SUM stands for Supplementary Uninsured/Underinsured Motorists coverage. It pays for your injuries and your family’s injuries when the driver who hits you doesn’t have enough insurance, or has none at all. Every other coverage on your New York auto policy protects someone else. SUM is the one that protects you.
Here’s why that matters. New York only requires drivers to carry $25,000 in bodily injury coverage per person. If the driver who hits you carries that state minimum and your medical bills run higher, their insurance simply runs out. What happens after that depends entirely on the SUM limit sitting on your own policy, the one almost nobody explains and almost nobody reads.
One of our own clients found out how much that number matters, except it turned out fine, because the limit on their policy was set correctly before anything happened.
Common Questions About SUM Coverage
Is SUM coverage required in New York? Yes, at a minimum level. Every auto policy in New York must include SUM coverage, though the required minimum is low. We build SUM well above that minimum on every policy we write.
How much SUM coverage should I carry? We match your SUM limit to your liability limit. If you carry 250/500/250 in liability, your SUM should be built the same way. There’s no logical reason to protect other drivers at a higher limit than you protect yourself.
What’s the difference between uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage? Uninsured motorist coverage responds when the at-fault driver has no insurance at all. Underinsured motorist coverage, the more common real-world scenario, responds when the at-fault driver has insurance, but not enough to cover your damages.
The Claim That Proves the Point
Picture this. You’re stopped at a light on Route 17. A driver runs the red and hits you hard enough to total your car and put you in the hospital. You’re there for five days. You need surgery. You spend three months in physical therapy.
The driver who hit you carries the New York state minimum, $25,000 in bodily injury coverage. Your medical bills alone blow past that number before you’re even out of the hospital. Their insurance pays its $25,000 and stops. Everything after that is your problem, unless your own policy is built to catch it.
This happened to one of our clients. Because their policy carried SUM coverage matched to a real liability limit rather than the state-minimum floor, SUM stepped in once the at-fault driver’s coverage ran out and paid close to $200,000 toward the medical bills, lost wages, and pain and suffering that followed. Without that number set correctly ahead of time, that gap comes out of the client’s own pocket, not the insurance company’s.
Why This Coverage Gets Overlooked
SUM doesn’t come up in casual conversation the way liability or collision does. It isn’t the coverage that gets mentioned when someone asks what a policy costs, and it’s rarely the coverage a captive agent or a direct-write app walks a new customer through. It sits quietly on the declarations page at whatever limit the system defaults to, often the state minimum, until the day it’s the only thing standing between a serious accident and a serious financial loss.
With roughly one in eight drivers on New York roads carrying no insurance at all, and plenty more carrying only the state minimum, the odds of being hit by someone who can’t cover what they’ve caused are higher than most people assume.
How We Set Your SUM Limit
We don’t set SUM as an afterthought. When we build your policy, we set your SUM limit to match your bodily injury liability limit, whatever that number is. If you carry 250/500/250 in liability, you carry 250/500/250 in SUM. If you move to a $1,000,000 combined single limit, SUM moves with it. It’s a simple rule, and it’s one many policies never get, because nobody stopped to explain why it matters.
To see how SUM fits into everything else we build into a policy, from liability limits to deductibles, see How We Build Auto Policies.
We’ve been doing business this way in the Hudson Valley for over 80 years. If you want to talk to a real person about your SUM coverage, call us. No phone tree, no pressure, just a straight answer.