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Injured in New York? The Rules That Decide Your Case Changed in May 2026
New York Injury Compensation
If someone else's negligence hurt you in New York, you can pursue the full cost of that harm: your medical care, your lost earnings, and what the injury took from your life.
But New York rewrote a large piece of its injury law on May 26, 2026, and the changes hit car crash victims hardest.
A category of qualifying injury was deleted. A fault rule that used to protect you was narrowed. Both apply to cases filed after that date.
Outside of motor vehicle claims, New York remains one of the strongest states in the country for an injured person, and the Scaffold Law is the most powerful liability statute any construction worker in America has.
Our New York attorneys work from 305 Broadway in Lower Manhattan, in the courthouse district where these cases are actually tried.
Attorney Don Worley is admitted in New York and has spent more than twenty years trying serious injury cases.
You pay nothing unless we win. Call (888) 713-6653 for a free, confidential review of your New York injury claim.
- $100+ million recovered w/ 98% recovery rate
- Admitted in New York, with a Lower Manhattan office in the courthouse district
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What the May 2026 Reform Changed, and What It Left Alone
Part EE of the 2026 state budget took effect on May 26, 2026 and applies to actions commenced on or after that date. Four changes matter to an injured person, and the first two are the ones that cost real money.
The 90/180 category is gone from the serious injury threshold. To sue for pain and suffering after a New York car crash, you have to clear the "serious injury" gate in Insurance Law § 5102(d).[1] That gate used to have a ninth door: an injury that kept you from substantially all of your usual activities for 90 of the 180 days after the crash. That door was deleted. Eight categories remain, and a soft-tissue injury that resolves now has to fit one of them or it does not clear at all. Our breakdown of the eight remaining serious injury categories walks through each one.
Car crash victims lost pure comparative negligence. New York was one of the few states where an injured person could be 90% at fault and still recover the other 10%. That is still true for a construction fall, a bad surgery, or a sidewalk trip. It is no longer true in a motor vehicle case: new CPLR § 1411(b) bars recovery entirely when your share of fault is greater than the defendant's.[2] Fault is now a cliff in car cases and a slope everywhere else, which is exactly the distinction the adjuster is counting on you not to know. See how New York's two fault rules now work.
New York still does not cap what a jury can award you. No general limit on pain and suffering. No medical malpractice cap. A New York jury can size the verdict to the actual harm, which is not true in most of the country. The 2026 reform carved one narrow exception: Insurance Law § 5104(d) caps non-economic loss at $100,000 for an at-fault injured driver who was uninsured, or who was convicted of driving impaired, or who was committing a felony. It does not touch wrongful death claims. Everyone else's recovery is uncapped, and our page on New York damage caps explains where the line falls.
The Scaffold Law was not touched. Labor Law § 240(1) still puts absolute, non-delegable liability on owners and general contractors when a gravity-related hazard hurts a construction worker, and comparative negligence is still not a defense to it.[3] It is the strongest injury statute in the country and it exists nowhere else. Our attorneys handle these claims from the New York office; the mechanics are laid out in our explainer on New York Labor Law 240.
Read together, the message is blunt. New York got harder for people hurt in cars and stayed excellent for people hurt on job sites, on sidewalks, and in hospitals. Which side of that line your case falls on now changes the strategy from the first phone call.
- New York Scaffold Law Claims
- New York Construction Accident Lawyers
- Car Accident Lawyers
- New York Truck Accident Lawyers
- New York Medical Malpractice Lawyers
- New York Wrongful Death Lawyers
- Premises Liability Lawyers
- New York Pedestrian Accident Lawyers
- Nursing Home Abuse Lawyers
- Brain Injury Lawyers
- Catastrophic Injury Attorneys
- Subway, Bus & MTA Injury Claims
- NYC Sidewalk Injury Liability
- New York Negligent Security Claims
- New York Settlement Value
- Do I Need a Lawyer After a Crash?
The New York Injury Cases That Turn on a Rule Most People Never Hear
We handle serious injury and death cases across New York, the kind that need investigation, expert proof, and a firm willing to try them.
- Construction and Scaffold Law falls. Falls from scaffolds, ladders, roofs, and unguarded floor openings, plus falling-object strikes. Labor Law § 240(1) and § 241(6) reach the owner and the general contractor directly, which is why a construction accident claim in New York is worth far more than a workers' comp file alone. Related: scaffolding accidents and third-party claims beyond comp.
- The second case workers' comp never mentions. A tradesperson collecting compensation usually has a separate claim against somebody other than the employer, and nobody on the site is required to point it out. Our page on comp plus a third-party lawsuit shows where that second recovery comes from, and Workers' Compensation Law § 11 and the grave injury list covers the narrow cases where the employer itself can be reached.
- The trades the statute was written for. Sandhogs and tunnel workers do the most dangerous construction work in the state, almost always on publicly owned projects with a 90-day clock attached. Window cleaners and facade crews work suspended off buildings under a separate duty in Labor Law § 202.
- Hurt on a job site you do not work on. A delivery driver, a tenant, or someone walking past has a real claim, just not the same one, and our page on non-worker construction site injuries works through what is left. On residential jobs the one and two-family homeowner exemption decides who stays in the case and who walks.
- Car, truck, and motorcycle crashes. Collisions on the Cross Bronx Expressway, the BQE, the Long Island Expressway, and the Thruway. Every one of these now runs through the rebuilt threshold and fault rules. Our car accident attorneys and New York truck accident lawyers handle the full range. Riders sit outside the no-fault system entirely, which our page on New York motorcycle accident claims explains.
- For-hire vehicles and delivery fleets. The company behind the vehicle almost always carries more coverage than a private driver does, which is the whole reason it matters who owned it. See Uber, Lyft, and TLC vehicle crashes and contracted parcel delivery van claims.
- Buses and carting trucks. A charter or tour bus seating eight or more has to carry a $1,500,000 combined single limit, while a seven-seat van for hire needs almost nothing. A private carting truck answers under City rules a Department of Sanitation truck does not.
- Passengers, and the driver who left. A passenger is the one person in a collision with no fault to defend, which our page on injured passenger claims explains. When the at-fault driver fled or carried nothing, MVAIC and uninsured driver claims run on far shorter deadlines than the crash itself.
- No-fault benefits, and what happens when they stop. Every New York crash claim starts inside the no-fault system, with a 30-day application deadline that quietly voids benefits. When payments are denied or cut off after an insurer examination, that decision can be reversed. What the other driver's policy actually holds is on our page about New York coverage requirements.
- Pedestrian and cyclist injuries. New York City leads the nation in walking and cycling volume, and the crosswalk, dooring, and delivery-vehicle cases that follow have clear liability and severe injuries. See our New York pedestrian accident lawyers, our page for e-bike and delivery riders, and our page on cyclists doored in a bike lane.
- Sidewalk, staircase, and premises falls. Under NYC Administrative Code § 7-210, the building owner next to the sidewalk is usually the defendant, not the City. Our NYC sidewalk liability page explains the shift, our page on how long the hazard was there covers the notice fight that decides most of these cases, and apartment stairway and handrail claims run on measurements the Multiple Dwelling Law already fixed.
- The two arguments that end most sidewalk cases. That the defect was too small to sue over, which our page on the trivial defect doctrine answers with the factors courts actually weigh. And that the storm had not finished yet, covered on our page about winter falls and the storm in progress rule.
- Street hardware, potholes, and defects the City owns. A cellar door, hatch, or sidewalk grate pulls the building back in through the special use doctrine. A pothole or broken crosswalk belongs to the City, but usually only where the defect was already recorded, which our page on prior written notice and the Big Apple Map explains.
- Elevators, windows, and lead paint. Three building duties that leave a dated paper trail. An elevator that stops off level adds the maintenance contractor as a second defendant. Window guards are required in any apartment where a child ten or younger lives. And lead paint in a pre-1960 building is presumed rather than proven, which shifts the whole case onto the owner.
- Public housing injuries. A fall in a New York City Housing Authority building is not an ordinary landlord case. Public Housing Law § 157 layers a notice of claim, a 30-day waiting period, and a one year and 90 day suit deadline on top of the same duty, and our page on NYCHA injury claims lays out that sequence.
- Building fires, poisonings, and outbreaks. Lithium-ion battery fires, carbon monoxide from a failed boiler or flue, and Legionnaires' disease from an untested cooling tower. Each of these is governed by a specific New York requirement with a dated compliance record behind it, and our battery fire and carbon monoxide pages show how those records are pulled.
- Silica dust in countertop shops. Fabricators cutting engineered stone are developing silicosis young, and CPLR § 214-c starts the three years at the diagnosis rather than at the exposure that caused it. Our page on engineered stone silicosis claims covers both cases a fabricator usually has.
- Assaults caused by failed building security. A broken entrance lock, a dead intercom, or a dark stairwell can make an owner answerable for a foreseeable attack. See our page on New York negligent security claims.
- Medical malpractice. Missed cancer diagnoses, surgical errors, ER failures, and birth injuries, in a state that caps nothing. Our New York medical malpractice attorneys take on hospital defense teams, the 2.5-year malpractice deadline has exceptions most patients never hear about, and lack of informed consent is a separate codified claim.
- The malpractice patterns we see most. A cancer diagnosis delayed until the stage changed, a heart attack, stroke, or sepsis sent home from an emergency room, and a sponge or instrument left inside after surgery, which carries a one-year deadline that starts the day it is found.
- Malpractice deadlines that are not what they look like. The continuous treatment doctrine can move the start date to your last visit rather than the mistake. A child's birth injury claim runs on the infancy toll, with a ten-year ceiling families are rarely told about. And harm at a New York City public hospital compresses two and a half years into 90 days.
- Subway, bus, and municipal claims. A fall on MTA stairs, a city bus collision, an injury on public property. These carry a 90-day notice requirement that quietly ends more good claims than any other rule in New York. See subway, bus, and MTA injury claims, falls in parks and public buildings, and the 90-day notice of claim.
- Nursing home neglect and elder abuse. Pressure injuries, falls, malnutrition, and sepsis in a state with one of the largest facility counts in the country. New York gives residents a statutory claim negligence does not, covered on our page about Public Health Law § 2801-d neglect claims, alongside our national nursing home abuse lawyers.
- Brain, spinal, and catastrophic injuries. Traumatic brain injury, paralysis, amputation, and severe burns carry lifetime costs, and New York's no-cap rule matters most here. Our brain injury lawyers and catastrophic injury attorneys build claims sized to decades of care.
- Wrongful death. New York's wrongful death statute is one of the most restrictive in the country, and what a family can recover is narrower than most people expect. Our page on what a New York wrongful death claim can recover explains why, and where the real value usually sits. Families ready to talk to someone can start with our New York wrongful death lawyers.
- Where that rule falls hardest. A statute that pays for economic loss and nothing else is at its cruelest when there were no earnings to project, which is the situation on our page about the wrongful death of a child. And a death at a public hospital starts the 90-day clock from the appointment of an estate representative, not from the day of the death.
- What a family actually recovers after a death. New York pays for economic loss and nothing else, so the categories that do count are worth reading in full on our page about New York wrongful death damages. The survival action for conscious pain and suffering belongs to the estate and is frequently the larger of the two claims.
If your injury is not on this list, call anyway. The only way to know whether you have a New York claim is to have a lawyer look at the actual facts.
Lawsuit Legal is a nationwide personal injury firm, and our New York attorneys bring that trial experience to the cases they take here.
The Injury Claims That Only Happen in New York
Some of the strongest cases we see here run on statutes and conditions that exist in no other state. Practicing in New York means knowing them cold.
Gravity cases under the Scaffold Law. A worker who falls from a height, or is struck by an object that should have been secured, does not have to prove the owner was careless. Labor Law § 240(1) makes liability absolute when the required safety device was missing or failed. A comparable fall in Texas or Florida is an ordinary negligence case worth a fraction of the same claim in New York.
The sidewalk that belongs to the building. Since 2003, § 7-210 has pushed liability for a defective New York City sidewalk onto the abutting property owner, with a narrow carve-out for owner-occupied one-to-three-family homes where the City stays on the hook. Naming the wrong defendant is how these cases die.
The 90-day clock on public defendants. Sue the City, the MTA, or a public hospital and General Municipal Law § 50-e gives you 90 days to serve a sworn notice of claim, not three years. Miss it and a strong case is usually over before it starts.
Delivery and micromobility injuries. E-bikes, mopeds, and app-dispatched delivery riders have turned New York streets into a crash environment no other city has at this scale, and the employment and coverage questions behind those crashes are still unsettled.
Buildings that hurt people who never went inside. Sidewalk sheds, facade work under Local Law 11, and construction debris injure pedestrians walking past. The Scaffold Law does not reach a passerby, and the one Industrial Code rule written for people passing a construction site is switched off inside New York City, so these claims run on negligence and on the building's own violation history. Our page on pedestrians hit by falling debris and sidewalk sheds works through who answers for it.
The bar that kept pouring. General Obligations Law § 11-101 gives an injured person a direct claim against the licensee that unlawfully served a visibly intoxicated driver, with actual and exemplary damages, and it is a separate defendant with separate insurance. Our page on New York dram shop claims covers what an unlawful sale requires.
Transit injuries at transit scale. Millions of daily subway and bus trips produce stairway falls, platform-gap injuries, and bus collisions, each against a public authority with its own notice rules and its own defense playbook.
Buildings regulated down to the calendar. New York requires window guards where a young child lives, Legionella testing every 31 days on a registered cooling tower, carbon monoxide alarms replaced at the end of their stated life, and certified lithium-ion batteries on anything sold here. Each of those duties generates a dated record, which means proving what an owner knew starts from a file rather than from an argument. Our page on cooling tower Legionnaires' claims shows what that looks like in practice.
What Changed on May 26, 2026
The 90/180-day category was removed from the serious injury threshold in Insurance Law § 5102(d). Eight categories remain: death, dismemberment, significant disfigurement, a fracture, loss of a fetus, permanent loss of use, permanent consequential limitation of use, and significant limitation of use.
CPLR § 1411(b) now bars recovery in a motor vehicle case if the injured person's share of fault is greater than the defendant's. Pure comparative negligence still applies to every other kind of injury claim in New York.
Insurance Law § 5104(d) caps non-economic loss at $100,000 for an at-fault injured driver who was uninsured, convicted of impaired driving, or committing a felony. Wrongful death claims are excluded.
These provisions apply to actions commenced on or after May 26, 2026, which makes the filing date part of what a case is worth.
What Compensation Can You Recover in a New York Injury Case?
"Two people with the same diagnosis can recover completely different amounts. Value is built from the file, not from a formula..."
There is no honest average. What a claim is worth comes from the severity of the injury, the strength of the liability proof, and the insurance actually available to pay it.
Injury severity and permanence. A documented, permanent injury carries the highest values. A full recovery sits at the other end of the range.
Liability and shared fault. Clear liability is worth more than a contested one, and in a car case, fault above the defendant's share now ends the claim rather than shrinking it.
Available coverage and defendants. New York's minimum policy is small. Finding every applicable policy, and every responsible party, is often what separates a modest recovery from a full one.
Future costs. Future surgery, attendant care, and lost earning capacity usually dwarf the bills already paid, and because New York caps nothing, those numbers are recoverable in full.
Damages in a New York personal injury claim can include:
- Past and future medical bills, including surgery, hospitalization, and rehabilitation
- Lost wages and loss of future earning capacity
- Pain and suffering, with no statutory ceiling in an ordinary claim
- Permanent disability, disfigurement, and scarring
- Loss of enjoyment of life
- Loss of consortium for a spouse
- Home modifications, assistive equipment, and long-term attendant care
- Punitive damages where the conduct was reckless or intentional
Our page on pain and suffering damages in New York covers how the non-economic side is proven and what actually limits it here.
For crash claims specifically, what sets New York car accident settlement value walks through the threshold gate, the excluded $50,000 of basic economic loss, and the coverage search that decides the ceiling.
Value also turns on the injury itself, because each one meets the threshold differently and gets attacked differently. We break that down for a herniated disc, where the range-of-motion measurements matter more than the MRI, a torn rotator cuff, where the fight is whether the tear is traumatic or degenerative, and a torn ACL or meniscus, where a weight-bearing joint changes the whole calculation.
The same goes for a brain injury the emergency room scan never looked for, for complex regional pain syndrome, which has to be proven to people paid to doubt it, and for a fracture, which clears the gate outright and puts the entire case on what it is worth.
If a number is already sitting in front of you, read it before you sign anything. Our page on what a first settlement offer is actually priced on covers what the release gives up and when accepting is the right call.
Why Injured New Yorkers Choose Lawsuit Legal
New York has more personal injury advertising than any market in the country. Volume is easy to buy. What follows is what we would want a family to weigh instead.
- A New York-admitted trial attorney, not a referral desk. Don Worley is admitted in New York and has spent more than twenty years trying serious injury cases. Colleagues call him the lawyer lawyers call when cases get complicated, and the firm's New York work runs through him rather than being handed off.
- An office in the courthouse district. We work from 305 Broadway in Lower Manhattan, minutes from New York County Supreme Court at 60 Centre Street and the federal courthouse at 500 Pearl Street. Being where the cases are tried is not a marketing line; it is how you keep pressure on a file.
- Verified Scaffold Law experience. We handle Labor Law § 240 and § 241(6) claims and use the statute the way it was written, to hold owners and general contractors strictly accountable for height safety.
- Results across 40,000 cases. More than $100 million recovered and a 98% recovery rate, built on selective case acceptance rather than volume intake. We take a case when we believe hiring a lawyer is in that person's best interest.
- Recognized by our peers. Our attorneys have been recognized by Best Lawyers in America, Super Lawyers, the Million Dollar Advocates Forum, and the National Trial Lawyers.
- Trial-ready posture. Insurance companies price a claim partly on who is holding it. A file that can be tried is worth more than a file that will always settle, and carriers track the difference.
- You Win or It's Free. No fee unless we recover for you, free consultations 24/7, and home and hospital visits for clients too badly hurt to travel.
Past results do not guarantee future outcomes, and every claim turns on its own facts.
Where Our New York Injury Lawyers Practice
Lawsuit Legal's New York office is at 305 Broadway, 7th Floor, in Manhattan's Civic Center. The office runs by appointment, and for clients too badly hurt to travel we come to the home or the hospital.
We picked Lower Manhattan because you can walk from our door to 60 Centre Street. A firm that never goes to the courthouse settles like a firm that never goes to the courthouse.
Manhattan and the courthouse district. Civil cases here are filed in New York County Supreme Court at 60 Centre Street, with smaller claims in Civil Court at 111 Centre Street and federal matters at the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Courthouse at 500 Pearl Street. All of it sits within a few blocks of our office.
The outer boroughs. Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island each file in their own county Supreme Court, and the jury pools and calendars differ enough that venue is a real strategic question rather than a formality.
Long Island and the Hudson Valley. Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester, and Rockland claims run on the same state law with a different jury profile and a different crash mix, weighted toward highway collisions rather than pedestrian strikes.
Upstate and statewide. We take cases across New York State, including the Thruway and I-90 corridors, where a serious crash usually means a long transport to a regional trauma center and a scene that is cleared before anyone documents it properly.
How Long Do You Have to File an Injury Claim in New York?
Most New York personal injury claims must be filed within three years of the injury under CPLR § 214.[4] That is longer than most states give you, and it is the single most common reason people assume there is no rush.
Three shorter clocks override it. Medical malpractice runs two years and six months under CPLR § 214-a. Wrongful death runs two years from the date of death. And any claim against the City, the MTA, a public hospital, or another public entity requires a sworn notice of claim within 90 days under General Municipal Law § 50-e, with the lawsuit itself due within one year and 90 days.
A case can be perfectly good on the merits and still be over because the 90-day notice was never served. That is not a rare outcome in New York; it is the ordinary one when nobody identifies a public defendant early.
The safe move is to have the deadline confirmed rather than assumed. There is no fixing a missed one, and no cost to asking. Every New York deadline, including the shorter ones that override the three-year rule, is laid out side by side on our page covering the statute of limitations for New York injury claims.