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What to Do After a Car Accident in Georgia
Stop, check for injuries, and call 911.
Those three actions cover your legal duties at a Georgia crash scene and start the record your claim will be built on.
What you do in the first hour protects your health.
What you do in the first week usually decides how the insurance claim goes.
Most claim problems trace back to something skipped in this window, and every one of them is avoidable.
Questions about a crash that already happened? Call (888) 713-6653 for a free review. You Win or It's Free.
After a Georgia Crash, at a Glance
- Georgia law requires you to stop, render aid, and report a crash with injury, death, or $500+ in damage
- If no one is seriously hurt, move drivable vehicles out of the roadway; the law protects you for doing it
- Photograph everything before the vehicles move, and see a doctor the same day
- Your crash report is on BuyCrash.com within days for $13
- Two years to file an injury claim; a government defendant shortens the clock
What to Do at the Scene of a Georgia Crash
Georgia's rules of the road set three duties at the scene, and the first steps track them exactly.
1. Stop, Stay, and Help
Georgia law requires every driver involved in a crash to stop immediately or as close to the scene as possible, exchange name, address, and registration, and give reasonable help to anyone hurt, including getting them transport to medical care.[1] Leaving a serious-injury crash is a felony under O.C.G.A. § 40-6-270. Stay until police release you.
2. Call 911 and Report It
If anyone is hurt, someone died, or the damage looks like $500 or more, O.C.G.A. § 40-6-273 requires notice to police by the quickest means available.[2] In practice, that means call 911 from the scene. The officer's report becomes the first official record of fault, so a crash handled with a handshake and a phone number is a crash with no record at all when the other driver changes their story.
3. Move Drivable Vehicles Out of the Road
When no one appears seriously hurt, Georgia requires drivers to move drivable vehicles out of the travel lanes, onto the shoulder or median, and O.C.G.A. § 40-6-275 says doing so cannot be used to pin fault on you.[3] If the crash involves serious injury or death, leave the vehicles where they are until police document the scene.
4. Photograph Everything First
Before the vehicles move, if it is safe, photograph their positions, the damage to each, skid marks, debris, traffic signals, and the road itself. Wide shots that show the whole intersection matter as much as close-ups. Thirty seconds of video walking the scene captures details no checklist remembers.
5. Exchange Information and Find Witnesses
Get the other driver's name, phone number, insurer, policy number, and tag number. Then look around for witnesses and get names and numbers before they drive off. An independent witness who saw the light change is often the single most valuable piece of a disputed-fault case.
6. Watch What You Say
Be polite, check on the other driver, and say nothing about fault. "I'm sorry" at a crash scene has a way of surfacing later as an admission. Georgia reduces your recovery by your share of blame and bars it entirely at 50 percent, so casual scene apologies carry real cost under the state's comparative negligence rule.
What to Do in the Days After the Crash
7. See a doctor the same day, even if you feel fine. Adrenaline masks injuries, and the most common serious ones, concussions, disc injuries, internal bleeding, routinely surface a day or two later. The medical visit protects your health first, and it also ties the injury to the crash in writing. A treatment gap is the first thing an adjuster uses to argue the crash did not cause the harm.
8. Notify your insurer, and only your insurer. Report the crash to your own company promptly, as your policy requires. You have no obligation to give the other driver's insurer a recorded statement, and you should not. Those calls are made to lock in answers before you know the extent of your injuries. If the at-fault driver was uninsured or carried the state minimum, your own uninsured motorist coverage may end up paying the claim, which makes the early paper trail matter twice.
How to Get Your Georgia Crash Report
The investigating officer files a Georgia crash report, and most agencies post it to BuyCrash.com, the state's online portal, within a few days of completion. A copy costs $13. If the agency does not use BuyCrash, you can request the report from the department directly or through the Georgia Department of Transportation's crash reporting office.
Read it as soon as you have it. The report records the officer's diagram, the statements each driver gave, any citations issued, and the contributing factors the officer checked. Errors happen, a transposed lane, a wrong direction of travel, and they are far easier to correct in the first weeks than after the insurer has built its position on them.
The Deadlines That Apply to a Georgia Crash Claim
Most Georgia injury claims must be filed within two years of the crash, and the full set of deadlines and exceptions is covered on our Georgia statute of limitations page. Three wrinkles catch people.
- Property damage runs on a different clock. Georgia allows four years for vehicle damage under O.C.G.A. § 9-3-32, which misleads people into thinking the injury deadline is just as forgiving.[4] It is not.
- Government vehicles shorten everything. A crash with a city truck, a county vehicle, or a state employee triggers an ante litem notice due in as little as six months.
- Evidence has its own deadline. Intersection cameras, dash cam footage, and a commercial defendant's records are overwritten on their own schedules, long before any statute runs.
When Calling a Lawyer Actually Helps
Not every fender-bender needs an attorney, and we say so. A crash with no injury and clear fault is usually a claim you can handle yourself, and our guide on whether you need a lawyer after a Georgia crash draws that line honestly.
The calculus changes when you were hurt, when fault is disputed, when a commercial vehicle or government defendant is involved, or when the insurer's first offer arrives before your treatment ends. Those are the claims where the early moves, preservation letters, the right medical documentation, refusing the recorded statement, change the outcome, and where our Georgia car accident lawyers do their best work.