Car insurance claims in Indiana

Indiana settles motor claims on fault, and what it compels is liability cover. A person may not register a vehicle or operate one on a public highway if financial responsibility is not in effect (IC 9-25-4-1(b)), and that responsibility «must be continuously maintained as long as a motor vehicle is operated on a public highway in Indiana» (IC 9-25-4-3(a)). The minimum amounts are $25,000 for bodily injury to or the death of one individual, $50,000 for two or more in one accident, and $25,000 for property damage, the last of those since 1 July 2018. There is no compulsory first-party injury benefit in the chapters read, and so no tort threshold to cross before suing the other driver.

Sharing the blame reduces the award, and above a point it ends the claim. Any contributory fault «diminishes proportionately the amount awarded as compensatory damages … but does not bar recovery except as provided in section 6» (IC 34-51-2-5), and section 6 bars recovery where the claimant’s fault «is greater than the fault of all persons whose fault proximately contributed to the claimant’s damages». The phrase to read twice is «all persons». The jury must assess the fault of nonparties too — «regardless of whether the person was or could have been named as a party» — and the percentages of the parties «may total less than one hundred percent» as a result. A share allocated to somebody who was never sued still counts against the claimant’s own percentage, which is how a claim that looks survivable against one defendant can fail.

The court deadline is two years for both heads. Your own insurer is a different question and a less settled one: Indiana’s written-contract period is ten years from accrual (IC 34-11-2-11(a)), but the section excludes contracts «for the payment of money», no Indiana authority applying it to an insurance policy was read, and the policy’s own suit clause is normally far shorter. No provision voiding such a clause in a motor policy was located — the only one in Title 27, IC 27-1-12-8(1), is a life-insurance floor and must not be borrowed — so which limitation period governs an action on an Indiana motor policy, and whether the policy may contract for less, has not yet been verified against a primary text and is not stated here. What the statute does fix is the underinsured-motorist floor: the coverage must be made available at no less than $50,000 and an insurer «may not sell or provide» less (IC 27-7-5-2(a)).

Indiana fixes no general deadline for an insurer to acknowledge, decide or pay a motor claim. The unfair claim settlement practices section asks only for acting «reasonably promptly» on communications and affirming or denying coverage «within a reasonable time after proof of loss statements have been completed» (IC 27-4-1-4.5(2), (5)) — but unlike several neighbouring states it lists those practices flatly, without requiring a pattern frequent enough to be a general business practice, and one entry has no counterpart elsewhere in this section of the dataset: it is an unfair claim settlement practice to ascribe «a percentage of fault to a person seeking to recover from an insured party, in spite of an obvious absence of fault on the part of that person» (subdivision (15)). Whether any Indiana Administrative Code rule sets general claims-handling timeframes has not yet been verified against a primary text and is not stated here — the publisher’s own site could not be read, and no rule number is cited anywhere on this page. What Indiana does have is a clock you start yourself, through a written complaint to the commissioner, and every insurer must tell each policyholder once that the remedy exists (IC 27-4-1-5.6(f)). Two more rights are worth knowing. Uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage comes at your own liability limits unless a named insured rejected it in writing; that rejection binds everyone on the policy and does not lapse at renewal, and the uninsured half can extend to property damage as well as injury, but only if the bodily-injury half is also carried (IC 27-7-5-2(a)–(c)). And before an insurer may direct a body shop to repair the exterior of a vehicle, it must give the insured written notice of the right to approve whether new original, new non-original or used body parts are used — but only «in the five (5) years after the model year of the motor vehicle» (IC 27-4-1.5-8); failing to give that notice is itself an unfair claim settlement practice (IC 27-4-1.5-9). On reporting, the sections that once required a driver to report a crash are printed repealed; what remains is the duty at the scene, with police notification required where somebody is injured or killed and a 911 call sufficing (IC 9-26-1-1.1(a)). The $2,500 figure a reader may meet is the threshold at which a law enforcement officer must investigate, not a duty of the driver, and the officer must check the exchange of details whatever the damage (IC 9-26-2-1).