Alabama Crash Reporting Requirements
In Alabama, the crash reporting threshold is $250 in damage. Deadline to file: 30 days. Submit to: Alabama Law Enforcement Agency.
- Damage threshold
- $250
Lower than almost anywhere else. A written report is due whenever anyone is killed or injured, or property damage to any one person — including your own car — comes to more than $250. Do not confuse this with the $500 figure in § 32-7-6: that is the threshold for the separate security-deposit process, not for the reporting duty.
- Deadline to file
- 30 days
Thirty days after the crash. If the driver is physically unable to file, the owner has 10 days from learning of the crash.
- Submit to
- Alabama Law Enforcement Agency
The written report goes to the Director on ALEA's own form. That is separate from the duty under § 32-10-5 to give immediate notice, by the quickest means available, to the local police if the crash is inside a municipality and otherwise to the county sheriff or the state troopers, whenever anyone is injured or killed. When an officer investigates, that officer files the uniform report with ALEA within 24 hours.
Alabama sets $250 — the lowest of the 44 jurisdictions on this site. The range runs from $250 to $4,000.
How Alabama compares with every other state
What this means after a crash
$250 is the number to keep in mind, and it is a damage figure rather than an injury one: a crash with no one hurt still has to be reported once the damage reaches it. No jurisdiction we cover starts lower. Note what the threshold is measured against — apparent damage at the scene, not the final repair invoice — so the call has to be made before anyone has priced anything.
You have 30 days. No jurisdiction we cover gives you more. The clock runs from the crash, not from the insurance claim or the repair estimate, and it keeps running while you wait to hear whether the police filed a report of their own.
Who receives it matters as much as when. In Alabama the report goes to Alabama Law Enforcement Agency. An officer writing a report at the scene is not automatically the report the state is waiting for — where the two are separate, the table above says who receives yours.
Every statute cited for Alabama
Why the rule looks like this
- What Changed in 2026Liability minimums doubled in Hawaii, two states dropped pure comparative fault, New Hampshire stopped inspecting cars, and three crash reporting thresholds moved — a dated account of the 2026 changes, and the ones already signed for 2027 and beyond.
- The Crash You Are Required to Report Is Smaller Than You ThinkCrash-report triggers start at $500 in Georgia and New Jersey and reach $3,000 for a Virginia police report; Florida's is $500 before 1 October 2026 and $2,000 from that date, and Pennsylvania and Maryland use no dollar figure at all.
More on Alabama
Checked against the primary sources above on September 27, 2026. If a figure here is wrong, tell us and we will fix it — what we have corrected so far is public.