Hit and Run and Uninsured Driver Claims in New York

Hit by a Driver Who Fled or Carried No Insurance in New York? There Are Two Doors, and Only One of Them Is Yours.

If you or anyone in your household has an auto policy, your claim goes through uninsured motorist coverage. New York makes that coverage mandatory on every policy.

If nobody in the household has auto insurance, the claim goes to the Motor Vehicle Accident Indemnification Corporation instead.

MVAIC exists for people with nowhere else to turn, and it enforces that limit strictly: having other coverage available disqualifies you.

Both routes run on deadlines shorter than anything in the ordinary injury system.

A hit-and-run needs a police report within 24 hours and a notice of intention within 90 days.

Nobody hands you that timetable at the scene, and the fleeing driver's plate is not what decides whether the claim survives.

Call (888) 713-6653 for a free review of your New York hit-and-run or uninsured driver claim. You Win or It's Free.

Start Here: Does Anyone in Your Household Carry Auto Insurance?

This single question decides which system your claim belongs to, and getting it wrong costs months.

New York requires uninsured motorist coverage on every auto policy issued in the state, at $25,000 per person and $50,000 per accident. That coverage is written to respond when the at-fault driver has no insurance or cannot be identified, which is precisely the hit-and-run situation. It reaches the named insured and, depending on the policy, resident family members, including while they are passengers in someone else's car or on foot as pedestrians.

So if you own a car, or you live with a relative who does, that policy is usually the first and best route. A UM claim also has a feature people do not expect: your own insurer becomes your adversary in it. The company that has been collecting your premiums is now the entity valuing your injury and deciding what to pay, and it defends that money the way any carrier does.

MVAIC is the other door, and it is narrower on purpose.

The MVAIC Deadlines, and What Closes Them

MVAIC operates under Article 52 of the Insurance Law. Its requirements are procedural, unforgiving, and completely independent of how strong your injury case is:^[1]

• Report to police within 24 hours. A hit-and-run reported three days later is a serious problem, because the report is what substantiates that an unidentified vehicle existed at all
• Notice of intention within 90 days for an accident involving a hit-and-run or unidentified motor vehicle. This is the deadline that ends the most claims
• Notice of intention within 180 days where the uninsured vehicle is identified but had no coverage in force
• A sworn, notarized filing. The notice of intention and household affidavit have to be completed, signed, and notarized, not emailed as a description of events
• Proof of New York residency as of the date of the accident: a utility bill, a lease, a driver license, or a state ID showing the address you lived at then

Statutory notice deadlines are set out in Insurance Law § 5208, and there is no cure for a missed one that resembles the flexibility courts sometimes extend elsewhere.^[2] There is also no cost to filing early and no benefit to waiting for the police investigation to conclude.

Who Actually Qualifies for MVAIC Coverage

A qualified person under Article 52 is, in general terms:

• A New York resident on the date of the accident, with non-residents qualifying only in limited circumstances
• A person with no other automobile insurance available, including through any household member's policy. This is the requirement that disqualifies most applicants, and it is checked
• Not the owner of the uninsured vehicle involved, and not the owner's spouse riding as a passenger in it
• A pedestrian, cyclist, or occupant injured by an uninsured or unidentified motor vehicle in New York

The household requirement catches people who reasonably believed they had no coverage. An adult living with a parent who owns a car, a person whose spouse has a policy they have never read, a passenger who assumed the driver's lapsed policy was the end of it: each of those has coverage somewhere, and the right move is to find it rather than to file with MVAIC and be denied at the four-month mark.

Which is exactly the kind of question that should be answered in the first week, not the fifth month.

What MVAIC Pays, and What It Does Not

MVAIC provides the no-fault benefits an insurer would have paid, plus access to a liability recovery for the injury itself.

On the benefits side, medical expenses and work loss track the no-fault structure, with lost earnings capped at $2,000 per month for up to three years. That is the same ceiling every New York no-fault claimant lives with, and the same reason it stops covering the actual loss for anyone earning more than roughly $30,000 a year.

On the liability side, the recovery is subject to the same serious injury threshold that governs every motor vehicle claim in this state. Eight categories qualify under Insurance Law § 5102(d) after the May 2026 reform repealed the 90/180-day category, so an injury that was disabling but temporary now has to be documented into permanent or significant limitation of use. Our page on the New York serious injury threshold takes each category apart.

What MVAIC is not is a windfall. It is a substitute for the coverage the at-fault driver was required to carry and did not, which means the practical ceiling is modest and the value of the claim depends heavily on documentation.

Why These Claims Are Won on Investigation, Not on Forms

An unidentified vehicle does not have to stay unidentified. The most valuable work in a hit-and-run case is the search that turns it into an ordinary liability claim against an insured driver:

• Fixed and private cameras - Building, bodega, bus, and traffic cameras along the route, requested before retention cycles overwrite them, which on many private systems is a matter of days
• Partial plates and vehicle descriptions - A partial plate plus a make, model, and color is frequently enough to identify a registrant
• Physical evidence from the vehicle - Paint transfer, a broken mirror housing, a grille fragment, or a bumper cover left at the scene
• Body shop and parts inquiries - A vehicle with front-end damage from a collision it fled has to be repaired somewhere
• The police investigation itself - Collision investigation records, canvass results, and any subsequent arrest, which the criminal case can produce faster than a civil subpoena

Drivers who flee get identified more often than the police report suggests. The driver who left is usually still in the neighborhood, still driving a car with front-end damage, and still in somebody's camera. Sometimes they come forward, or a camera two doors down from the scene can identify them. Nobody looks for him unless it is somebody's job to look. We treat a hit-and-run as an open investigation rather than a closed one. The difference between MVAIC and a real liability policy is worth the effort.

Our national guide on what to do after a hit-and-run covers the immediate steps, and the uninsured accident page covers the claim structure in general terms.

 

What You Can Recover After Being Hit by an Uninsured or Fleeing Driver

The categories are the same as any New York injury claim; the constraint is the coverage available to pay them:

• Medical expenses - Through no-fault benefits from MVAIC or your own policy, then beyond the $50,000 cap through the liability or UM claim
• Lost earnings - Capped at $2,000 per month for three years in the benefits layer, with the full loss pursued in the liability claim
• Pain and suffering - Uncapped by statute in New York, and available once the serious injury threshold is met
• Permanent limitation, disfigurement, and scarring
• Wrongful death and survival damages - Where a fleeing driver kills someone, pursued as pecuniary loss to the family plus the decedent's conscious pain and suffering
• Punitive damages - Available against a driver whose conduct went beyond ordinary negligence, which leaving the scene of a serious injury often does

Supplementary underinsured motorist coverage deserves a specific mention. Where a driver is eventually identified but carries minimum limits, SUM coverage on your own or a household policy can add substantially to the recovery, and it is the most commonly overlooked money in this category of case. What a minimum New York policy actually contains is set out on our page covering New York car insurance requirements.

Timing sits over all of it. Three years from the crash to sue an identified driver under CPLR § 214(5), a much shorter contractual window in most UM policies, and the 24-hour and 90-day MVAIC requirements above. The full deadline map is on our page covering how long you have to file a New York injury claim.