2026 Tort Law Changes by State

Injury law moved in 2025 and 2026, and most of what has been written about it is either out of date or wrong about the details that decide cases.

New York rewrote its motor vehicle claim rules. Georgia flipped its seat belt evidence rule. Louisiana ended pure comparative fault. South Carolina rebuilt liquor liability, and the Supreme Court moved every malpractice case filed in federal court.

Every entry below was verified against the signed act, the statute, or the decision itself, not against another firm's blog post.

A state missing from the table is a state where we have not confirmed a 2025 or 2026 change, which is not the same as a promise that nothing happened there.

Last verified: August 17, 2026. Legislatures amend, and courts interpret; treat any tracker older than a few months, this one included, as a starting point, and get a current answer for your own case.

Call (888) 713-6653 for a free, confidential case review under the law as it stands today.

The 2025-2026 Injury Law Scorecard, State by State

Every jurisdiction where we have confirmed a change against the signed act, the statute, or the decision itself, plus the states whose headline bills failed. It is a change log rather than a rulebook: the standing rules for all fifty states sit on our index of personal injury laws by state.

New York's 2026 Motor Vehicle Reform Is the Biggest Change

New York's reform, Part EE of the 2026 budget legislation, rewrote four rules at once for motor vehicle claims, and it governs actions commenced on or after May 26, 2026.^[1]

• The serious-injury threshold narrowed. The 90/180-day category is repealed; eight categories remain. Soft-tissue injuries that resolve must now qualify under "significant limitation of use" or they do not clear the threshold at all.
• Pure comparative fault ended for MV claims. Under the new CPLR § 1411(b), recovery is barred where the claimant's fault exceeds the combined fault of the defendants sued. An even 50/50 still recovers half; 51% recovers nothing. Every other claim type keeps pure comparative fault.
• A narrow $100,000 noneconomic cap. New Insurance Law § 5104(d) caps noneconomic damages for an at-fault claimant who was uninsured, convicted of impaired driving, or convicted of a felony connected to the crash. It does not apply to death cases or blameless drivers.
• Juries decide fault first. The trier of fact resolves fault before deciding serious injury, a sequencing change with real trial consequences.

The full threshold analysis, and what the eight categories now demand, lives on our page about New York's serious injury threshold. Anyone describing New York as a flat pure-comparative, no-caps state in 2026 is describing the law that used to exist.

Georgia's SB 68: The Seat Belt Rule Flipped for New Filings

For decades Georgia barred seat belt evidence in civil cases. The 2025 reform inverted the rule: for actions commenced on or after April 21, 2025, a plaintiff's non-use may be considered on negligence, causation, apportionment, and damages, subject to the trial court's discretion to exclude it under the evidence rules.^[2] Cases filed earlier stay under the old bar, so the filing date, not the crash date, decides which rule governs.

The same package changed apportionment, allowing fault to be assigned to nonparties even in single-defendant cases, and made further procedural changes that practitioners are still litigating the edges of. The defense-side effect is real: an unbelted plaintiff in a newly filed Georgia case faces an argument no Georgia jury had heard in a generation. How the new rule actually operates, and what it still cannot do, is covered on our page about Georgia's seat belt defense.

South Carolina's Act 42 Rewrote Liquor Liability for 2026 Accruals

South Carolina's 2025 reform, Act 42, took aim at dram shop law: how and when a bar or restaurant answers for overserving a patron who goes on to hurt someone, alongside revisions to how fault is apportioned among defendants under § 15-38-15.^[3] The act applies to causes of action accruing on or after January 1, 2026, an accrual trigger rather than a filing trigger, which puts 2025 injuries and 2026 injuries under different regimes regardless of when suit is filed.

Worth stating because it gets misreported: Act 42 did not touch South Carolina's seat belt rule. Section 56-5-6540 still makes non-use inadmissible in civil actions. The post-reform landscape for alcohol-related claims is covered on our page about South Carolina dram shop law.

Four Changes Outside the Headline States That Summaries Keep Missing

The reforms above were covered heavily because they happened in large litigation markets. Four others changed real outcomes with almost no coverage, and three of them are still described wrongly in the reference charts most firms and adjusters work from.

• Louisiana stopped being a pure comparative state. HB 431 amended C.C. art. 2323 to install a 51% bar for accidents occurring on or after January 1, 2026. A claimant found 60% at fault used to recover 40% of the damages and now recovers nothing. The trigger is the accident date, so Louisiana crashes on either side of New Year's Day 2026 are governed by different rules. Where every state now sits is mapped on our comparative negligence by state table.
• Indiana quietly opened a seat belt lane in 2024. The amendment to § 9-19-10-7 lets a defendant argue non-use on mitigation of damages, at the trial court's discretion, in a state that had barred the evidence almost entirely. Georgia got the attention; Indiana got none, and the older charts still list it as a bar state. Both are covered on our seat belt defense by state page.
• North Dakota's government caps step up mid-2026. State liability under ch. 32-12.2 rises to $500,000 per person and $2 million per occurrence for occurrences on or after July 1, 2026, from $375,000 and $1 million. Political subdivisions did not move, so which public body caused the harm now changes the ceiling as much as the date does. The claim deadlines and caps for every state are on our suing the government by state page.
• The Supreme Court changed where malpractice cases get filed. Berk v. Choy, decided unanimously on January 20, 2026, held that a state rule requiring a merit affidavit to accompany the complaint cannot be applied in federal diversity court. For a plaintiff facing a hard state filing requirement, the forum choice is now part of the strategy rather than a formality. What each state demands, and where the federal overlay bites, is on our certificate of merit by state page.

What Failed Matters Too: Florida's Vetoes and Tennessee's Dead Bills

A tracker that only lists what passed misses half the law. In 2026, two of the biggest injury-law stories were things that did not happen.

Florida held its status quo twice. The repeal of the medical malpractice "free-kill" rule, the provision that bars certain adult survivors from wrongful death pain-and-suffering damages, passed the House 88-17 in January 2026 and died in the Senate, after the previous year's version was vetoed.^[4] And the bill raising the sovereign-immunity caps was vetoed on June 30, 2026, leaving government claims capped at $200,000 per person. The 2023 HB 837 regime, the two-year filing deadline and the 50% fault bar, stands intact. The surviving rule families are covered on our Florida free-kill law page.

Tennessee's cap raise died in committee. The 2025 bill to lift the caps on claims against state and local governments failed in Senate Judiciary, and Tennessee's broader caps, $750,000 for most noneconomic loss, $1 million for catastrophic injury, remain as they have been since the courts upheld them.^[5] Details live on our page about Tennessee's damage caps.

The Filing-Date Trap: Which Version of the Law Governs Your Case

Notice what the New York and Georgia entries share: the trigger is when the action was commenced, not when the crash happened. Two people hurt in the same collision can be governed by different statutes because their lawyers filed on different days. South Carolina runs the other way, on accrual, so the injury date controls there.

This is not trivia. In a transition year, the applicability clause is a strategic variable: what a claim is worth, what evidence the defense may use, and whether a fault percentage ends the case can all turn on a date a claimant never thought about. It is also the detail secondary sources get wrong most often, which is why every row above cites the trigger. If your injury or your filing straddles one of these dates, that fact belongs at the top of your first conversation with a lawyer.