Texas Accident & Injury Laws

Everything that determines what your claim is worth in Texas: deadlines, fault rules, and minimum insurance — with citations to the actual statutes.

The 4 rules that decide your Texas claim

By AccidentCompass Editorial Team · Updated July 13, 2026

Texas is where the numbers get serious: the state leads the nation in traffic deaths, Harris County alone logs more than 64,000 crashes a year, and the legal rules — a firm two-year deadline, a 51% fault bar, and no damage caps in ordinary cases — reward the victims who understand them early and punish the ones who learn them late. The table above gives you the four rules at a glance; here’s how each actually works in a real claim.

The 51% bar, with real numbers

Texas follows modified comparative fault (officially “proportionate responsibility,” Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code § 33.001): a jury assigns fault percentages, your recovery drops by your share, and at 51% or more you get nothing. Three scenarios show the mechanics:

• You’re 0% at fault, damages $100,000 → you recover $100,000. Straightforward — which is why insurers rarely leave your percentage at zero.
• You’re 20% at fault, damages $100,000 → you recover $80,000. Typical fact pattern: the other driver ran the light, but you were a few miles over the limit.
• You’re 51% at fault, damages $100,000 → you recover $0. The single most consequential percentage point in Texas law.

Now the strategy behind the numbers: every fault point the adjuster pins on you is a direct discount, and pushing you from 45% to 51% is the difference between paying you $55,000 and paying you nothing. This is why the recorded statement, the apology at the scene (“I didn’t even see you”), and the social media post all get weaponized — each is raw material for shifting percentages. It’s also why fault fights are where lawyers earn their fee: evidence (camera footage, reconstruction, witness accounts) moves percentages in both directions.

One more wrinkle: in multi-defendant cases, a defendant found more than 50% responsible can be made to pay the full judgment (joint and several liability, § 33.013) — a big deal when one defendant is insured and another isn’t.

The two-year deadline — and every exception that matters

The statute of limitations for injury and wrongful death claims is two years (§ 16.003; for wrongful death, two years from the date of death). The exceptions cut both ways:

Exceptions that give you more time:

• Minors. The clock doesn’t start until the child turns 18 (§ 16.001) — a child injured at 10 can sue until 20. Caution: the parents’ claim for medical expenses stays on the adult two-year clock.
• The discovery rule. For injuries that are inherently undiscoverable when they happen (rare in crash cases, more common in malpractice and toxic exposure), the clock can start when the injury reasonably should have been discovered. Texas courts apply it narrowly — never plan around it.
• The defendant leaves Texas. Time the defendant is out of state generally doesn’t count (§ 16.063), though modern service rules blunt this.

Exceptions that give you dramatically less:

• Government defendants. Suing a city, county, or state entity (a municipal truck, a TxDOT road defect, a school-district vehicle) falls under the Texas Tort Claims Act, which requires written notice within six months of the incident (§ 101.101) — and city charters can shorten that: Houston requires notice within 90 days. Miss the notice and the two-year statute never even matters.
• Dram-shop and survival claims carry their own procedural quirks; treat any death or bar-liability case as urgent.

Practical rule: the legal deadline is two years, the evidentiary deadline is measured in weeks (camera footage, vehicle data, witnesses), and the government-notice deadline can be 90 days. Consult early; filing can wait, preservation can’t.

No caps — and what actually limits Texas payouts

Texas imposes no cap on economic or non-economic damages in ordinary negligence cases. The caps that exist are specific: non-economic damages in medical malpractice, and punitive damages generally limited to the greater of $200,000 or two times economic damages plus non-economic damages up to $750,000 (§ 41.008).

So what limits real-world recoveries? Coverage. The at-fault driver’s 30/60/25 minimum policy is exhausted by a single surgery. The claims that pay full value are the ones where counsel finds more: umbrella policies, an employer’s commercial policy (a driver on the job makes the employer liable), dram-shop claims against the bar that overserved, and — decisive in truck cases — the federal minimums of $750,000+ that commercial carriers must carry. For how that works in the state’s biggest trucking venue, see our Houston truck accident guide.

Two Texas multipliers: dram shop and gross negligence

Two doctrines routinely turn ordinary Texas crash claims into bigger ones. The Dram Shop Act (Tex. Alco. Bev. Code § 2.02) makes a bar, restaurant, or club liable for serving a customer who was obviously intoxicated and then hurt someone — adding a commercial policy to a claim that would otherwise be capped by a drunk driver’s minimum limits. These cases turn on receipts, surveillance video, and toxicology math, all of which evaporate quickly; a same-week preservation letter to the bar is standard practice. And gross negligence opens punitive damages (within § 41.008’s caps): the drunk driver, the trucking company that falsified logs, the employer that put a known-dangerous driver on the road. Punitive exposure changes settlement posture — carriers pay premiums to keep those facts away from a Harris County jury. Neither doctrine is self-executing; both reward early investigation, which is the recurring theme of Texas practice.

The uninsured-driver problem

Roughly one in seven US drivers carries no insurance, and Texas’s urban counties run worse than average. If you’re hit by one of them — or by a hit-and-run driver — the recovery path runs through your own policy:

• UM/UIM coverage stands in for the missing or inadequate policy, covering injuries and, in UM property-damage claims, your vehicle (with a small statutory deductible). Texas insurers must offer UM/UIM and can only omit it if you rejected it in writing (Tex. Ins. Code § 1952.101) — if there’s no signed rejection in your file, you may have the coverage even if it’s not on your declarations page.
• PIP (personal injury protection) — $2,500 minimum unless rejected in writing; pays medical bills and lost income regardless of fault, fast.
• The Texas UM/UIM quirk: under Texas case law, your insurer generally isn’t obligated to pay UM/UIM benefits until the other driver’s liability and your damages are established — which can require litigation even against your own carrier. These claims need litigation posture from day one, one more reason they’re poor candidates for self-handling.

Claiming against your own insurer feels safer than it is: the adjuster across the table has the same incentives as the other driver’s would. Treat a UM/UIM claim exactly like a liability claim — documented, unhurried, and, if the injuries are serious, represented.

What to do right now

If your crash was in the last few days: get every injury medically documented, get the CR-3 crash report started, notify your own insurer (a policy duty), decline the at-fault insurer’s recorded statement, and photograph everything before vehicles are repaired. Then use the local guides — like the Houston truck accident guide — or the form on this page for a free case review with a vetted Texas lawyer. Two years sounds like a long time; a strong claim is built in the first two weeks.

Sources

• Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code ch. 16 (limitations) · ch. 33 (proportionate responsibility) · ch. 41 (damages) · ch. 101 (Tort Claims Act)
• Tex. Transp. Code ch. 601 — financial responsibility (30/60/25) · Tex. Ins. Code ch. 1952 (UM/UIM y PIP) · Tex. Alco. Bev. Code ch. 2 (dram shop)
• TxDOT — crash data (CRIS)

Local guides in Texas

• Houston — Truck Accident Lawyer