Is Utah an At-Fault or No-Fault State?
Yes — Utah is a no-fault state. Your own insurer pays your injury costs first, whoever caused the crash.
- Fault system
- No-fault
Your own insurer pays the first $3,000 of medical bills and the wage and household-services benefits regardless of who caused the crash. In exchange, a driver who has or should have personal injury protection cannot sue for general damages — pain and suffering — unless the injury clears the threshold in the negligence row below. Economic losses beyond the no-fault benefits are still recoverable from the at-fault driver, and the threshold does not apply at all to an uninsured motorist claim.
- Comparative negligence rule
- Modified comparative — 50% bar
You may recover only from defendants whose fault, combined with the fault of immune persons and nonparties, exceeds your own. Being exactly half at fault therefore ends the claim; below that, damages drop by your share. Utah also abolished joint and several liability: each defendant pays only its own percentage, so an insolvent co-defendant's share is simply lost. Before any of this you must clear the no-fault threshold for pain and suffering — death, dismemberment, permanent disability or impairment on objective findings, permanent disfigurement, a bone fracture, or medical expenses over $3,000.
- PIP minimum limit
- $3,000
The $3,000 medical minimum does double duty in Utah: it is both the floor on no-fault medical benefits and the dollar test in the tort threshold. It has not moved — the 2026 rewrite of § 31A-22-309 left the figure untouched — so the medical bills that buy you the right to sue for pain and suffering are the same $3,000 your own policy already had to cover.
How Utah compares with every other state
What the fault rule decides
Being a no-fault state changes who pays first, not who was wrong. Your own insurer covers your medical bills and lost income up to the limit on your policy, whoever caused the crash, and the fight about blame happens later or not at all. Only 9 of the 51 jurisdictions on this site work this way, which is why advice written for the rest of the country — sue the other driver, let their insurer pay your bills — quietly does not apply here.
Modified comparative fault turns the case into a percentage. On a hypothetical $100,000 of damages — arithmetic, not a figure from Utah law — being 20% to blame leaves you $80,000, and being 40% to blame leaves you $60,000. Cross the line at 50% and the award is not reduced, it is gone. 10 of the 50 jurisdictions on this site draw the line in the same place, and the whole dispute after a serious crash tends to be about which side of it you land on.
The $3,000 of personal injury protection is the money that moves first, before anyone argues about blame — and it is higher than 2 and lower than 15 of the 18 that require it. Treat it as a floor rather than a budget: it is what the state makes you carry, not an estimate of what an injury costs.
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 One Percentage Point That Decides Your ClaimAcross the states covered on this site there are four different rules for what your own share of the blame does to your claim — and in North Carolina, Maryland and Virginia, being 1% at fault ends it entirely.
- No-Fault Does Not Mean Nobody Is at FaultNo-fault restricts the right to sue rather than removing it. Florida, Massachusetts, Michigan and New York run it, New Jersey and Pennsylvania let you choose, and Michigan lets every driver pick one of six PIP ceilings — which changes who pays after a crash.
More on Utah
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.