Car accident claims

Fault allocation is the biggest single variable

Every state reduces recovery by the claimant’s share of fault, but they differ on whether there is a point at which recovery stops entirely. California and New York use pure comparative negligence, so a claimant found ninety per cent at fault still recovers ten per cent of their damages. Florida and Texas bar recovery completely above fifty per cent.

Florida’s rule changed recently and this trips people up constantly. Before March 2023 Florida was a pure comparative state like California. House Bill 837 replaced that with a fifty per cent bar, and a great deal of published material still describes the old rule. If you are reading about Florida fault law, check whether the source has been updated since 2023.

No-fault states put a threshold in front of pain and suffering

Florida and New York are no-fault states. Your own personal injury protection coverage pays your medical bills and part of your lost wages regardless of who caused the crash, but you cannot sue the at-fault driver for pain and suffering unless your injury clears a statutory threshold.

The practical effect is large. In New York, a soft-tissue injury that resolves in two months frequently cannot reach non-economic damages at all, and recovery is limited to economic loss above the fifty thousand dollars of basic PIP coverage. In Texas and California there is no such threshold, so the same injury can support a pain and suffering claim from the start.

The two states also differ enormously in PIP amount. New York requires fifty thousand dollars of basic economic loss coverage; Florida requires ten thousand, and only twenty-five hundred of that is available unless a provider certifies an emergency medical condition within fourteen days.

Insurance limits often decide what is actually collectible

A claim is only worth what can be collected, and that is frequently governed by the at-fault driver’s policy limits rather than by the value of the injury. Minimum required coverage varies sharply: Texas requires thirty thousand dollars per injured person, California raised its minimum to thirty thousand on 1 January 2025 after fifty-eight years at fifteen thousand, and New York requires twenty-five thousand.

Florida is the outlier and the most consequential one. Florida does not require ordinary private-passenger drivers to carry bodily injury liability coverage at all. The mandatory minimums are ten thousand dollars of PIP and ten thousand of property damage. This means the driver who injured you in Florida may have no liability coverage whatsoever, and uninsured or underinsured motorist coverage on your own policy is frequently the only meaningful source of recovery in a serious Florida crash.

The deadlines that end claims

Filing deadlines are shorter than most people assume and they vary. Florida and Texas allow two years for a personal injury claim; California allows two; New York allows three. Missing the deadline ends the claim regardless of its merit.

Claims against a government entity are on a different and much shorter clock, and this is where good claims are most often lost. New York requires a notice of claim within ninety days. California and Texas require six months. Texas cities may shorten that further by charter, and Houston requires notice within ninety days. If a city bus, a police vehicle, a municipal maintenance truck, or a road defect is involved, the deadline may be measured in weeks rather than years.

What to do in the first two weeks

Seek medical evaluation promptly even if symptoms seem minor, because delay is both the most common evidentiary attack and, in Florida, a statutory bar to most PIP coverage. Request the crash report once it is filed; officers generally have ten days to submit it, and each state runs a central portal that sells it for a small statutory fee.

Photograph the vehicles, the scene, and any visible injury. Keep every medical bill and record every day of missed work, because documented economic loss is the one part of a claim nobody argues about. And identify which agency responded, since that determines where the report lives and which government entity any road-condition claim would run against.