A pedestrian hit by a car has no metal around them, no airbag and no seat belt. The injuries are worse than in almost any other kind of traffic case, and the argument about whose fault it was starts before the ambulance leaves.

Two things are worth knowing right away. The first is that money for your treatment is available immediately, from a source most people never think of. The second is that a change in New York law in May 2026 turned the fault argument from something that reduces a case into something that can end it.

The car that hit you pays your medical bills

You were walking. You do not own the car, you were not in it, and you may not own a car at all. It does not matter. New York’s no-fault law covers a pedestrian struck by an insured vehicle as a person covered under that vehicle’s policy, by name and in so many words.

That means the driver’s insurance company pays for your treatment and part of your lost earnings, whether or not the driver did anything wrong and whether or not you did. You do not have to prove anything to get it. You do not need your own insurance and you do not need papers.

There is a thirty-day deadline. The application has to reach that insurance company within thirty days of the accident. Miss it and the company will deny the claim, and while there is a way to explain a late filing, you do not want to be in that argument. This is the single most common way a seriously injured pedestrian ends up with hospital bills they never had to pay.

What changed in 2026, and why fault now decides everything

For decades, being partly at fault in New York reduced your recovery and nothing more. A pedestrian found thirty percent responsible collected seventy percent. Even a pedestrian found mostly at fault collected something.

That is no longer true in motor vehicle cases. An injured person whose share of the fault is greater than the driver’s now recovers nothing at all. At fifty percent you still recover half. At fifty-one percent you recover nothing. The gap between those two findings is one percentage point and the entire case.

Pedestrians are inside that rule. Because the no-fault law treats you as a covered person — the same provision that gets you the medical benefits above — your case against the driver is the kind of case the new bar applies to.

Two things follow from that, and they are the reason this page exists.

Every argument a driver’s insurer used to make to shave a settlement — you were on your phone, you were in dark clothes, you crossed mid-block, you stepped out — is now an argument aimed at ending the case outright. And the version of events that gets recorded in the first week, while you are in a hospital bed and the driver is talking to an adjuster, is often the only version anybody writes down.

One more wrinkle worth being straight about: the change applies to cases filed on or after late May 2026, not to accidents that happen after that date. An older accident that has not been brought yet is caught by it too.

What the law requires of drivers

New York puts specific written duties on drivers, and a violation of a state traffic statute is not merely evidence of carelessness — it is negligence in itself. That matters more than it sounds, because it takes an argument away from the other side before it starts.

Yielding in a crosswalk

Where there is no signal, a driver has to yield to a pedestrian crossing in a crosswalk — slowing or stopping if that is what yielding takes.

Passing a car that has stopped for someone

This one is underused and it wins cases. When a vehicle has stopped at a crosswalk to let a pedestrian cross, a driver coming up behind it may not overtake and pass it. That is the classic second-car collision — the first driver stops and waves you across, the second swings around and never sees you. The prohibition is flat, with no exceptions written into it.

Due care, crosswalk or not

Separately from the right-of-way rules, every driver has to exercise due care to avoid hitting a pedestrian or a cyclist, and to sound the horn when necessary. This duty applies whether or not you were in a crosswalk, which is why “she wasn’t at the corner” is not the end of the conversation.

The statute also carries something most people do not know about: where a driver’s failure to use due care causes injury to a pedestrian, the law presumes the failure caused it, and it falls to the driver to rebut that. It is one of the few places in this area where the burden sits on the other side.

The City’s Right of Way Law

New York City has its own law making it an offense for a driver to fail to yield to a pedestrian or cyclist who has the right of way, and a more serious one where the driver actually strikes and injures somebody. The Court of Appeals upheld it in 2021.

Be careful what you read about this one. A summons under the City law is strong evidence of negligence, and a jury is entitled to weigh it — but because it is a City ordinance rather than a state statute, it does not by itself establish liability the way a state traffic violation does. In practice that rarely costs anything, because the same driving that breaks the City law almost always breaks the state due-care statute too, and that one does carry the stronger weight.

Crossing mid-block, and what decriminalizing jaywalking did not do

New York City decriminalized jaywalking in 2024. You can no longer be ticketed for crossing outside a crosswalk, and that is a real change.

It does not mean crossing mid-block carries no legal risk. Anyone who tells you otherwise is going to cost you money. Two reasons.

State law still requires a pedestrian crossing outside a crosswalk to yield to traffic, and the City has no power to repeal a state statute. And the City’s own law, in the same breath that it stopped the ticketing, kept saying that pedestrians crossing outside a crosswalk do not have the right of way, must yield, and must exercise care entering the roadway.

So a jury can still assign you a share of the fault for crossing mid-block. Since May 2026 that share can end the case. What decriminalization did change is useful but narrower than the headlines suggested: there is no longer a ticket in the file for the defense to wave at the jury.

The arguments made against injured pedestrians

These come up in nearly every case. None of them is automatically fatal, and all of them are worth preparing for rather than being surprised by.

  • “You stepped out in front of me.” There is a statute behind this, and it has two parts: the pedestrian left a place of safety suddenly, and the vehicle was so close it was impractical for the driver to yield. The second half is where these are won — with the driver’s speed, the sightlines, and how much room there actually was to react.
  • “She was crossing mid-block.” Discussed above. It is a factor, not an answer, and it does not relieve the driver of the duty to see what is there to be seen.
  • “He was wearing dark clothing.” No law requires pedestrians to wear reflective clothing. Reduced visibility is also a reason for a driver to slow down, not a license to keep going at the same speed.
  • “She was looking at her phone.” There is no New York statute against a pedestrian using a phone. This is a jury argument and it needs to be answered with what the driver was doing, not just what you were doing.

The most useful thing you can do about any of these is early: photographs of the scene and the sightlines, the names of people who saw it, and any camera that might have caught it. Intersection and business cameras overwrite themselves, often within two weeks.

Children

A child under four cannot be found negligent in New York at all. Above that age there is no automatic protection, but a child is judged by what is reasonable for a child of that age, experience and development — not by adult standards. A seven-year-old is not expected to judge closing speed the way a grown adult is.

That age-adjusted standard matters far more now than it used to. Keeping a child’s share of the fault below half is no longer about the size of the recovery. It is about whether there is one.

A child’s own deadline to sue is extended because of their age. If a City vehicle was involved, the ninety-day notice of claim is not. That trap catches families every year — see below.

If the driver fled, had no insurance, or drove a City vehicle

Hit and run

There is a fund that stands in for the missing insurance, and it can pay both your medical benefits and a claim for your injuries. It is strict about its conditions, and one of them ends cases: in a hit and run, the accident has to be reported to the police within twenty-four hours. If the driver left, the first day matters more than anything that happens afterward.

There is also an open question worth knowing about. The new fifty-one percent bar is tied to the no-fault system, and where the car that hit you was uninsured or was never identified, there is a real argument the bar does not apply to your case at all. No court has decided it yet. It is worth raising rather than conceding.

A City bus, a sanitation truck, a police car

Ninety days to serve a notice of claim, not three years, and then roughly a year and ninety days to sue. The entity has to be the right one — a bus is usually the Transit Authority rather than the City, and serving the wrong one is not a mistake a court will fix for you. If a government vehicle was involved in any way, that is a reason to call in days rather than months.

Frequently asked questions

I don’t have health insurance or car insurance. Who pays for the hospital?

The insurance on the car that hit you, under the no-fault law, regardless of who caused the accident. You need to apply within thirty days. If the car was uninsured or fled, there is a fund that takes its place. Not having insurance of your own does not leave you without coverage here.

I was crossing against the light. Do I still have a case?

Possibly, and it depends more on the driver than on you. The question is how your share of the fault compares with the driver’s — speed, whether they were looking, whether they had time to stop. If yours ends up greater than theirs, you recover nothing, which is exactly why this kind of case needs investigating early rather than explaining away later.

The police report blames me. Is that the end of it?

No. A police report reflects what an officer was told at the scene, often by the only person still standing and talking. It is not binding on anyone, and the officer usually did not see the accident. Reports get corrected, and the details that change them — camera footage, witness accounts, the physical evidence on the vehicle — are gathered in the first weeks.

The driver’s insurance company called and wants a recorded statement.

Talk to a lawyer first. You are not required to give one, and the questions are built around the fault arguments described above. This was always worth being careful about. With a rule that ends cases at fifty-one percent, a recorded statement given from a hospital bed is now a much more expensive thing to get wrong.

My injuries seemed minor at first and got worse. Is it too late?

Usually not, but the gap will be used against you, so get evaluated and keep going back. To sue a driver for your pain and suffering on top of the medical benefits, your injury has to clear a legal bar called the serious injury threshold — and that is decided on what is written in your medical records, not on how much it actually hurts.

My husband was killed. Is this the same kind of case?

It becomes a wrongful death claim, brought by a representative of the estate, and it runs on a different clock — two years from the date of death. Whether the new fault rule even applies to a death case is unsettled; the statute speaks of personal injury and does not mention wrongful death. Anybody who tells a grieving family with certainty how that works is guessing.

How long do I have?

Three years from the accident against a private driver. Ninety days to file a notice of claim if a government vehicle was involved. Thirty days for the no-fault application. Twenty-four hours to report a hit and run to the police. The shortest of those is the one that usually gets missed.

Talk to us

If you or somebody in your family was hit by a car in Staten Island or Brooklyn, the two things worth doing this week are getting the no-fault application in and getting somebody out to the scene while the evidence is still there.

Call 718.701.2776 (toll-free: 800.310.5520) or contact us. Consultations are free. If we don’t recover money for you, we don’t get paid.

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Attorney Advertising. This page is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. No attorney-client relationship is formed by reading this page or submitting an inquiry. This page states New York law as of September 2026.