Arizona Crash Reporting Requirements
Crash reporting in Arizona — deadline to file: Immediately. Submit to: Local police, county sheriff, or highway patrol.
- Deadline to file
- Immediately
Immediately, by the quickest means of communication, when a crash injures or kills anyone. Arizona has no driver-filed written crash report; the investigating officer writes the report and forwards it to ADOT.
- Submit to
- Local police, county sheriff, or highway patrol
Notify the local police department if the crash happened inside a city or town, otherwise the county sheriff or the nearest highway patrol office (A.R.S. § 28-666).
How Arizona compares with every other state
What this means after a crash
The deadline is not a number of days. Arizona wants the report immediately, which in practice means from the scene or as soon as you are able. A clock that starts and ends the same day leaves no room to "get to it later", and that is the most common way an ordinary crash turns into a charge of its own.
Who receives it matters as much as when. In Arizona the report goes to Local police, county sheriff, or highway patrol. 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 Arizona
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 Arizona
Checked against the primary sources above on September 22, 2026. If a figure here is wrong, tell us and we will fix it — what we have corrected so far is public.