Comparative Negligence in Arizona

How Does Comparative Negligence Work in Arizona?

Arizona is a pure comparative negligence state. You can recover damages even if you were mostly at fault for your own injury.

Under A.R.S. § 12-2505, your award is reduced in proportion to your share of fault, but it is never cut off, no matter how high that share is.

At 30% fault, you keep 70% of your damages. At 90% fault, you still recover the remaining 10%.

This is one of the most plaintiff-friendly fault rules in the country, and it is the reason a shared-fault crash that would be worth nothing in some states is still a real claim in Arizona.

The catch is that the insurer decides where to start the fault argument, and it always starts high on you.

Every percentage point of fault assigned to you comes straight off your recovery, which is why the fault fight is where a serious chunk of an Arizona case is won or lost.

What Pure Comparative Negligence Means in Arizona

Comparative negligence is the rule for splitting fault when more than one person contributed to an injury. Arizona uses the most forgiving version of it.

A.R.S. § 12-2505 says the full damages "shall be reduced in proportion to the relative degree of the claimant's fault."^[1] There is no fault threshold that ends the claim. You take your damages, subtract your percentage of fault, and what is left is yours.

On a $300,000 Arizona injury claim, the math runs like this:

• 10% at fault: your recovery is reduced to $270,000
• 25% at fault: reduced to $225,000
• 50% at fault: reduced to $150,000
• 75% at fault: you still recover $75,000
• 90% at fault: you still recover $30,000

That last line is what separates Arizona from much of the country. Most states use modified comparative negligence, which bars recovery entirely once the injured person crosses 50% or 51% fault. Arizona has no such cutoff. Even a claimant found mostly responsible keeps the share the other party caused. You can see how the states line up in our breakdown of comparative negligence by state.

The One Exception

Pure comparative negligence has a single limit in Arizona. A.R.S. § 12-2505 withholds it from any claimant who "intentionally, wilfully or wantonly caused or contributed to" the injury or death. Ordinary carelessness, even a lot of it, does not trigger this. It is aimed at conduct that goes well beyond negligence. For the vast majority of injury claims, the pure comparative rule applies in full.

How Insurers Inflate Your Fault Percentage

Because every point of fault is money off the claim, the insurer's adjuster goes to work on your percentage from the first call. The pattern is consistent.

The Recorded Statement

The adjuster asks for a recorded statement early, while you are rattled and before you have the full picture. A stray "I didn't see them" or "I might have been going a little fast" becomes the foundation for a fault argument. You are not required to give one, and you should talk to a lawyer first.

Reading Fault Into the Crash Report

An officer's notation, a citation that was later dismissed, or an ambiguous diagram gets treated as a finding of fault. It is not. The crash report is evidence, not a verdict, and a reconstruction or the physical evidence often tells a different story.

The Assumed Split

A common opening move is a flat assumption that fault is 50/50, or that you carry 30% or 40%, with no analysis behind it. An assumed percentage is a negotiating position, not a legal allocation. The actual split has to be supported by evidence.

How an Attorney Counters

Your lawyer answers the fault argument with the things that actually decide it: the physical evidence, the other driver's speed and attention, surveillance and black-box data, witness accounts, and where needed an accident reconstruction. The goal is to drive your assigned percentage down, because in a pure comparative state, every point recovered is real money back in your recovery.

An adjuster's fault number is not a ruling. It is where the negotiation starts, and in a state with no fault cutoff, every point we argue back is real money returned to the client.

Comparative Fault and the Empty Chair

Arizona's fault rules carry a second wrinkle that works against an injured person if it goes unanswered. The state abolished joint liability under A.R.S. § 12-2506, so each defendant pays only its own share of fault, and a defendant is allowed to point at someone who is not in the lawsuit at all.^[2]

This is the nonparty at fault rule. A defendant can formally name an absent person or company and argue that they, not the defendant, caused the harm. If that nonparty is never brought into the case and pursued, the fault a jury assigns to the empty chair can simply disappear from your recovery.

The two rules combine into one lesson. Keeping your own fault percentage low is only half the job. The other half is making sure every genuinely responsible party is identified and in the room, so their share is collected rather than parked on a chair nobody is sitting in. Our Arizona personal injury lawyers build cases with both halves in mind.

How Arizona Compares to Other States on Fault

Arizona's pure comparative rule is one of the most plaintiff-friendly in the country. The same crash can produce very different outcomes depending on the state's negligence system. Using a claimant found 60% at fault as the example:

Negligence System	Recovery at 60% Fault	Example States
Pure comparative (Arizona)	Recover 40% of your damages	Arizona, California, New York, Florida
Modified, 50% bar	Barred; recover nothing	Colorado, Georgia, Tennessee
Modified, 51% bar	Barred; recover nothing	Texas, Nevada, Illinois
Contributory negligence	Any fault bars recovery	Alabama, Maryland, Virginia, D.C.

Other states' thresholds and how they group fault vary and change over time, so this is a general comparison rather than legal advice for another state. The point holds: in Arizona, a high fault percentage shrinks a recovery but does not erase it. See the fuller breakdown in our overview of pure vs. modified comparative negligence.