Car insurance claims in District of Columbia

The District of Columbia is a compulsory-insurance jurisdiction whose chapter is titled “Compulsory/No-Fault Motor Vehicle Insurance”, and the title is the most misleading thing about it. Personal injury protection here is optional for the insured: the insurer must offer it, and the insured may take any one or any combination of the three coverages, solely at their option (§ 31-2404(a)). When it is bought it pays without regard to fault (§ 31-2404(b)), with medical and rehabilitation benefits of at least $50,000, work loss of at least $12,000 — lost income reduced by a presumed 20 % for income tax unless you show otherwise — and funeral costs up to $4,000. What matters most is what happens after a crash. A victim has 60 days from the accident to notify the insurer of an election to take those benefits; the insurer must tell any identifiable victim about that period in writing, and the parties may extend it by mutual written agreement. If no election is made within the 60 days, the ordinary mandatory liability coverage applies (§ 31-2405(a), (d), (e), (g)) — so in the District, silence preserves the lawsuit.

That election is what gates the lawsuit, and only for the person who makes it. A victim who elects personal injury protection benefits may sue another person only if the injury directly results in substantial permanent scarring or disfigurement, or substantial and medically demonstrable permanent impairment significantly affecting professional or daily activities, or a medically demonstrable impairment preventing all or substantially all usual and customary daily activities for more than 180 continuous days — or if the medical and rehabilitation expenses or work loss exceed the benefits available (§ 31-2405(b)). Death is outside the restriction entirely: survivors may sue for the loss and non-economic loss resulting from the death whatever the victim had elected (§ 31-2405(c)). If the victim is incapacitated, the next closest relative, or whoever is handling their affairs, may make the election (§ 31-2405(f)).

Shared fault is where the District differs most sharply from its neighbours, and the answer turns on who was hurt. Between drivers the old bar still stands: the Court of Appeals stated in 2021, in a pedestrian-vehicle case, that “a plaintiff in a negligence action generally cannot recover when he or she is found to have been contributorily negligent”, adding in a footnote that “the District remains one of the few jurisdictions that generally retains a pure contributory negligence defense” and that even a contributorily negligent plaintiff may recover where the defendant had the last clear chance to avoid the injury. The Council said the same thing about its own law when it wrote the no-fault chapter’s findings, describing the present system as one in which a victim must establish “that the person injured was free from contributory fault” (§ 31-2401(a)(2)(D)). The statutory exception is narrow and deliberate: under § 50-2204.52 a pedestrian or “vulnerable user” is barred only where their negligence was a proximate cause and greater than the aggregated total negligence of all the defendants, and “vulnerable user” is defined to include cyclists, scooter riders and motorcyclists — not the driver or occupant of a car. Joint and several liability and last clear chance are both expressly preserved.

On the money, the compulsory minimums today are $25,000 per person injured, $50,000 for all persons injured in any one accident and $10,000 for property damage in any one accident (§ 31-2406(b), (c)) — and they are about to change. The Motor Vehicle Insurance Modernization Amendment Act of 2026 strikes those figures and inserts $50,000, $100,000 and $20,000, applying as of 1 October 2027, and adds a decennial escalator from 1 January 2037. Uninsured motorist protection is mandatory and unusually broad: every insurer must include $25,000 per person, $50,000 per accident and $5,000 of property damage subject to a $200 deductible, with optional limits up to $100,000, $300,000 and $25,000, and “uninsured” covers a vehicle whose insurer denies coverage or becomes insolvent as well as a hit-and-run driver who cannot be identified (§ 31-2406(f)). Underinsured motorist coverage, by contrast, is only offered — not for motorcycles or motor-driven cycles, never re-offered once rejected, and with no requirement that the insurer keep a written rejection (§ 31-2406(c-1)).

Three years is the answer to almost every District deadline: three years for damage to real or personal property, three years for bodily injury under the residual catch-all, and three years on a simple contract, which is how you sue your own insurer (§ 12-301(a)(3), (7), (8)). Two insurer clocks are fixed in days. Personal injury protection benefits unpaid 30 days after the insurer receives reasonable proof are overdue and carry interest at the prevailing District prime rate on the day they first went overdue (§ 31-2410(c)) — a floating rate, so no percentage is printed here. And where a claimant makes a written claim and supplies the listed documents, the insurer must respond in writing within 30 days and disclose the limits of every policy, even if it disputes that the policy applies (§ 31-2403.01(d)); accidents involving bicyclists are expressly included. Beyond those two, the District’s unfair-claim-settlement statute imposes duties to acknowledge and act reasonably promptly and to affirm or deny within a reasonable time, but fixes no number of days anywhere (§ 31-2231.17), and whether any District regulation supplies one has not been verified against a primary text and is not stated here. There is no dollar reporting threshold: any driver who knows or has reason to believe their vehicle has been in a collision must immediately stop, call 911 and remain until law enforcement arrives where someone is injured, and give identifying information where another’s property is damaged — and being blameless for the collision is expressly no defence (§ 50-2201.05c). Complaints go to the Department of Insurance, Securities and Banking, whose Consumer Services Division confirms receipt of a completed complaint within three business days; that is the agency’s own service promise and not a deadline binding any insurer.