Injury claims after a car accident

How the claim for an injured person runs alongside the claim for the vehicle — who pays the first medical bills, what the medical record decides, and the deadlines that keep their own clock.

One crash usually starts two claims. The vehicle is repaired or written off on one file; the person is treated, documented and settled on another. They run on different clocks, are handled by different people, and are almost never resolved on the same day.

These guides follow the injury file: who pays first, what a medical record has to show, what a recorded statement and an examination are for, what a release signs away, and when the clock runs out. Each one ends with the rules for your own state or country, cited to the statute or the regulator. None of them tells you what a claim is worth, and none of them is medical advice.

Start here

Bodily injury claims — how the timeline decides what you recover

An injury claim is not argued so much as accumulated. Its value is fixed by things that happen in a sequence — treatment, recovery, a demand, a release — and the decisions that cost claimants most are decisions about when, not about how forcefully to argue.

Guides

1. 

   One crash opens two claims, and they do not move together

   The injury claim and the vehicle-damage claim put to the same six questions — who the counterparty is, what has to be proved, who produces the evidence, who holds the clock, when each can be settled, and what settling one does to the other — answered from statutes and regulators' own texts that keep the two apart.

2. 

   I felt fine at the scene and saw someone days later. Does that matter?

   The shortest true answer, then the qualifications: what statutes and protocols in four markets actually condition an injury payment on, and why the answer is always a dated document rather than an account of how a person felt.

3. 

   PIP, med-pay and who pays the first medical bills

   Minnesota's No-Fault Automobile Insurance Act read in the order the chapter prints it — the purposes, the benefit, the duty to carry it, the overdue clock and the price paid for it — with Florida, New York, Maryland and Delaware alongside where they answer the same question differently.

4. 

   Crossing the threshold: when a no-fault state lets you claim against the other driver

   A threshold is one sentence of drafted text, and the sentence is written five different ways. Ranged from the state that has no threshold at all to the one where your own earlier paperwork decided the regime — with the line drawn in the open rather than hidden in the middle.

5. 

   Soft-tissue and delayed-onset injuries: what the instruments actually say, and what nobody wrote down

   Three claims circulate about soft-tissue injury with total confidence: that whiplash appears within a fixed window, that low vehicle damage means low injury, and that soft-tissue claims are discounted on sight. We opened eight documents and searched them term by term. This is what was in them, and what was not.

6. 

   One injury file, assembled in the order the documents can still be obtained

   The diary, the wage-loss letter and the receipts nobody keeps, walked in sequence — and, at each step, the statutory definition that says what the document has to prove.

7. 

   Specials, multipliers, and the words the statutes actually use

   The folk model says add up the bills and multiply. Two legislatures have written a whole valuation method into law, and neither of them does that — so here are the terms, each defined by the instrument that created it, and the folk model set against them.

8. 

   The recorded statement and the examination, put to the same eight questions

   Who asks, on whose authority, who pays, what is produced, who holds it, what you are obliged to do, what follows a refusal, and how the product may be used later. One half of this pair is written into statutes and court rules. The other is governed by a contract you signed.

9. 

   By the time an offer arrives, other people already have a claim on the money

   The other claimants on an injury recovery, set down in the order they actually arrive — the health plan or scheme that paid first, the public programme that acquires a right by paying, the hospital that files at a courthouse, the offer, and the document put in front of the injured person — each read from the instrument that creates it.

10. 

    What a contingency fee is, read in the rule that defines it

    ABA Model Rule 1.5 read in its printed order — the reasonableness factors, the writing requirement, the five things a contingent fee agreement must state and the two matters in which the fee is prohibited — with the English success-fee cap and Spain's two redactions of the cuota litis brought alongside.

11. 

    How long do I have to claim for an injury, and does anything stop the clock?

    The injury period is written separately from the vehicle's, in the same statutes, and it usually starts on a different day. Four legislatures read on what makes it run, what interrupts it, and what does not.

12. 

    Struck while walking or cycling: the order the questions arrive in

    One ordinary claim by a person who was on foot or on a bicycle, walked through end to end — which policy answers when the injured person owns no car, what happens when the driver is uninsured or never identified, and where the fault question finally arrives.

13. 

    Claiming as a passenger, from the clearest position to the most contested

    The passenger is the one claimant in this section who did nothing and controls nothing. Ranged from the position the instruments settle outright to the one they deliberately leave alone, with the line drawn in a section of its own.

14. 

    The words a family meets after a death on the road

    Wrongful death, survival action, estate, personal representative, trustee, next of kin, heir at law, survivor, dependant, perjudicado — each defined from the statute that creates it, and then used to say what the claim is and who the law allows to bring it. No figures.

If the injured person was working

When the injured driver works for you, two schemes answer at once

Workers' compensation and the claim against the other driver, put to the same questions — what has to be proved, whether fault matters, who may be sued and who may not — and then to the question that only arises when both are open: how a third-party recovery is divided with the compensation payer.

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Car insurance claim rules by state and country

Fault system, deadlines to claim and to sue, insurer response times, minimum liability coverage and the regulator to complain to — one page per jurisdiction, every rule cited.

AlabamaAlaskaAlbertaArgentinaArizonaBritish ColumbiaCaliforniaChileColombiaColoradoConnecticutDelaware Rules by state & country →

This guide explains how car insurance claims generally work. It is not legal advice, does not create a lawyer–client relationship, and is not a statement of any insurer's or regulator's position. Rules change and differ by jurisdiction; check the cited instrument and, where money or injury is at stake, consult a licensed professional in your jurisdiction. It is also not medical advice. It describes what a claim file has to contain, never what care anyone should seek: decisions about treatment belong to you and a qualified clinician, not to an insurer, an adjuster or this page.