Providence Uninsured and Underinsured Motorist Claims

About one Rhode Island driver in six carries no insurance at all. By Insurance Research Council data, roughly 15.6 percent of Rhode Island drivers were uninsured as of 2022. Many of the rest carry the state minimum, which has been $25,000 per person and $50,000 per accident since 1991, and which a serious injury can exhaust in a single afternoon at Rhode Island Hospital. At Jeffrey Glassman Injury Lawyers, our Providence car accident attorneys handle uninsured and underinsured motorist claims for people injured in crashes across Providence County. Our Rhode Island office in Woonsocket supports these cases, including claims involving drivers whose insurance coverage is insufficient to cover the resulting losses.

This page leads with the thing every other Rhode Island page we could find either omits or gets wrong.

The common assumption, and it is the one most people are carrying when they call, is that underinsured motorist coverage stacks on top of what the at-fault driver’s insurer paid. Collect the other driver’s $25,000, then collect your own $100,000, for $125,000.

Rhode Island does not work that way. Our Supreme Court rejected exactly that calculation, holding that accepting it would endorse a method of calculation that encourages double recovery, contrary to the Court’s previous opinions and to the purpose of the underinsured motorist statute. A companion decision applied the same setoff mechanics against both the liability payment and medical payments coverage.

The correct sequence in Rhode Island is:

1. Establish your total damages.
2. Subtract what the at-fault driver’s insurer paid.
3. Subtract medical payments coverage you already received.
4. Your underinsured carrier owes the remainder, capped at your underinsured limit.

By way of illustration only, with round numbers and no relation to any actual case: if your damages are $250,000, the at-fault driver carried $25,000, and you carry $100,000 in underinsured coverage, the arithmetic is $250,000 minus $25,000, which is $225,000, capped at your $100,000 limit. You receive $125,000 total, and the offset never bites.

Change one number, and it does bite. If your damages are $110,000, the at-fault driver carried $25,000, and your underinsured limit is $100,000, then $110,000 minus $25,000 is $85,000. You receive $110,000 total rather than $125,000, and roughly $15,000 of nominal coverage you paid premiums for does nothing.

The sentence worth remembering: in Rhode Island, underinsured coverage tops you up to your proven damages. It does not add a second pot on top of what the other driver’s insurer paid.

Having delivered the bad news, here is the good news, and it is substantial.

Many states decide whether a driver is “underinsured” by comparing the two policies’ limits. Under that approach, a person with $25,000 in underinsured coverage can never make a claim against a driver who carried $100,000, because their own limit is lower. Rhode Island rejects that. Our statute defines an underinsured motorist as one carrying liability coverage in an amount less than the limits or the damages that the insured is legally entitled to recover, and the Supreme Court has construed it as a damages comparison: the question is whether the tortfeasor’s policy limit is less than the actual amount of damages the claimant sustained.

Which means a Providence driver with only $25,000 in underinsured coverage can still reach that coverage after a crash with a driver carrying $100,000, so long as the proven damages exceed $100,000. In a limits-comparison state, that claim does not exist. In Rhode Island, it does.

This is the trap, and it is silent until it is fatal.

Rhode Island’s statute provides that a release of the tortfeasor with the consent of the company providing the underinsured coverage does not extinguish or bar the insured’s claim against the underinsurance carrier. Read it the other way around: a release given without that consent can end the underinsured claim.

Our Supreme Court has enforced this. In one case, an insured’s failure to obtain a carrier’s consent before settling cost that carrier’s entire share of the award. In another, failure to obtain consent was held to permit a reduction of an arbitration award.

The practical rule is short. Do not sign the at-fault driver’s release, however small the check looks and however cooperative the adjuster is, until your own underinsured carrier has consented in writing. Adjusters offering a quick policy-limits settlement are not usually trying to destroy your underinsured claim. It happens anyway.

Rhode Island does not compel you to buy uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage. It compels insurers to offer it, in an amount equal to your own bodily injury liability limits and no less than the statutory minimum. You may select lower limits in writing. You may go to zero only if you are buying minimum compulsory coverage and only after signing an advisory notice, approved by the Director of Business Regulation, about the hazard of uninsured and underinsured motorists.

The Department’s regulation requires that a rejection be in writing in a form substantially similar to the one prescribed by bulletin, requires an offer of at least $25,000 in uninsured motorist property damage coverage, which may be rejected in writing if the policy carries collision, and requires clear written notice at renewal of the availability of the coverage or of higher optional limits.

Every one of those requirements is a place a carrier can fall short. When a Rhode Island insurer says you have no uninsured motorist coverage, the first thing to examine is the paperwork that supposedly removed it. A defective or missing rejection is the standard attack, and it is not a technicality; the requirements exist precisely because the legislature did not want this coverage disappearing quietly.

Rhode Island permits stacking in a specific circumstance: where an insured has paid two or more separate premiums for uninsured motorist coverage in a single policy, or under several policies with the same insurance company, the insured may collect up to the aggregate for all the vehicles insured. The premise, as the Supreme Court put it, is that the insured must be the payer of the premium.

Two 2026 decisions narrowed access to employer coverage within ten weeks of each other. In May 2026, the Court held that an employee driving her own personal vehicle on work business was not a named insured under her employer’s commercial auto policy where the policy’s plain language excluded personal vehicles. In July 2026, it held that Rhode Island’s stacking statute, by its clear and unambiguous terms, does not apply to commercial fleet policies, and that an occupant of a covered fleet vehicle who was not a named insured could not stack across the fleet.

If your crash happened on the job, in your own car or the company’s, those two cases decide a great deal about what is available.

The deadline is longer than the one for suing a driver. Rhode Island treats a claim by an insured against their own carrier as fundamentally contractual rather than tortious, which carries a substantially longer limitations period than the three years applying to a suit against the at-fault driver. But your policy can impose its own shorter notice and suit conditions, and those are enforced. Read the policy. Do not rely on the long number.

You cannot join your insurer as a defendant in the suit against the driver. Rhode Island reaffirmed its anti-direct-action rule in 2026: an injured party may not join the insurer as a defendant in the suit against the insured, absent a narrow statutory exception.

You cannot sue the other driver’s insurer for bad faith. Rhode Island’s Supreme Court held in 2019 that the obligation to deal with settlement offers in good faith runs only to the insurer’s own insured, or to someone holding an assignment of the insured’s rights. Rhode Island’s unfair claims practices law is enforced by the Department of Business Regulation rather than through a private lawsuit by a claimant. If you have come from Massachusetts, where a claimant can go after the other side’s carrier directly, this is a genuine difference and not a formality.

You can sue your own insurer for bad faith. That is the flip side, and it has teeth. Rhode Island gives a policyholder an independent statutory cause of action against their own insurer for a bad-faith refusal to pay or settle, with compensatory damages, punitive damages, and attorney’s fees available, and the bad-faith question goes to the jury. Our Supreme Court has held that to defeat such a claim, the insurer must show the claim was fairly debatable and that it was evaluated appropriately and on time, based on the information the insurer actually had at the time of denial. The insurance company, the Court said, cannot later seek to justify its denial by gathering information it should have had in the first place. In an uninsured or underinsured claim, your carrier is your adversary and your contract partner at the same time, and that statute is why that matters.

Rhode Island requires the driver of a vehicle in a reportable crash to file a written report with the Division of Motor Vehicles within twenty-one days. The report itself is confidential and cannot be used at trial. But the statute adds something useful: if the report was never filed, that failure is treated as prima facie evidence that the operator or the registered owner was uninsured at the time of the crash. In a case where the other driver’s coverage is in doubt, that is worth checking early.

Uninsured and underinsured claims are the ones where a single signature at the wrong moment can end an otherwise strong case. Before you release anyone, contact Jeffrey Glassman Injury Lawyers for a free, confidential review. You pay no attorney’s fee unless we recover for you.

This page is attorney advertising and general information, not legal advice. Reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Every case is different, and past results do not guarantee a similar outcome.