Stopping sets play a crucial role in failure events of iterative decoders over a binary erasure channel (BEC). The -th stopping redundancy is the minimum number of rows in the parity-check matrix of a code, which contains no stopping sets of size up to . In this work, a notion of coverable stopping sets is defined. In order to achieve maximum-likelihood performance under iterative decoding over the BEC, the paritycheck matrix should contain no coverable stopping sets of size , for 1 ≤ ≤ n − k, where n is the code length, k is the code dimension. By estimating the number of coverable stopping sets, we obtain upper bounds on the -th stopping redundancy, 1 ≤ ≤ n − k. The bounds are derived for both specific codes and code ensembles. In the range 1 ≤ ≤ d − 1, for specific codes, the new bounds improve on the results in the literature. Numerical calculations are also presented. are also with ITMO, St. Petersburg, Russian Federation.The results of this work were partly presented in [1].