Florida no-fault and PIP in Miami-Dade: what the 10/20/10 actually covers

In Florida, a typical at-fault fight does not start at the scene. Your Personal Injury Protection — PIP — is supposed to pay your medical bills and lost wages first, even if the other driver ran the light on Kendall Drive. That is the deal the state made: faster medical money, fewer small lawsuits.

It does not mean nobody is at fault. It means your first dollars come from your own policy. If you skip PIP or let it lapse, a Miami-Dade crash gets expensive before anyone has talked to a carrier. We see it after fender-benders in Doral parking lots and after highway impacts on 826.

Florida’s legal minimum is $10,000 in PIP and $10,000 in property-damage liability. Bodily injury liability is not required to register a car. People still say “10/20/10” because $10,000 / $20,000 bodily injury is the old financial-responsibility number that shows up after you cause an injury crash.

PIP’s $10,000 is not a hospital’s idea of a limit. A night in a Kendall ER, imaging, and follow-up can chew through it. Property-damage $10,000 does not replace a late-model SUV on Bird Road. Bodily injury, if you carry none, is your house, your savings, and a judgment. That is the hole.

Miami-Dade has a high share of uninsured and underinsured drivers. Uninsured motorist coverage — UM — is the line that pays you when the other person cannot. Florida lets you stack UM across vehicles, or buy it unstacked. Stacked costs more. It also multiplies the limit if you keep more than one car on the policy.

We ask two questions at the desk: how many cars, and who else in the household drives. A Palmetto Bay family with two commuters and a teen is a different UM conversation than a Doral one-car household. The application will ask you to accept or reject UM in writing. Read that box. It is not decoration.

Standard PIP in Florida pays 80% of reasonable medical and 60% of lost wages, up to the $10,000 combined limit, with a small death benefit. There are PIP options — extra medical, extra wage, a deductible. Those options are how you keep a crash from becoming a credit-card event.

What PIP does not do: pay the other person’s injuries, pay to fix their car, or defend you in a lawsuit. That is liability. If you only buy what the tax collector requires, you have medical money for yourself and almost nothing for anyone else.

We start with the state floor, then we name the gaps: bodily injury at real limits, UM that matches those limits, collision if the car is worth repairing, comprehensive for theft and flood-on-the-street, rental, and roadside. Miami-Dade comprehensive is not theoretical. Street flooding after a summer storm is a comprehensive claim, not PIP.

If you already have a policy, bring the declarations page. We shop independent markets. You see options with the holes labeled. Then you choose. Nationwide clients get the same Palmetto discipline: required first, then the coverage that actually pays.