Car insurance claims in Louisiana

Louisiana decides crash claims by fault, and it has changed the rules twice in two years. Every registered vehicle must carry liability cover under La. R.S. 32:861(A)(1), and the limits are the lowest in this round: fifteen thousand dollars for bodily injury to one person, thirty thousand for two or more, and twenty-five thousand for property damage (R.S. 32:900(B)(2)). Nothing in either section requires a first-party medical benefit — both were read end to end, and the words «personal injury protection» appear in neither — so there is no no-fault layer to fall back on. Liability itself rests on Civil Code art. 2315: «Every act whatever of man that causes damage to another obliges him by whose fault it happened to repair it,» and the article expressly adds that damages «shall include any sales taxes paid by the owner on the repair or replacement of the property damaged». Where two or more drivers are at fault, each pays only its own share: art. 2324(B) makes the obligation joint and divisible, not solidary, and art. 2324(C) provides that interruption of prescription against one joint tortfeasor is effective against all.

The shared-fault rule is the change most likely to catch a reader out. Louisiana was a pure comparative-fault state from 1979 until 31 December 2025, and almost everything written about it says so. Since 1 January 2026 art. 2323(A)(2) reads differently: a person whose own negligence is «equal to or greater than fifty-one percent» recovers nothing, and below that the award is reduced in proportion. The amendment is Acts 2025, No. 15, whose own title says it is enacted «to establish a modified comparative fault system»; its only other operative line is «This Act shall become effective on January 1, 2026.» The act contains no applicability or prospectivity clause, so whether the fifty-one percent bar reaches accidents that happened before that date has not yet been verified against a primary text and is not stated here. A companion act in the same session, Acts 2025, No. 16, raised a harsher rule still. Under R.S. 32:866(A)(1) an uninsured driver — even one who did nothing wrong — has «no recovery for the first one hundred thousand dollars of bodily injury and no recovery for the first one hundred thousand dollars of property damage», unless the other driver was convicted of impaired driving, caused the crash intentionally, fled the scene, or was committing a felony.

The deadline changed too, and the date it changed on is the one that matters. Louisiana’s famous one-year prescription is gone: Civil Code art. 3492 was «Repealed by Acts 2024, No. 423, §2, eff. July 1, 2024,» and the new art. 3493.1 provides that «Delictual actions are subject to a liberative prescription of two years. This prescription commences to run from the day that injury or damage is sustained.» Because the article covers all delictual actions, injury and vehicle damage run on the same clock. But the act that created it says, in its own Section 3, that its provisions «shall be given prospective application only and shall apply to delictual actions arising after the effective date of this Act» — so a crash on 30 June 2024 still prescribed in one year, and only crashes on or after 1 July 2024 get two. An action on the policy itself is a personal action and prescribes in ten years under art. 3499, but the policy’s own suit clause is what usually bites, and R.S. 22:868(B) sets only a floor on it: no less than twenty-four months for a first-party claim in certain enumerated classes of insurance, and no less than one year otherwise, with any shorter condition void. Which floor reaches a private passenger auto policy depends on classes given by cross-reference that were not read, and is not stated here. Filing against the driver protects the insurers too, because R.S. 22:1269(B)(3) makes that filing interrupt prescription as to every insurer covering the claim. That same section is where another 2024 change landed: the right to sue the other driver’s insurer directly is now the exception, available only in the seven listed situations — though one of them is that «the insurer is an uninsured motorist carrier», so a claim against your own uninsured-motorist cover is still direct, and the insurer is kept out of the caption.

The insurer’s clocks are statutory, and they are in one section. Under R.S. 22:1892 an insurer must pay a first-party claim «within thirty days after receipt of satisfactory proofs of loss» (A)(1); must pay a third-party property damage or reasonable medical expenses claim «within thirty days after written agreement of settlement» (A)(2); and must «initiate loss adjustment of a property damage claim and of a claim for reasonable medical expenses within fourteen days after notification of loss by the claimant» (A)(3). The units shift inside the section, so read them literally: the payment clocks are plain days, the loss-of-use rule at (B)(4)(a) runs on «more than five business days» without the car, the rental-cover duty at (B)(4)(b) on «three business days» from a written request, and the cheque-processing rule at (C)(2) on «three calendar days, exclusive of Saturdays, Sundays, and legal holidays». The insured also has a concrete right to a copy of the insurer’s field adjuster report within fifteen days of asking for it, and the anti-steering rule at (D) forbids requiring repairs at a particular place or shop and requires the insurer to say that the claimant is «under no obligation» to use a recommended service. A missed deadline is not automatically a penalty: subsection (B)(1)(a) awards fifty percent of the amount due, or a thousand dollars, plus attorney fees, only where the failure «is found to be arbitrary, capricious, or without probable cause». Since 1 July 2024 the insurer’s good-faith duty also lives here, at subsection (I), Acts 2024 No. 3 having repealed R.S. 22:1973 outright and rewritten it into this section — so any figure attributed to § 1973 today, the familiar sixty days included, is describing a statute that no longer exists, and this page publishes only § 1892’s current duties. On cover: uninsured and underinsured motorist protection is included at the policy’s own bodily-injury limits unless the named insured rejects it, takes lower limits, or chooses «economic-only» cover, and only on the commissioner’s prescribed form. A properly completed and signed form creates a rebuttable presumption that the rejection was knowing; a form signed but not properly completed loses that presumption, but the rejection still stands «if it is determined that the insured or his representative intended to reject or modify the uninsured motorist coverage» (R.S. 22:1295(1)(a)(ii)) — the defect does not restore the coverage. Any crash causing injury or death, or property damage over five hundred dollars, must be reported to police immediately, with a seventy-two-hour allowance only under an evacuation order (R.S. 32:398(A)). Whether Louisiana law allows recovery of inherent diminished value has not yet been verified against a primary text and is not stated here, and neither has whether any Insurance Department regulation adds a claims-handling deadline to R.S. 22:1892.