North Carolina Car Accident Laws (2024 Guide)

In North Carolina, drivers must buy liability insurance. There are set minimum coverage requirements. You can choose to buy more than the required coverage, but not less.

The minimum amount of liability insurance in North Carolina is:

• $30,000 in bodily injury coverage per person
• $60,000 in total bodily injury coverage per accident
• $25,000 in property damage liability coverage

Essentially, this means that if you get into an accident, your insurance will pay up to $30,000 per injured victim but will only pay out a total maximum amount of $60,000 no matter how many people were hurt. This isn’t a large amount of money, especially since crashes can cause serious injuries, so many drivers smartly opt to buy more than the minimum protection.

North Carolina law requires you to report a car accident to the police if:

• Anyone was hurt in the collision
• Anyone was killed in the collision
• The collision caused $1,000 or more of property damage

Drivers are also required to stop at the scene of an accident and exchange contact details and other relevant information with the other parties involved in the accident.

It is a good idea to report any collisions that happen, as well as to get the contact details of witnesses in addition to contact info for other motorists in the crash. Accident reports from the police and eyewitness testimony are invaluable if questions arise later regarding who was at fault for the accident.

Some states, called no-fault states, limit the rights of crash victims. In no fault states, drivers must buy a special kind of insurance called personal injury protection. PIP coverage pays for wage loss and medical costs when minor injuries happen, regardless of who caused the crash.

Because of these rules, if you live in a no-fault state, you have to go through your own insurance rather than making a claim with the insurer of the driver who was to blame for your crash. You can collect compensation from the at-fault driver only if your injuries meet your state’s definition of seriousness.

This isn’t the rule in North Carolina, though. North Carolina is a fault state so any crash victim can try to collect compensation from the driver who caused the accident. The severity of injuries doesn’t play a deciding role in whether a claim can be made.

North Carolina does have one very unusual rule though. It is one of a very small number of states that follow contributory negligence rules. Under contributory negligence, if you were even 1% responsible for causing your own crash to happen, you cannot make a case against the other driver.

The vast majority of states have abandoned this strict rule in favor of comparative negligence. These allow crash victims to sue to recover partial compensation from another driver who shared the blame for causing the accident. But since North Carolina hasn’t adopted comparative negligence, your own carelessness could prevent you from making a successful North Carolina car accident claim.

A North Carolina car accident lawyer helps you to better understand how contributory negligence rules could affect your ability to get the compensation you need and deserve after a crash.

There is a three-year statute of limitations for making a car accident claim in North Carolina. This means you have three years from the time of the accident to move forward with your case. If you don’t, you’ll lose the legal right to try to recover compensation from the other driver.

Every state sets a statute of limitations for injury claims to protect people from having to defend lawsuits arising out of events that happened a long time ago. The theory is, most people won’t accurately remember what happened so many years ago, and evidence may be lost too.