Personal Injury Rules by State

Every US jurisdiction answers one question before it answers any other: if you were partly to blame, do you still get paid? There are four answers in use across the 50 states and DC, and which one applies to you can move your recovery further than any other single factor on this site.

Pure comparative negligence, in force in 11 jurisdictions, cuts your award by your share of the blame and never bars it outright. Found 40 percent responsible on a claim worth $100,000 and you recover $60,000. Found 90 percent responsible and you still recover $10,000.

Modified comparative negligence with a 51 percent bar is the most common rule in the country, used in 25 jurisdictions. You recover as long as your share of fault is 50 percent or less, and a finding of 51 percent ends the claim entirely. Because the cliff sits between two adjacent percentages, most of the negotiation in these states is an argument about where your number falls, which is what the comparative negligence rule covers in detail, and the 25 are not identical underneath it: Indiana applies the 51 percent bar to ordinary claims while leaving medical malpractice and government claims outside it, on the older contributory negligence rule.

Modified comparative negligence with a 50 percent bar, used in 10 jurisdictions, is the same structure one point stricter: at exactly 50 percent you recover nothing.

Pure contributory negligence is the outlier, and it is the harshest rule in American injury law. In Alabama, Maryland, North Carolina, Virginia and the District of Columbia, any share of fault at all bars recovery completely. One percent is enough. how contributory negligence works sets out what that means for a claim in those five jurisdictions, where the Alabama fault rule pairs the bar with no cap at all on compensatory damages and the Maryland fault rule pairs it with two separately indexed caps.

Twelve states run a no-fault system for motor vehicle claims: Florida, Hawaii, Kansas, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Pennsylvania and Utah.

In those states your own personal injury protection coverage pays your medical bills and part of your lost income first, whoever caused the crash. The trade is that you cannot pursue the other driver for pain and suffering until your injury clears the state threshold, which is either a dollar figure of medical expense or a description of the harm such as permanent impairment, significant disfigurement, or fracture. Clearing it is what moves a claim from your own insurer to the other side.

No-fault governs car crashes and nothing else. A slip and fall, a dog bite, or a malpractice claim in the same state runs on the ordinary fault rules in the table above.

The statute of limitations is the hardest deadline in an injury claim. Miss it and the claim is worth nothing, however strong it was the day before.

Kentucky and Tennessee are the shortest in the country at one year. Maine, Minnesota and North Dakota allow six. Twenty-five jurisdictions sit at two years and 17 at three, which is why two to three years is the assumption most people arrive with, and why it is worth checking rather than assuming.

The figure in the table is the general personal injury deadline. Medical malpractice, wrongful death, and claims against a city or state body frequently run on their own and shorter clocks, and a claim against a government entity can require written notice within months of the incident rather than years. Check the state page, or an attorney licensed there, before relying on the general number.

Most states place no cap at all on an ordinary injury claim. Among the states with a full page here, two limit non-economic damages in a general injury case. Ohio caps them at $350,000, reached through a formula of the greater of $250,000 or three times economic damages. Maryland caps them at $965,000 for a cause of action arising between October 1, 2025 and September 30, 2026, a figure that rises $15,000 every October 1.

Medical malpractice is where caps concentrate. California, Massachusetts, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas and Virginia all limit what a malpractice claim can recover, and several of those figures are indexed and move every year. Virginia is unusual in capping total damages rather than the non-economic share alone.

A cap is applied after your fault share has already been deducted, not before, which is why it can matter less than it first appears on a claim where fault is contested. a statutory damage cap sets out that ordering, and each state page carries its own current figure with the statute behind it.

The fault rule and the filing deadline can swing a settlement from full value to zero.