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

“No-fault state” is not a rule. It is a label for a benefits system — who pays the first medical bills, without waiting to establish who caused the crash — and what it does to a claim against the other driver is a separate question answered by a separate sentence in the same statute book. That sentence is the threshold, and it comes in several shapes. Some differ in severity. Several differ in grammar, which matters more, because grammar decides whether failing one test ends the question or leaves another open.

So this article ranges the drafting rather than the label: from a state routinely called no-fault with no threshold at all, to one where the answer was settled by a form signed before the crash. The contested middle is the whole subject, and the verdict is not hidden in it — it has a heading of its own.

The end with no threshold at all

Delaware requires every motor vehicle policy to carry “Compensation to injured persons for reasonable and necessary expenses incurred within 2 years from the date of the accident”, with a floor of $15,000 per person and $30,000 per accident. That compulsory first-party benefit is why the state is commonly filed under no-fault. No bar on claiming against the at-fault driver for pain and suffering accompanies it.

What Delaware has instead is § 2118(h), and describing it as a threshold is the common error. A person eligible for those benefits “is precluded from pleading or introducing into evidence in an action for damages against a tortfeasor those damages for which compensation is available under paragraph (a)(2) or (3) of this section … whether or not such benefits are actually recoverable.” That is an evidence rule aimed at double recovery. It narrows what may be shown; it does not decide whether the claim exists.

The District of Columbia starts in the same place by another route: personal injury protection is elective there, so the default is an ordinary claim with no threshold in front of it.

The threshold written as a sum of money

Massachusetts states its gate as an amount. Damages for pain and suffering are recoverable only where the reasonable and necessary expenses of treating the injury “are determined to be in excess of two thousand dollars” — unless the injury causes death, “consists in whole or in part of loss of a body member”, of “permanent and serious disfigurement”, of the sight or hearing loss described in c. 152, § 36, or “consists of a fracture”.

Notice the conjunction. Those carve-outs are drafted as unless, hanging off the money rule rather than standing beside it as a second test. The reader’s first question is still arithmetic, and the carve-outs rescue a case the arithmetic would have closed. It is the shape people picture when they hear “threshold”, and also, in that pure form, the least common one.

The threshold written as a list of described injuries

Florida states no amount at all. Tort liability is exempted to the extent the first-party benefits are payable, and damages for pain, suffering, mental anguish and inconvenience are recoverable only where the injury consists of “significant and permanent loss of an important bodily function”, “permanent injury within a reasonable degree of medical probability, other than scarring or disfigurement”, “significant and permanent scarring or disfigurement”, or “death”.

Read those four phrases as a reader, not a lawyer. Not one can be measured against a document. Each is a characterisation arriving through medical opinion and, if contested, through a court. Whatever else the Florida gate is, it is not something an injured person can settle at a kitchen table.

New York is built the same way. Section 5104(a) provides that “there shall be no right of recovery for non-economic loss, except in the case of a serious injury, or for basic economic loss”, and “serious injury” is only what § 5102(d) defines it to be. No quantity of medical expense opens or closes that door.

Here the piece reports a limit on its own reading rather than rounding it off. The official rendering we could open on 22 September 2026 served § 5102(d) as far as death, dismemberment, significant disfigurement, a fracture, loss of a fetus, permanent loss of use of a body organ, member, function or system, permanent consequential limitation of use of a body organ or member, and “significant limitation of use of a body function or system” — then stopped without visibly ending the subsection, and a direct request to the same page was refused. Those categories are published here as a list that does not visibly end, not as the complete definition.

The threshold that is both — and where the two routes are independent

This is the shape the shorthand of “monetary states” and “verbal states” erases, and the most consequential one to get right. Kansas allows damages for pain and suffering “only in the event the injury requires medical treatment of a kind described in this act as medical benefits, having a reasonable value of $2,000 or more, or the injury consists in whole or in part of permanent disfigurement, a fracture to a weightbearing bone, … loss of a body member, permanent injury within reasonable medical probability, permanent loss of a bodily function or death.” Two routes, joined by or: falling short of the money says nothing about the second, and clearing it makes the second unnecessary.

Minnesota is drafted the same way and shows its working. A computed sum of medical expense benefits — free or family-provided nursing added, diagnostic x-rays and rehabilitative treatment subtracted — must exceed $4,000; or the injury must result in “(1) permanent disfigurement; (2) permanent injury; (3) death; or (4) disability for 60 days or more”, where disability means “the inability to engage in substantially all of the injured person’s usual and customary daily activities”. The subtraction is not a detail: bills that look comfortably over the figure may not be, once the excluded categories come out.

North Dakota arrives there by a different structure. Its statute exempts a secured person from liability for “Noneconomic loss unless the injury is a serious injury” — one test, apparently descriptive. But “serious injury” is then defined as an injury “which results in death, dismemberment, serious and permanent disfigurement or disability beyond sixty days, or medical expenses in excess of two thousand five hundred dollars.” The money route sits inside the definition rather than beside it: the test reads as descriptive and behaves as alternatives.

The end where your own earlier paperwork decided it

Kentucky does not impose a regime; it offers one and lets a person refuse it. The rejection is made in writing or electronically, on a prescribed form, and “must have been executed and filed with the department at a time prior to any motor vehicle accident for which such rejection is to apply”; “Any rejection shall result in the full retention by the individual of his or her tort rights and tort liabilities.” It has a price: a person who has rejected may not collect basic reparation benefits.

Without a rejection, Kentucky’s gate is the both-routes shape: damages recoverable only where the medical expense benefits payable “exceed one thousand dollars ($1,000), or the injury or disease consists in whole or in part of permanent disfigurement, a fracture to a bone, … permanent loss of bodily function or death.”

The District of Columbia mirrors this with the choice made after the crash. A victim who elects personal injury protection benefits within sixty days of the accident may then maintain an action for non-economic loss only where the injury causes substantial permanent scarring or disfigurement, a substantial and medically demonstrable permanent impairment, or “a medically demonstrable impairment that prevents the victim from performing all or substantially all of the material acts and duties that constitute his or her usual and customary daily activities for more than 180 continuous days” — or where the costs exceed the benefits available. There, the threshold is a consequence of the injured person’s own decision; it was not waiting for them at the scene.

Our line, and why

The label on the state tells you nothing. The grammar of the sentence tells you everything, and it separates into a part you can check and a part you cannot.

The money route is the part a reader can check, and nothing else in the test is. It is arithmetic over documents the injured person already holds or can obtain, with the statute’s own inclusions and exclusions applied — which is where Minnesota’s subtraction earns its place.

The described-injury route is not checkable, and an article implying otherwise is doing harm. “Permanent injury within a reasonable degree of medical probability” is a determination the statute has deliberately routed to someone who is not the reader — a treating clinician first, a court if it is contested. Nobody reading a web page can say which side of it a given injury falls on. We will not, and we would distrust anyone who does.

So the practical line: read the conjunctions in your own statute’s sentence before anything else. Or means a shortfall on the money decides nothing. Unless means the money rule is the main road and the rest are exits. No money in it at all means stop looking for a figure — the question is a characterisation from the start. And where the statute offers a rejection or an election, find out which is on file: that piece of paper, not the crash, chose the regime.

What crossing it does not do

Crossing a threshold does not move a deadline. The two live in different instruments: a threshold describes what kind of injury opens the claim for non-economic loss; the limitation period describes how long that claim survives, and it has generally been running since the day of the crash — including through every month spent finding out which side of the threshold the injury fell on. The deadline calculator, opened in injury mode, keeps the two clocks separate.

It also does not settle who pays the first bills. That is the fault system, a distinct rule from the threshold sitting on top of it — the jurisdiction notes below carry the no-fault position and, where the instrument could be read, the operative words of the threshold itself.

Two sets of those words we could not reach. Hawaii’s legislature refused both our summarising request and a direct one on 22 September 2026, so no Hawaii clause appears above, although the state has a threshold in force; and New York’s definition was served only as far as the clause quoted earlier. For an article arguing that the operative words matter, saying so is the only honest ending.