Georgia’s motor-carrier insurance statute does not contain a dollar amount. O.C.G.A. § 40-1-112 provides that the department shall determine and fix the amounts of such indemnity insurance, and leaves the figure to the Department of Public Safety to set by rule. For a carrier that operates only inside Georgia, that is the single most useful thing to know about the requirement: the number is not in the law you can look up, it is in a rule that can change on its own schedule.
What the statute does say
Reading the 2024 Code, most recently amended by 2024 Ga. Laws 701 and 616, effective July 1, 2024, the statute requires coverage for household-goods and property carriers against loss or damage, and for passenger carriers of passengers and the public against injury proximately caused by the negligence of such motor carrier. It permits self-insurance whenever in its opinion the financial ability of the motor carrier so warrants. What it does not do is state how much.
Why that is different from the federal rule
The federal requirement for interstate carriers is printed in the regulation: 49 CFR § 387.9 sets $750,000, $1,000,000 or $5,000,000 by commodity. Georgia’s intrastate figure is set by the department by rule, which means it moves independently of the federal floor. An agency that quotes a Georgia intrastate amount from memory is quoting a number that may have moved.
What we do instead
This site does not print a Georgia intrastate dollar figure, because the statute does not, and a number copied from another website is not a source. The current amount is confirmed against the department’s rule at the time of the filing, and the policy is written to it. If your operation runs both inside Georgia and across state lines, the interstate figure applies to the interstate operation and the state rule to the rest; the filing has to describe both correctly.
Metro Risk Management Group writes trucking programs from Smyrna and Atlanta for carriers across Georgia.