Will my car insurance cover my spouse? (multi-state edition)

October 30, 2019 5:25 PM

I have insurance from Esurance. The car is registered in New York and we both have New York drivers licenses. However, we also own a house in Rhode Island. Here’s where it gets complicated...

Spouse is currently on my insurance. She would like to get a license in Rhode Island as she spends most of her time there and we would like to establish residency for her so our real estate taxes go down. If she does this, they will go down significantly. My question is, can she just get a Rhode Island license and then I switch it on our insurance? I would keep my NYS license and the car would continue to be registered in NYS.

posted by degoao to Law & Government (4 answers total)

The important thing with car insurance is where the car lives, not where it's registered and not where the owner's driver's licenses are from. Your insurance company couldn't care less about what state issues your license, they care about where the car is parked.
posted by brainmouse at 6:55 PM on October 30, 2019 [1 favorite]

If I had a question like this, I'd call my insurance agent. He/She's always helpful. But I'm probably paying mightily for this very occasional convenience while with Esurance, you are not. Call Esurance and ask. With insurance, it's worthless if you find out after a fact that it won't cover what you bought it to cover.
posted by tmdonahue at 10:08 AM on October 31, 2019

If your wife drives your car or the car that you've put on the policy as long as she is a authorized driver on the policy she should be fine. The question is are you adding her to your cars policy or adding her vehicle to your coverage plan.
posted by The_imp_inimpossible at 1:19 PM on October 31, 2019

Where the car lives is the first and most important question as brainmouse said. The other issue is where a driver of the car who is NOT listed as an authorized lives. Typically, a person who shares your legal address must be listed as an authorized driver in order to be covered while driving your car. A person with a legal address different than yours does not have to be listed as an authorized driver in order to be covered. (If you loan your car to your neighbor, they are fully covered. If you loan your car to your room mate, they are not.)

So, if your wife's legal address changes to Rhode Island, you would not technically need to have her listed as an authorized driver for a car housed at your New York residence, but I would suggest keeping each of you as authorized drivers of each other's cars, to avoid a challenge if anything were to happen when you were driving each other's cars.
posted by hworth at 8:13 PM on October 31, 2019