An analysis of 21,265 motor vehicle accident cases comparing settlement rates, typical payouts, and resolution times across contributory fault and comparative fault states.
October 30, 2026
Lawfty grouped states by fault rule and minimum insurance requirements to show how often signed motor vehicle accident cases end in a settlement, what a typical case pays, and how long it takes, built on more than 20,000 real cases.
In 2024 alone, more than 6.18 million police-reported motor vehicle crashes occurred across the United States, injuring an estimated 2.42 million people and killing 39,345, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Behind every one of those numbers is a set of decisions most people never think about until they're in a crash themselves: who pays, how much, and how fast.
No one wants to get into a car accident, but if you end up in one, where it happens can dramatically affect the outcome. That's not because the facts of your crash change from state to state. It's because the rules for deciding who pays do. Each state sets its own: how it divides blame when both drivers share some fault, whether your injury has to clear a legal threshold before you can even sue, and how much insurance the other driver was required to carry in the first place.
To show how much these rules affect settlements, we analyzed 21,265 signed motor vehicle accident cases from the last several years and sorted them into three groups: contributory fault states, comparative fault states that require less than $25,000 in bodily injury coverage, and comparative fault states that require $25,000 or more.
Before digging into the data, it helps to understand the two rules behind almost everything below: how a state divides blame when both drivers share fault, and how much insurance the other driver was required to carry. Together, they define the three groups in our analysis.
Every car accident claim starts with the same question: whose fault was it? In the real world the honest answer is often “both, to some degree” — one driver ran a stale yellow light, the other was going five miles over the limit. States handle that shared blame in one of two fundamentally different ways.
A shrinking number of jurisdictions — Alabama, Maryland, North Carolina, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. — still follow contributory negligence, the old common-law rule. Under it, a plaintiff who is even 1% responsible for their own injury recovers nothing at all. If a jury finds you 5% at fault for a $200,000 injury, you collect $0, not $190,000.
Every other state uses some version of comparative fault, which reduces your recovery by your percentage of fault instead of erasing it. That splits into two variants:
New York is a useful — and very timely — illustration of how granular these rules can get (and how they differ by state). Historically, New York used pure comparative fault for every kind of negligence claim, motor vehicle accidents included. That changed in May 2026: as part of that year's state budget, New York adopted a new 51% bar (a plaintiff more than 50% at fault recovers nothing) specifically for motor vehicle accident cases, while leaving pure comparative fault in place for every other kind of negligence claim, such as slip-and-falls or defective products. The new rule applies to motor vehicle cases commenced on or after May 26, 2026, not to cases already filed, so the New York cases in our data (part of the comparative fault ≥$25k group in the table below) fall under the old, more plaintiff-friendly rule. It's worth watching whether New York outcomes shift as more cases move through the courts under the new standard.
Every state requires drivers to carry a minimum amount of liability insurance, usually written as three numbers — for example, 25/50/25. Read left to right, that means $25,000 in bodily injury coverage per person, $50,000 in bodily injury coverage per accident (the cap if more than one person is hurt), and $25,000 in property damage coverage. No-fault states layer a PIP (personal injury protection) requirement on top, which is what actually pays the policyholder's own bills regardless of fault.
These minimums vary meaningfully by state — Louisiana's bodily injury minimum is $15,000 per person, while Alaska, Maine, North Carolina, and Virginia require $50,000 — and they're widely criticized as too low relative to the real cost of a serious injury. A single overnight hospital stay can exceed a 25/50 policy before the ambulance ride is even paid off. That gap is exactly what a plaintiff's own underinsured/uninsured motorist coverage is designed to fill, assuming they bought it.
Look at the typical settlement column in the table below and you'll see it in action: comparative fault states with minimums of $25,000 or more show a typical settlement of exactly $25,000, the bodily injury minimum most of those states require.. That's not an artifact of the data; it reflects the practical reality that when the at-fault driver's policy caps out at $25,000, that's usually the most a claimant recovers without pursuing the at-fault driver's personal assets or their own underinsured motorist coverage — both of which happen, just less often.
Of the 21,265 motor vehicle accident cases in Lawfty's data set, 60.7% ended in a settlement. The typical case takes 14.9 months to resolve from the day the client signs with an attorney, and the typical settlement is $19,150.
That 60.7% figure is easy to misread. It is not the share of cases that avoided trial. According to U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics data, only about 3% to 4% of personal injury cases ever reach trial. "Didn't go to trial" describes nearly every case in every state, so it tells you nothing about any one of them. Lawfty's settlement rate measures something stricter and more useful: of the cases signed with an attorney, what share actually ended with the client recovering money. Every signed case that ends without a recovery, whether it was dropped, dismissed, or resolved for nothing, counts against the rate.
One note on scope: throughout this analysis, "motor vehicle accident" covers all motor vehicle claims. That means car accidents, plus motorcycle, truck, and pedestrian incidents.
Average settlements run well above typical ones because a minority of cases settle for much more. Lower-minimum states have a larger share of those big settlements, which is why their average is the highest even though their typical settlement is lower.
A few states (AZ, CA, MI, NV, NJ) changed their minimums during the period and are all $25,000 or more today; their cases count under whichever minimum applied at the time.
While the data is interesting on its own, the most important takeaways aren't in the comparison — they're in what's driving the differences.
A high settlement rate doesn't necessarily mean what you think it means. Settlement rates are calculated by dividing cases settled by cases signed, so there's a selection-effect built into the number worth understanding. It would be wrong to assume you're more likely to recover for a motor vehicle accident in a contributory state than elsewhere. This is because in a contributory negligence state, where a plaintiff who is even 1% at fault recovers nothing, firms are more selective at sign-up. This makes it more likely that whatever case does get signed will monetize. Counterintuitively, then, a high settlement rate can mean you're actually less likely to obtain a settlement from a motor vehicle accident claim in the first place — attorneys in these states are simply saying “no” to more people before a case ever reaches the settlement stage.
Typical settlements tend to track insurance minimums among comparative fault states. Look at typical settlement value and you'll see a correlation between the required insurance and the typical value of a claim. That's because most drivers on the road carry only the state minimum, opting for lower premiums over higher coverage. Contributory states are the exception: they require $25,000 or more but have the lowest typical settlement, a sign that fault rules can outweigh coverage limits.
The speed of settlement is largely driven by how much there is left to fight over. Generally speaking, states with more demanding liability rules tend to produce quicker settlements. The proof is in the contributory negligence states with high selection bias at intake. Put another way, the cases that do get signed in these states are generally more clear-cut on who was at fault, leaving only the dollar amount to negotiate, thereby speeding up settlement.
Speed and settlement size are inversely correlated. As the data shows, the states with the quickest settlement times often have the lowest average value. Liability rules explain much of this too: in a contributory negligence state, the defense only has to prove the plaintiff was partially (as little as 1%) at fault to defeat the claim entirely. That possibility reduces the odds a case ever heads toward trial, and with it, the leverage a plaintiff's attorney has to negotiate a larger number. Put simply, the threat of trial isn't as strong a bargaining chip in those states, so cases resolve faster — but for less.
There are three things worth taking away from the table above.
Your state shapes your odds before the facts of your case even come into play. Injury severity, insurance coverage, and liability all matter enormously, but the same set of facts could yield a very different result depending on where the accident happened.
A fast resolution isn't automatically a good one. The states that close cases quickest are, on the whole, the states that pay the least. If your case is moving slowly, that can be a sign the system is working toward a larger number, rather than failing you.
The typical figures here reflect real, resolved case averages, not predictions. Individual outcomes vary widely with injury severity, insurance coverage, and the specific liability facts of your case. But if someone quotes you a typical settlement figure without accounting for the state it occurred in, they could be very mistaken.
One More Factor: No-Fault States
One more factor worth keeping in mind when considering big differences between states. It's beyond the scope of this analysis, and maybe the subject of a future post, but it's worth knowing about. About a dozen states have "no-fault" laws. In these states, drivers don't sue each other over every fender-bender. Instead, each driver's own insurance company pays their medical bills and lost wages up to a set limit, no matter who caused the crash. That's what "no-fault" means. In exchange for that faster, guaranteed payout, no-fault states put a gate in front of lawsuits for pain and suffering: your injury has to clear a legal "threshold" before you can sue the other driver at all.
That threshold takes one of two forms. A monetary threshold requires your medical bills to exceed a set dollar amount. A verbal threshold requires your injury to fall into one of a list of defined categories. New York's list, for example, includes:
No-fault and threshold rules aren't all-or-nothing. States mix and match them, and the details vary a lot from one state to the next. A local attorney can walk you through how the rules work in the state where your accident happened.
What matters is that, like contributory fault, no-fault laws discourage law firms from signing smaller cases, which creates a selection bias when comparing results between states. Firms in these states likely take fewer marginal cases on average, so their settlement rates will tend to look higher.
Every state is different. A motor vehicle accident attorney knows the rules where your crash happened and what they mean for your claim.
Across more than 21,265 motor vehicle accident cases Lawfty included in the data set, 60.7% ended in a settlement. The rate varies widely by state, largely because of differences in fault law that shape which cases attorneys sign in the first place. These figures cover motor vehicle claims broadly, including car, motorcycle, truck, and pedestrian-involved incidents.
The typical settlement across Lawfty's resolved motor vehicle accident cases is $19,150 nationally, but state-level figures range from significantly. Individual outcomes depend heavily on injury severity, insurance coverage, and liability, so state typicals are a reference point, not a prediction.
According to Lawfty's case data, the contributory fault states have the highest settlement rate at 64.2% As explained above, a high settlement rate could reflect selective case intake as much as it reflects favorable odds.
The contributory fault states resolve cases quickest. However, these states also show among the lowest typical settlements, so the fastest resolutions tend to come with smaller payouts. The contributory fault states are North Carolina, Alabama, Virginia, Maryland and The District of Columbia.
The typical motor vehicle accident case in Lawfty's data resolves in 14.9 months from the day the client signs with an attorney.
In a no-fault state, each driver's own insurer pays their medical bills and lost wages up to a set limit regardless of who caused the crash, and lawsuits against the other driver for pain and suffering are barred unless the injury clears a legal threshold. In an at-fault (tort) state, an injured person can sue the driver who caused the crash directly for any injury, without clearing a threshold first. Roughly a dozen states, including New York, New Jersey, Florida, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, use some version of no-fault; the rest are at-fault states.
The biggest structural factor is each state's fault rule, which determines how a claimant's own share of fault affects their recovery. States where any share of fault can defeat a claim entirely tend to settle a higher share of signed cases, faster, and for less, largely because attorneys are more selective about which cases they sign. Insurance minimums, court backlogs, and local jury tendencies also play a role.
Disclaimer: This article is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. The figures reflect historical outcomes across Lawfty's resolved cases and are not a guarantee or prediction of any individual result. Legal rules described here, particularly New York's 2026 changes, are current as of publication and may be interpreted or amended further by courts and legislatures. For guidance specific to your situation, contact Lawfty for a free consultation with an experienced personal injury attorney.
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