Hit by a drunk driver: a complete guide for DUI accident victims

A drunk driver killed 11,904 people in the United States in 2024, accounting for roughly 30% of all traffic deaths that year.¹ The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention put the annual cost of alcohol-impaired crash deaths at about $143 billion.² Behind those numbers are people who did nothing wrong: drivers stopped at a red light, passengers in the other car, pedestrians standing on the shoulder. If that's you or someone you love, the path forward runs through two separate legal systems at once, plus an insurance process that often pays out far less than victims expect.

This guide covers how a DUI crash claim works at the national level: the criminal case, the civil case, who besides the driver might owe you money, what insurance actually covers, and the deadlines that can quietly end your right to sue. Several of these rules vary by state, sometimes sharply, so treat this as the map and check your state's page for the specific figures that apply where your crash happened.

Right after the crash

Police responding to a suspected DUI crash typically run a field sobriety test and, if there's probable cause, a breath or blood test to measure blood alcohol concentration (BAC). Every state treats a BAC of 0.08% or higher as intoxication per se for standard drivers, a threshold Congress locked in nationally by tying a share of federal highway money to it.³ Minors face a much lower bar: federal law required every state to adopt a zero-tolerance limit of 0.02% BAC or less for drivers under 21, a requirement all states met by 1998.⁴ Commercial drivers face a stricter line still, 0.04% BAC under federal motor carrier rules, with alcohol possession in the cab prohibited outright regardless of BAC.⁵

The police report from that crash becomes one of your most important documents. It usually records the BAC result, whether field sobriety tests were administered, and the officer's narrative of what happened. Request a copy once it's finalized, and don't wait for the criminal case to resolve first, since your civil claim runs on its own clock. Beyond the report itself, dash-cam footage, nearby business surveillance video, and witness contact information tend to disappear fast, so gathering them within days matters more in a DUI case than in an ordinary crash, since insurers and defense counsel scrutinize the BAC evidence closely.

Two cases, not one

A DUI crash almost always spins off two separate legal proceedings, and it helps to keep them apart in your head.

The state brings the criminal case. It exists to punish the driver, not to compensate you, though restitution can overlap with that goal. If the crash caused a death, many states charge the driver with a felony version of vehicular homicide reserved specifically for intoxicated drivers, carrying penalties above ordinary vehicular manslaughter. California's gross vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated statute runs 4, 6, or 10 years in state prison.⁶ Texas's intoxication manslaughter statute doesn't require prosecutors to prove recklessness, only intoxication and that it caused the death, and it now carries a first-degree enhancement when more than one person dies in the same crash.⁷

You bring the civil case, and it's yours to control no matter what happens in criminal court. The standards of proof differ: criminal guilt requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt, while a civil claim needs only a preponderance of the evidence, meaning it's more likely than not that the driver caused your injuries.⁸ That gap matters. A driver acquitted of DUI, or one who pleads down to a lesser charge, can still be found liable in your civil case. A criminal conviction, on the other hand, tends to be strong evidence in the civil case that follows it.

Who else might be on the hook

The driver isn't always the only party with money to answer for the crash. Most states have some form of dram shop law that lets an injured person sue the bar, restaurant, or liquor store that served the driver.⁹ Where that liability starts and stops depends heavily on the state. California generally shields alcohol servers from liability for selling to intoxicated adults, and permits a claim only against a licensee who serves an obviously intoxicated minor.¹⁰ Texas draws the line differently: a bar can be sued for serving anyone, adult or minor, who was obviously intoxicated to the point of presenting a clear danger, as long as that intoxication proximately caused the harm.¹¹ A handful of states don't recognize dram shop liability at all. Social host liability, covering private individuals who serve alcohol at home rather than commercial vendors, follows an even less uniform set of rules from state to state.

Other potential defendants show up depending on the facts: an employer, if the driver was working or driving a company vehicle; a vehicle owner who lent a car to someone known to be an unsafe or impaired driver; a parent who supplied alcohol to a minor who then got behind the wheel. None of these are automatic, and each depends on facts your state's law treats differently. They matter most when the driver is uninsured or underinsured, since a dram shop, employer, or vehicle owner may carry commercial liability insurance far larger than the driver's personal auto policy, which is exactly the kind of variation the state pages linked from this guide are built to cover.

What insurance actually pays, and why it's often not enough

Here's the part that catches most victims off guard: the drunk driver's auto insurance is frequently the smallest source of recovery, not the largest. Roughly one in three U.S. drivers carried no insurance or not enough of it in 2023, a rate that's climbed ten percentage points since 2017.¹² A drunk driver skipping coverage entirely, or carrying only the state's bare minimum liability limits, is common enough that your own uninsured/underinsured motorist (UM/UIM) coverage often ends up doing more of the work than the at-fault driver's policy. Some states require insurers to include UM/UIM coverage automatically; others require insurers to offer it and let policyholders waive it in writing. Check your own policy limits before assuming you're covered, and stack claims across every applicable policy (your own, a household member's, sometimes an employer's fleet policy) where your state allows it.

Medical payments coverage (MedPay) or personal injury protection (PIP), where your state has it, pays some bills up front regardless of fault. The rest of your claim against the driver and any other liable party runs separately.

What you can recover

Compensatory damages in a DUI civil case cover the same ground as any car accident claim: medical bills past and future, lost income, property damage, and noneconomic harm like pain and disability. What DUI cases add is the possibility of punitive damages, which exist to punish the driver rather than compensate you, and which most states allow only on a higher showing than ordinary negligence. Courts typically require clear and convincing evidence, a step above a simple preponderance, that the driver's conduct was willful, malicious, or in conscious disregard of a known risk. Choosing to drive after drinking heavily, particularly with a high BAC or a prior DUI on record, is the kind of fact pattern that supports a punitive damages claim in states that allow them.

If you were a passenger who chose to get in the car with a driver you knew had been drinking, most states will still let you recover, but many apply comparative negligence rules that can reduce your damages by whatever percentage a jury assigns to your own choice to ride along. A handful of states still follow contributory negligence, where any fault on your part, even a small percentage, can bar recovery entirely. Either way, the calculation only reduces your compensation. It doesn't erase the driver's underlying liability, and it doesn't affect a dram shop or restitution claim built on the driver's or server's conduct alone.

If the crash killed someone, the surviving family typically brings a separate wrongful death claim rather than folding everything into the injury claim the victim would have brought. Who's allowed to bring that claim (a spouse, children, parents, sometimes siblings) and what it can recover (lost financial support, loss of companionship, funeral costs) both vary by state more than almost any other piece of this process.

Restitution and criminal-side compensation

When a driver is convicted, courts in most states must order restitution to the victim as part of sentencing, apart from any civil judgment. California's restitution statute requires full restitution for economic losses regardless of the defendant's ability to pay, absent compelling and extraordinary reasons for a judge to depart from that rule.¹³ Restitution generally isn't a substitute for a civil claim. It tends to cover verified out-of-pocket losses, while a civil suit can reach noneconomic damages, punitive damages, and amounts restitution never collects, since restitution depends on a convicted defendant's actual ability to pay over time.

Federal law also requires every state's crime victim compensation program to treat driving-while-intoxicated crashes as a qualifying crime, one of only two categories, alongside domestic violence, that every state program must cover.¹⁴ These state-run funds pay medical costs, lost wages, and funeral expenses directly to victims, but only after other insurance has paid what it's going to pay, and usually subject to a cap per claim.

Deadlines vary sharply by state

Every state sets a statute of limitations on how long you have to file a civil claim, and the range is wide. Maine gives you six years for most civil claims.¹⁵ Tennessee gives you just one year for personal injury, though a pending criminal prosecution for the same crash extends that to two years, a provision written with cases like a DUI crash in mind.¹⁶ Louisiana cut its general prescriptive period from one year to two in 2024, and separately set a two-year period specifically for injuries arising from a criminal act, which a DUI crash generally is.¹⁷ Miss the deadline and the claim is gone, regardless of how clear the driver's fault was. This is the first date to nail down, not the last one you get to.

Why DUI crashes get treated differently

Beyond the criminal exposure, a documented BAC over the legal limit tends to simplify the negligence question in the civil case. A plaintiff can often point to the per se violation itself as the core of the fault case, rather than arguing over following distance or reaction time. Congress has spent three decades pushing states toward uniform enforcement tools for this reason, tying federal highway money to open container bans¹⁸ the same way it did to the 0.08% BAC standard. Sobriety checkpoints, a common enforcement tool nationally, cleared a Fourth Amendment challenge at the U.S. Supreme Court in 1990. The Court held that the public interest in stopping drunk driving outweighs the brief, minimally intrusive stop a checkpoint requires.¹⁹ States that require ignition interlock devices for all DUI offenders, not just repeat offenders, see roughly a 26% reduction in fatal crashes involving impaired drivers compared to states with no interlock law at all.²⁰

What to do next

A few steps apply no matter which state you're in:

• Get the crash report and the toxicology or breath test results once they're finalized, not just the initial incident number.
• Keep every medical bill, wage statement, and repair estimate. Restitution and civil damages both depend on documentation, not memory.
• Find out whether criminal charges were filed and, if so, the case number, since it can affect your civil deadline.
• Check your own auto policy for UM/UIM, MedPay, or PIP coverage before assuming the other driver's insurance is your only source of recovery.

An attorney who handles DUI crash claims in your state can walk through how your state treats dram shop liability, punitive damages, and your filing deadline, all of which shift the math substantially from state to state. You can find one through our legal directory.

This article provides general information about DUI accident claims, not legal advice.

Sources

1. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, "Alcohol-Impaired Driving: 2024 Data" (DOT HS 813 815). https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/813815

2. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, "Impaired Driving Facts." https://www.cdc.gov/impaired-driving/facts/index.html

3. 23 U.S.C. § 163, Incentive grant program for 0.08 blood alcohol concentration. https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=(title:23%20section:163%20edition:prelim)

4. 23 U.S.C. § 161, Zero tolerance laws. https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=(title:23%20section:161%20edition:prelim)

5. 49 C.F.R. § 392.5, Alcohol prohibition. https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-49/subtitle-B/chapter-III/subchapter-B/part-392/subpart-A/section-392.5

6. Cal. Penal Code § 191.5. https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?sectionNum=191.5.&lawCode=PEN

7. Tex. Penal Code § 49.08. https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/Docs/PE/htm/PE.49.htm

8. Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute, "Burden of proof." https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/burden_of_proof

9. County Health Rankings & Roadmaps, "Dram shop liability laws." https://www.countyhealthrankings.org/strategies-and-solutions/what-works-for-health/strategies/dram-shop-liability-laws

10. Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code §§ 25602, 25602.1. https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?sectionNum=25602.1.&lawCode=BPC

11. Tex. Alco. Bev. Code § 2.02. https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/Docs/AL/htm/AL.2.htm

12. Insurance Research Council, "One in Three Drivers Are Either Uninsured or Underinsured in the U.S." (Feb. 2025). https://www.insurance-research.org/news/one-three-drivers-are-either-uninsured-or-underinsured-us-exposing-themselves-and-other

13. Cal. Penal Code § 1202.4. https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=PEN&sectionNum=1202.4

14. 34 U.S.C. § 20102, Crime victim compensation. https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=(title:34%20section:20102%20edition:prelim)

15. Me. Rev. Stat. tit. 14, § 752. https://www.mainelegislature.org/legis/statutes/14/title14sec752.html

16. Tenn. Code Ann. § 28-3-104. https://ir.law.utk.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1490&context=civilmatter_files

17. La. Civ. Code arts. 3493.1, 3493.3. https://www.legis.la.gov/Legis/Law.aspx?d=1386443

18. 23 U.S.C. § 154, Open container requirements. https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=(title:23%20section:154%20edition:prelim)

19. Michigan Dept. of State Police v. Sitz, 496 U.S. 444 (1990). https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/112459/michigan-dept-of-state-police-v-sitz/

20. Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, "State laws mandating interlocks for all DUI offenders save lives." https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/state-laws-mandating-interlocks-for-all-dui-offenders-save-lives