Truck Accident Settlement Calculator, with the same math attorneys use.

A commercial vehicle in interstate commerce runs under federal rules a private car does not: how long the driver may work, what the carrier must know before hiring that driver, how the vehicle is maintained, when the driver is tested after a serious crash, and how long every one of those records must be kept. That produces a documentary record created before anyone was thinking about a lawsuit, held by the defendant and required by law to exist, plus a set of duties the defendant can be shown to have breached. It also produces more defendants, each potentially carrying its own policy.

One thing is the same, and the size of the truck invites the opposite assumption. The value of an injury claim tracks the injury. Truck cases run higher because the injuries are usually worse and more coverage is usually available, not because a multiplier applies to trucks.

For a driver hauling property: ten consecutive hours off duty before driving; no driving after the fourteenth consecutive hour following that break, which is a window rather than a driving budget because it keeps running through loading and waiting; eleven hours of actual driving inside it; a thirty-minute interruption of driving status once eight cumulative hours of driving time have passed, which may be off duty, sleeper berth or on duty not driving; and sixty on-duty hours in seven days for a carrier that does not run every day, or seventy in eight for one that does. An off-duty period of thirty-four or more consecutive hours restarts the weekly count, with no further conditions attached.

None of it is absolute. Section 395.1 carries a long list of exceptions, and two matter enough to name: the short-haul exceptions, which excuse a qualifying driver from the thirty-minute break entirely, and adverse driving conditions. A log read against the eleven and fourteen hour figures without checking which exceptions applied produces a confident wrong answer.

A violation is evidence, not a finding of liability, and it sets no number. What it establishes is a departure from a standard the federal government set for this exact risk, and its effect is on how the other side prices the risk of putting that log in front of a jury.

Every category below is required by federal regulation, and every one carries a period after which the carrier may lawfully discard it. The shortest is six months, and two separate provisions set it. Section 395.8(k)(1) covers records of duty status and their supporting documents: bills of lading, dispatch and trip records, expense receipts for on-duty time that was not driving, fleet-management communications, and payroll sheets showing how the driver was paid. Section 395.22(i)(1) separately covers a back-up copy of the electronic logging device records, on a device other than the one carrying the original data. FMCSA cites both together, and so should anyone sending a preservation demand.

Regulatory retention is not a preservation duty, and the difference cuts the claimant's way. Once litigation is reasonably anticipated a party is expected to preserve relevant material whatever the schedule would permit, and that reaches things no federal rule requires at all: dash camera footage, telematics, engine control module data, internal messages. What does not vary by court is that the letter has to arrive before routine systems overwrite anything.

The motor carrier matters most in nearly every case. It can be liable for the driver's negligence through respondeat superior, and in its own right for negligent hiring, retention, supervision or maintenance. The federal rules make the second provable: a carrier must investigate a new driver's licensing record and three-year safety-performance history and keep a qualification file (49 CFR 391.23), so what it knew is usually answerable from documents. Whether a carrier that admits responsibility for its driver can still be sued directly is a question of state law, answered differently in different states.

The broker question changed nationally in 2026. A freight broker arranges transportation without operating the truck, and for years whether it could be sued for choosing an unsafe carrier depended on which federal circuit you were in, because the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act preempts state laws related to a carrier's prices, routes and services while preserving the states' authority to regulate safety with respect to motor vehicles. In Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC, 608 U.S. ___ (2026), decided May 14, 2026, a unanimous Supreme Court resolved the split. Justice Barrett, for the Court: "Montgomery argues that even if the FAAAA otherwise preempts his negligent-hiring claim against C.H. Robinson, the safety exception saves it. We agree." (Slip op., at 4.)

Two limits travel with that holding, and stating one without the others overstates the decision. The Court assumed without deciding that the Act would otherwise preempt the claim at all (slip op., at 4, n. 2). And the decision is about interstate brokerage: a separate provision, 14501(b), preempts state regulation of intrastate broker services and carries no safety exception, and the Court declined to reach it because subsection (b) was not before it. A purely intrastate brokered load runs into a question the Court has not answered.

The shipper is the weakest of the three. No federal rule makes a company liable merely because its freight was aboard or because it picked the carrier. Shipper exposure turns on state law and on the facts, most often on who loaded and secured the cargo.

The most repeated number in truck-accident writing is that federal law requires a million dollars of coverage. The regulation does not say that. Section 387.9 sets minimum public-liability limits that depend on what is being hauled. For a for-hire carrier in interstate commerce at 10,001 pounds or more hauling non-hazardous property, the minimum is $750,000. The $1,000,000 figure is a different row: oil and the hazardous materials listed in the hazardous materials tables but outside the highest category. That highest category requires $5,000,000.

All three are floors on what a carrier must carry to operate, and reading any of them as case value gets it backwards twice. A large carrier usually holds coverage well above the minimum, often layered as a primary policy with excess and umbrella above it. It may be self-insured up to a retention, or named as an additional insured on a shipper or broker policy. And where the federal scheme applies, the MCS-90 endorsement required by 49 CFR 387.15 stands behind the federally required public-liability obligation even against a coverage defense, with the insurer keeping its rights against its own insured. That is public protection rather than extra coverage for the injured person.

This is why the calculator has no truck insurance setting and applies no truck-specific ceiling. Available limits are a fact about a policy nobody has read yet, and modelling a statutory minimum as a cap would produce a number that is confidently wrong in the direction that costs claimants money.

Every interstate motor carrier has a USDOT number, usually painted on the door of the tractor. The SAFER Company Snapshot at safer.fmcsa.dot.gov/CompanySnapshot.aspx is a free record of the carrier's identity, size, what it hauls, its safety rating if it has one, its out-of-service inspection summary and its crash history. Read FMCSA's stated limits with it: the snapshot retains no historical safety-rating data for the public, the inspection and crash counts cover the preceding twenty-four months, and individual inspection reports come off after 180 days. The Safety Measurement System at ai.fmcsa.dot.gov/SMS goes deeper, and FMCSA cautions in terms that the public should not use it to draw conclusions about a carrier's overall safety.

For national scale rather than one carrier, the Crash Statistics tool at ai.fmcsa.dot.gov/CrashStatistics draws on the same data as FMCSA's Large Truck and Bus Crash Facts 2022, published September 2025, which reports 5,279 fatal crashes involving large trucks, 5,936 total fatalities and 58,992 injury crashes. Those are counts of crashes, not of settlements. Looking a carrier up is free and useful and is not the same as investigating one: the records that decide a case are the ones the carrier holds, and those arrive by preservation letter and discovery. Your filing deadline is your state's own, and being hit by a truck does not extend it - across the 51 jurisdictions in our data it runs from 1 to 6 years, with 25 using 2. The six-month retention period means the practical deadline for the evidence is far shorter than the legal one for the claim.