Michigan lawmakers kicked off a push to rewrite personal injury protection rules, and the changes look big enough to shake how insurers handle auto and rideshare accidents.
The bill didn’t come out of nowhere, but the timing still surprised plenty of folks in the insurance world.
On November 13, 2025, Representatives Mike Harris and Jason Morgan dropped House Bill 5298 and sent it to the Committee on Insurance. It rewrites key portions of section 3114 in the Michigan Insurance Code of 1956.
The point is to lay out, with sharper edges, who pays PIP benefits across motor vehicle and motorcycle accidents. No one pretends the current rules feel clean.
The bill says a personal protection insurance policy covers bodily injury to the named insured, their spouse, and relatives living under the same roof, as long as the injury comes from a motor vehicle accident.
If more than one policy could handle the bill, the injured person’s insurer must pay every dollar up to the limits of that policy. The insurer doesn’t get to claw money back from others. Straight line responsibility.
For injuries that happen in a vehicle used to transport passengers for business, PIP benefits come from the insurer of that specific vehicle.
The exceptions stack up: school buses, common carrier buses, government sponsored transportation, nonprofit vehicles, taxicabs, and a few other categories.
Unless the passenger has zero access to benefits under any other policy, which flips the situation again. Complicated, but that’s the Legislature’s way.
If an employee, their spouse, or a relative gets hurt while inside a vehicle owned or registered by the employer, the employer’s vehicle insurer picks up the PIP tab. Simple sentence, messy real world.
The bill also covers people with no PIP policy at all. If they get injured in a motor vehicle accident, they go through the assigned claims plan unless one of the listed exclusions hits. We think that part alone will spark a lot of industry chatter.
Motorcycle accidents get their own priority ladder when a motor vehicle is involved. First in line sits the insurer of the owner or registrant of the motor vehicle.
Second, the insurer of the operator of that motor vehicle. Third, the motor vehicle insurer of the motorcycle operator. Fourth, the motor vehicle insurer of the motorcycle’s owner or registrant. It reads like a flowchart you scribble on a napkin, but the order matters.
If a policyholder chooses not to maintain PIP coverage or falls under an exclusion, the injured person must seek benefits from the next available policy in that same priority order. If no policy exists, they end up back at the assigned claims plan.
When multiple policies sit at the same priority level, total benefits cap at the highest limit among those policies. No stacking tricks.
The bill allows partial recoupment among insurers that share the same priority slot, so they can spread the loss and split the processing costs. That clause probably came from long negotiations with industry groups tired of uneven payouts.
Definitions for terms like personal vehicle, transportation network company digital network, and transportation network company vehicle tie back to Michigan’s limousine, taxicab, and TNC act. Lawmakers didn’t want wiggle room around those categories.
If the Legislature moves this forward, insurers across Michigan will need to recalibrate how they assign responsibility and coordinate PIP benefits.
Rideshare cases, employer vehicle injuries, multi policy collisions, motorcycle crashes, all of it. The bill sits waiting for more action, and the industry waits with it, hoping the next move brings clarity instead of more knots.
