If you are hurt in a crash involving an Uber or a Lyft, one question shapes your claim more than almost anything else, and you cannot answer it standing at the roadside.
Was the driver logged into the app, and had they already accepted a ride?
California has three different answers
The coverage available to you depends on what the app was doing at the moment of the crash.
The app was off. The driver was just a person driving a car. Only their personal auto policy applies, exactly as in any other crash.
The app was on, but no ride had been accepted. The driver was waiting for a request. California requires at least 50,000 dollars per person and 100,000 dollars per incident for injuries, and 30,000 dollars for property damage.
A ride had been accepted, or a passenger was in the car. Now the company must carry at least 1 million dollars in liability coverage for that accident, and at least 1 million dollars in uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage.
Read those last two again. The difference between fifty thousand dollars and a million is one tap on a phone that you never saw and cannot check.
That is why the app status is not a technicality. It is often the single largest factor in what is available to you, and it is one of the first things I go after.
It also matters who you were
The same crash produces different routes to different policies depending on where you were sitting.
If you were the passenger, you were almost certainly in the highest coverage tier, because a ride was in progress by definition.
If you were another driver, a pedestrian, or on a bicycle, the tier depends entirely on what the rideshare driver's app was doing. You may have no idea. The driver may be unclear about it themselves.
And that second million matters more than people expect. If the driver who hit you carries no insurance, or nowhere near enough, the uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage is what stands between you and nothing.
What changed in June
On June 25, 2026, the governor signed Senate Bill 623, the Fair Medical Billing and Rideshare Safety Act. It came out of a deal between Uber and the Consumer Attorneys of California that pulled two competing measures off the November ballot.
Some of it you can use today.
Background checks got stricter. Rideshare companies must now run a criminal background check before a driver's account is activated and again every year. A company cannot keep a driver who is on the national sex offender registry, or who has been convicted of a range of serious offenses. It also cannot keep a driver convicted of driving under the influence within the previous seven years.
Women can ask to be matched with women. The law now permits rideshare companies to let a woman passenger request a woman driver, and a woman driver request a woman passenger. That provision applies retroactively.
The part that costs you something
The rest of the bill takes effect for accidents on or after January 1, 2027, and it narrows one specific thing.
If you are hurt in a rideshare crash and you treat with a provider who works on a lien, meaning they wait to be paid out of your eventual settlement, the amount you can recover for those past medical bills is now capped. The ceiling is the 70th percentile of billed charges for that service in your area, measured against a national billing database.
There is a second piece. Medical liens are sometimes sold to third parties who buy them at a discount and then seek the full billed amount. Under the new law, recovery on a sold lien cannot exceed what the buyer actually paid for it, and that sale has to be disclosed.
I will be straight with you about the shape of this. It is a limit on what an injured person can recover, and it did not exist before.
What it does not touch
The limits are narrower than the headlines suggest, and the boundaries are worth knowing.
They apply only to accidents from January 2027 onward, only to claims against a rideshare company or an app-based driver, and only to treatment billed through a lien. If your care runs through your own health insurance, Medicare, Medi-Cal, or workers' compensation, this section does not reach it. The law also leaves the collateral source rule intact, and it changes nothing about pain and suffering, lost wages, or future medical care.
Which points at something practical. From 2027, how your treatment is paid for will matter to your claim in a way it did not before. That is worth asking about early rather than discovering at the end.
If this already happened to you
The six steps are here: what to do after a car accident. They apply to a rideshare crash the same as any other, with one addition. Screenshot your ride in the app before anything else. That record is the evidence of which coverage tier applies, and it lives on a phone you do not control.
If you were hurt in an Uber or a Lyft and you want to know where you stand, here is how I handle rideshare claims.
This is general information about a new statute rather than advice about your case. What matters in your situation is the detail, and detail is what a conversation is for.
