for personal purposes while it is not under dispatch. Different situations, different forms, not interchangeable, and a leased owner-operator usually needs both. Truckers general liability then sits beside your auto policy the way general liability does for any other business, and excess sits above your primary limit as a commercial umbrella, which is worth real consideration in the current nuclear verdict environment.
How you operate
Your authority structure decides more about the program than the truck does. Pick the way you run and we will say what an underwriter looks at first, and where the cover stops.
You carry the full program: primary liability, physical damage, cargo, bobtail and general liability. Nothing is shared with a carrier, because you are the carrier.
The fifth way to run is leased to a motor carrier, and it changes the picture most. You operate under the carrier's primary liability while you are under dispatch, which cuts your insurance spend significantly, but you remain responsible for non-trucking liability and for physical damage on your own equipment. Know exactly what the carrier's policy covers and when it stops covering you: off dispatch, running personal errands, or repositioning empty without a trip lease, you are on your own policy.
A trucking program is several policies rather than one, and most of what operators find at claim time is a seam between two of them rather than a hole inside one. Bobtail against non-trucking liability is the seam that catches people most often, and trailer interchange is the one they find out about last.
Four situations, and which policy answers:
Covered: Your tractor is at fault in a collision while under dispatch with a loaded trailer. Primary auto liability responds, and the MCS-90 sits behind it as the federal backstop.
Not covered: You are leased on and you take the tractor out on a Saturday for your own reasons. The carrier's primary liability does not follow you off dispatch. That is non-trucking liability.
Covered: A pallet goes over on a customer's dock and injures somebody who was never near the road. Truckers general liability responds, not the commercial auto policy.
Not covered: A trailer you are pulling under an interchange agreement is damaged. Motor truck cargo covers the freight inside it, not the equipment itself. That is trailer interchange.
Knowing exactly when a carrier's cover stops is the difference between one claim and two, and the answer is in the lease agreement rather than in the policy. It is worth reading the same seam between your auto policy and your general liability before you sign a shipper agreement rather than after a loading dock incident.
The carve-outs
The cargo form is where most of the surprises live, and the MCS-90 is where the rest of them do. Eight carve-outs that decide whether a loss you assumed was insured actually is.
WHAT YOU NEED
Load securement, before insurance. A cargo form will not pay for freight lost because of how it was loaded, whoever loaded it.
WHAT YOU NEED
A named peril extension if your lanes need it. Common carve-out on cargo forms, so read whether yours names weather, flood and earthquake, and at what sub-limit.
WHAT YOU NEED
A reefer breakdown endorsement. Without one, a refrigerated load lost to a failed unit is not a cargo claim.
WHAT YOU NEED
Nothing, at any price. Freight that degrades because of what it is rather than because of anything that happened to it is not an insured loss.
WHAT YOU NEED
Trailer interchange. Motor truck cargo covers the freight, not the equipment you pulled it in.
WHAT YOU NEED
Non-trucking liability. A motor carrier's primary liability stops when the dispatch stops, and not a mile later.
WHAT YOU NEED
Bobtail. It is a separate form from non-trucking liability and the two are not interchangeable, which is where the gap usually opens.
WHAT YOU NEED
Nothing, and this one surprises people. A carrier that pays a claim under the MCS-90 can seek reimbursement from you for a loss the policy would otherwise have excluded.
All eight are readable at quote stage. The cargo carve-outs in particular decide whether a commodity you run every week is genuinely covered, and they vary between forms far more than the numbers on the front page do. Speak to our team about the wording your lanes need, and ask about cover for your drivers at the same time if you are running employees rather than leased owner-operators.
The floor and the number
FMCSA sets a floor and files it. It does not tell you what limit to buy and it does not price you. Three separate things decide the number that ends up on your policy, and only the first one is federal.
$750,000 is the FMCSA minimum for general freight and household goods carriers. $1M is required for oil transport and non-bulk hazardous materials, and $5M for bulk hazardous materials transport. Those figures were set in the 1980s. The MCS-90 endorsement is filed with FMCSA as proof of financial responsibility and attaches to your primary liability policy: it does not expand your coverage, it guarantees the minimum is available to a claimant even where a policy exclusion would otherwise apply, and the carrier can seek reimbursement from you afterwards. State floors sit on top of the federal one. New Jersey raised its commercial truck liability minimum to $1.5M as of July 2024, and other states are reviewing their own. Understand what you're signing before you bind.
Most freight brokers and large shippers impose their own insurance requirements above the federal floor, and those are the numbers you are really being asked to carry. Common contractual requirements include $1M primary auto liability regardless of cargo class, cargo insurance with limits matching load value, general liability, and sometimes excess liability up to $2M or more. Many shippers and brokers now require $1M or more on primary liability whatever FMCSA mandates. If you're operating under broker-carrier agreements, pull the insurance requirements section out before you quote the lane rather than after you win it.
New authority is its own underwriting category, and the reason is absence of evidence rather than presence of risk: no loss history, no DOT safety record, no track record of compliance. That translates into a limited carrier market and closer scrutiny on driver qualifications. It steps down as you build a file, and the file is the only part of this you control. Starting with telematics from day one, before any carrier requires it, creates a verifiable safety record that compounds, and Rosella will tell you honestly what the market looks like before you commit rather than after.
The three do not move together. The filing is federal, the requirement is commercial, and the record is yours to build, so the limit you actually buy is where all three meet. Your broker should confirm what applies in your specific operating states rather than quoting you the federal baseline, and read the broker-carrier agreements alongside the filing before a submission goes out. That is also when the certificate wording a freight broker will demand gets checked against the contract, rather than on the day a load is sitting waiting on it.
Speak to our teamProgram check
Every line below is something a trucking underwriter asks before they will look at a file, and every one of them adds or removes a form from the program. No figure appears anywhere in it, because Rosella do not set one. What it gives back is the list of forms your operation has to argue for.
What your program has to carry
Tick what applies and the forms it implies appear here.
Print this before your next renewal call. Fifteen minutes on the phone will establish which of these your current program already answers, and which lane you have been running without.
Speak to our teamCost
Rosella place cover, they do not issue it, so this section names inputs rather than numbers. What follows is how a submission gets read, and the order it gets read in. Six inputs move a trucking file more than everything else on it put together.
Whether you run your own authority or lease on, and how far from the yard you operate. Radius is close to the first question on any trucking submission, and it decides which markets will look at the file at all.
What you haul drives both your eligibility and your rate on the cargo form. Hazardous materials, high-value freight and temperature-controlled loads are read differently from dry general freight, and some commodities put the whole file into the E&S market on their own.
Every driver on the submission is reviewed individually. Years of verifiable CDL experience, at-fault accidents and major violations in the past three to five years are read driver by driver, not as a fleet average.
What has been claimed, and what the FMCSA record shows alongside it. A new entrant has neither, which is why new authority is its own category rather than a surcharge on an established file.
Tractor and trailer values set the physical damage exposure, and your lender decides whether you carry it at all. Age and specification are read next to the maintenance file rather than on their own.
The primary limit, the cargo limit, any excess above them, and the filings your operating states require. Each layer is underwritten separately, and the filing underneath does not price the layer above it.
Three marks is an input a trucking underwriter weighs harder than the others in this list. It describes how a submission gets read, not what anything costs, because Rosella place the cover rather than set the price of it.
Most trucking operators get one quote from one broker and sign it. That is one data point in a market where the same coverage prices very differently from one carrier to the next, and where a lower number often arrives with a tighter cargo exclusion or a blanket MCS-90 reimbursement clause attached to it. Our brokers compare the forms alongside the figures and flag the differences before you bind. Where an operation carries premises, staff or equipment beyond the trucks themselves, the wider business insurance stack gets read at the same time rather than a year later.
Talk to an expertProcess
We understand your business first, then take it to the carriers who want to write it. An advisor walks you through the options and what they cost. No two files are the same, so what follows is the shape of a placement rather than a script.
What you do, where, with how many people, and what your contracts oblige you to carry. Those answers decide which markets will look at the file at all, and how much of the rest of this applies to you.
One set of information goes to underwriters with genuine appetite for your work rather than whoever happened to quote last renewal. An advisor talks you through what comes back and what it costs.
A main contractor wants proof before your crew can start, and this is how COIs get issued here. We read the certificate request against your contract so it asks the carrier for the wording that contract needs rather than a generic form that usually fails review.
Primary auto liability is, for interstate carriers, and FMCSA sets the minimum. Almost nothing else on a trucking program is required by federal law. Physical damage is required by your lender, and cargo, general liability and excess are required by your contracts. The law sets a floor, and the people you haul for set the number.
$750,000 for general freight and household goods carriers, $1M for oil transport and non-bulk hazardous materials, and $5M for bulk hazardous materials transport. Those figures were set in the 1980s. State minimums sit on top and vary: New Jersey raised its commercial truck liability minimum to $1.5M as of July 2024. Your broker should confirm what applies in your operating states rather than quoting the federal baseline.
It is a federal compliance filing rather than extra coverage. It attaches to your primary liability policy and is filed with FMCSA as proof of financial responsibility. It guarantees that the minimum limit is available to a claimant even where a policy exclusion would otherwise apply, and the carrier who pays under it can seek reimbursement from you for a claim they would not otherwise have covered. Understand what you're signing before you bind.
Bobtail covers a tractor operating without an attached trailer, typically between loads or after a drop. Non-trucking liability covers a tractor used for personal purposes while it is not under dispatch. Different situations, different policy forms, and not interchangeable. An owner-operator leased to a motor carrier likely needs both.
No. Cargo covers the freight in your care, custody and control, not the equipment carrying it. Your own trailer is physical damage. A trailer you don't own, pulled under an interchange agreement, is trailer interchange, and that is a separate form again.
You operate under the carrier's primary liability while you are under dispatch, which cuts your spend significantly, but you remain responsible for non-trucking liability and for physical damage on your own equipment. The part worth being precise about is when the carrier's cover stops: off dispatch, running personal errands, or repositioning empty without a trip lease, you are on your own policy.
Because there is no loss history, no DOT safety record and no track record of compliance for an underwriter to read. That means a limited carrier market and closer scrutiny on driver qualifications. Operations with two or more years of verifiable CDL experience on their primary drivers, clean MVRs, a realistic operating plan and active USDOT registration reach a reasonable market. Operations without them are in the E&S market.
Federally, no. Practically, yes for any truck worth more than you can afford to replace out of pocket, and your lender will require it on financed or leased equipment regardless. Collision and comprehensive are separate covers and they answer different events.
Get started
Most standard trucking submissions quote within a few business days. New authority and specialty cargo programs may take a little longer, but we'll tell you where you stand at submission rather than leaving you waiting on it.
