Title brands by state: salvage and rebuilt rules

By Priya Raman, Research and data. Last updated September 10, 2026.

Every state brands salvage and rebuilt titles, but the agency, the brand names and the rule that triggers a salvage title all differ. This table lists each state's titling agency, its salvage title and rebuilt title brand names, whether a distinct flood brand exists, and the salvage rule as published, with the agency's own site linked for verification.

Salvage and rebuilt title rules, state by state

A title brand is a permanent word stamped on a vehicle's title once an insurer or a state decides the damage was severe enough to matter to the next buyer. Every state runs this system, and every state runs it slightly differently: some fold flood damage into the ordinary salvage brand, some carve it out on its own, and the dollar or percentage figure that triggers a salvage title in the first place is set by each state's own insurance code, not by a single national rule. We checked each agency's own site for its current name, its working homepage, and any plainly stated salvage rule. Where a site did not load for us this session, or did not state a rule in plain text, the table says so rather than guessing at a figure we could not confirm.

Two columns are worth reading carefully before you rely on this table for a specific car. The "Salvage rule" column almost never carries a specific percentage, because most states leave the total-loss trigger inside an insurance-code formula that an adjuster applies case by case rather than a single number posted on the titling agency's homepage; where we saw no plain statement, we wrote "Statutory threshold; see agency" rather than repeat a figure from a source we could not confirm this month. The "Flood brand" column is marked "Not distinguished from salvage" wherever the agency's own site did not separately name a flood designation, which is the honest answer for most of the pages we checked, not a claim that no such brand exists in that state's statute.

How brands cross state lines

A brand is meant to follow the car, not the paperwork. When a state issues a salvage title or a rebuilt title, it reports that record to the National Motor Vehicle Title Information System, the federal database that every state titling agency, most insurers, and every junk and salvage yard in the country is required to check or report into. When the car is later re-titled in a different state, the new agency is supposed to query that system and carry the brand forward under its own local name for the same condition, even if the word on the new title reads differently from the word on the old one.

That handoff works most of the time, and it is the main reason a brand from a small state still shows up on a title issued somewhere else years later. It is not instant and it is not universal: reporting delays, data-entry errors, and a small number of vehicles that move through a state with weaker enforcement can all let a record lag behind the car. The federal system itself, not a private vendor's summary of it, is the source to check before you rely on a title being clean; see NMVTIS for how a buyer runs that check directly.

Why title washing works and how to catch it

Title washing is moving a car's paperwork through a state, or a sequence of states, until the salvage or flood brand no longer appears on the document a buyer is shown, even though the underlying damage never went anywhere. It works because the handoff described above depends on a human filing a report correctly and on the receiving state actually querying it before printing a clean title, and both steps can fail: a title reissued by hand, a bill of sale used in place of a title in a state that allows it, or a vehicle exported and reimported can all strip a brand that should have carried over.

A buyer catches it the same way a DMV clerk is supposed to: by running the VIN through the national database directly rather than trusting the paper in hand, and by comparing what that record shows against the title's actual brand history and the seller's account of the car. Our how to check a title and its liens page walks through that VIN check step by step, including what to do when the record and the paper title disagree.

Changes log

• September 10, 2026: first published.