Utah Crash Reporting Requirements
In Utah, the crash reporting threshold is $2,500 in damage. Deadline to file: 10 days. Submit to: Nearest law enforcement agency; Department of Public Safety only on request.
- Damage threshold
- $2,500
Notify law enforcement when apparent property damage reaches $2,500. The figure was $1,500 until 2019, and it is the single number most often quoted wrong for Utah. Below the threshold you still owe the other driver your name, address, plate number and the name and phone number of your insurer, and if the damaged vehicle or property is unattended you must find the owner or leave a written note.
- Deadline to file
- 10 days
Two clocks, and the first one is not measured in days. Notice to the nearest law enforcement office is immediate, "by the quickest means of communication available", whenever damage looks like $2,500 or more. A written report to the Department of Public Safety is owed only if the department asks for one, and then within 10 days of the request; the investigating officer has 10 days of their own, counted from finishing the investigation rather than from any request. Failing to file a requested report costs you your license until it arrives.
- Submit to
- Nearest law enforcement agency; Department of Public Safety only on request
You call the nearest law enforcement office at the time of the crash. There is no routine paperwork to mail to the state afterwards — the investigating officer files the report, and a driver's own report exists only when the department requests it. A local highway authority may add its own reporting ordinance on top, so a city may want a copy as well. Leaving the scene without meeting these duties is a class B misdemeanor, and worse with a prior hit-and-run or impaired driving conviction in the past 10 years.
Utah sets $2,500 — higher than 37 of the 44 jurisdictions on this site. The range runs from $250 to $4,000.
How Utah compares with every other state
What this means after a crash
$2,500 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. Only 4 of the 44 that set a dollar figure start higher. 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 10 days. 23 of the 43 with a day count give you less time, 8 give 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 Utah the report goes to Nearest law enforcement agency; Department of Public Safety only on request. 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.
What changed
May 12, 2020
The crash reporting threshold rose from $1,500 to $2,500, in two separate bills
Utah raised its property damage reporting threshold in two steps that are easy to miss because they sit in different sections. H.B. 302 (Laws of Utah 2019, chapter 149, effective May 14, 2019) changed Utah Code § 41-6a-401(4), the duty to notify the nearest law enforcement office immediately, from $1,500 to $2,500. H.B. 151 (Laws of Utah 2020, chapter 74, effective May 12, 2020) then changed the matching figure in § 41-6a-402(1), the written report the Department of Public Safety may require within 10 days. Until that second bill the two numbers disagreed. Sites that still put Utah's reporting threshold at $1,500 are quoting a figure no longer in either section.
H.B. 151, Traffic Safety Amendments, enrolled copy — Laws of Utah 2020, ch. 74
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 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.