If you were hit by a car while walking, the first hours matter more than any other stretch of your case. Call 911, accept medical transport or get to an emergency room the same day, and collect as much information at the scene as you safely can. What you do, say, and document in those first hours shapes both your recovery and any insurance claim or lawsuit that follows.
At the Scene
Get out of the road if you can move safely. A second vehicle hitting you is a real risk, especially at intersections and on busy streets. Then call 911 and ask for both police and an ambulance, even if you think you’re okay. Adrenaline hides pain, and a bruise at the curb can turn out to be a fracture by nightfall.
When officers arrive, tell them what you actually remember. Don’t guess, don’t speculate, and don’t tell the driver you’re “fine” or apologize. Those casual words have a way of resurfacing in an insurance file months later, repackaged as an admission that you weren’t hurt or were somehow to blame.
Before you leave the scene, get the driver’s name, phone number, license plate, driver’s license number, and insurance information. Ask any bystanders who saw what happened for their names and phone numbers. Witness accounts carry weight when the driver’s story later diverges from yours. If you’re hurt too badly to do this yourself, ask someone nearby or let the responding officer handle it.
See a Doctor the Same Day
Go to the emergency room or urgent care the day of the collision, even if you walked away. Pedestrians have no protection against a vehicle’s mass, and the common serious outcomes are lower-extremity fractures, head injuries, and spinal damage. One study of pedestrian crash injuries found that 73% of pedestrians with moderate or worse injuries had at least one fracture and about 38% had head, face, or neck trauma.1National Center for Biotechnology Information. Pedestrian Injury Patterns According to Car and Casualty Concussions, internal bleeding, and soft-tissue injuries can take hours or days to show symptoms.
Follow the treatment plan your doctor gives you, and keep every follow-up appointment. This matters medically, and it matters legally. Insurance adjusters scan treatment records for gaps. A three-week break between the ER visit and the next appointment gives them an argument that your injuries weren’t really serious.
Keep a running record of every visit, diagnosis, prescription, and bill. Save receipts for over-the-counter medications, physical therapy copays, and equipment like crutches or braces. These records are the backbone of any claim.
Evidence That Disappears Fast
Skid marks wash away. Surveillance footage gets overwritten. Memories fade. If you can, photograph the scene before you leave: the vehicle’s damage, the road layout, traffic signals, crosswalk markings, debris, and skid marks. Photograph your injuries that day, and keep photographing them as bruises, swelling, and surgical scars develop over the following weeks.
Get a copy of the police report once it’s available, usually within a few days. It contains the officer’s observations, witness statements, and often a preliminary take on what happened. Call the responding agency to find out how to request it.
One step most people skip is a preservation letter. Modern vehicles have event data recorders that capture speed, braking, and steering inputs in the seconds before a crash, and that data can prove a driver was speeding or never braked. It can also be lost once the vehicle is repaired or scrapped. A preservation letter is a written notice to the driver, their insurer, and the repair shop telling them to keep that evidence intact. Nearby businesses may have security footage worth preserving the same way. An attorney can send these quickly, but a written request from you is better than silence.
Start a personal journal while things are fresh. Write down the direction you were walking, whether you had a walk signal, what the driver was doing, and how you felt afterward. Track your daily pain levels, limits on normal activities, and emotional state in the weeks that follow. A contemporaneous record reads as more credible than a reconstruction attempted months later at a deposition.
If the Driver Fled
Hit-and-run collisions involving pedestrians are common, and they change what you do next. Write down everything you remember about the vehicle: color, make, model, direction of travel, and any part of the license plate, even a partial. Look for security cameras on nearby buildings, traffic cameras at intersections, and parked cars with dashcams. Point them out to the officers.
File a report even if you have almost nothing to go on. The report creates an official record and triggers an investigation. Some departments actively pull traffic camera and surveillance footage in hit-and-run cases, particularly when a pedestrian is seriously injured.
If the driver is never identified, your own auto policy becomes your primary resource. Uninsured motorist coverage usually treats a hit-and-run driver as uninsured, so it can pay medical bills and lost income up to your limits. If you don’t carry auto insurance yourself, check whether a household member’s policy covers you. Every state also runs a crime victim compensation program, partly funded by the federal Victims of Crime Act, that can reimburse out-of-pocket medical costs, lost earnings, and other expenses for victims of crimes including hit-and-run collisions. Eligibility rules vary, but a police report is almost always required.
Insurance Claims to File
Notify your own auto insurer within a day or two of the collision, even though you weren’t driving. Several coverages on your own policy can apply when you’re hit while walking:
- Medical Payments (MedPay) covers medical expenses regardless of fault, whether you were in a car or walking down the street.
- Uninsured/Underinsured Motorist (UM/UIM) applies when the driver has no insurance, not enough insurance, or fled. For pedestrians this is often the most valuable coverage you have.
- Personal Injury Protection (PIP) is required in about a dozen no-fault states. It covers medical bills and sometimes lost wages regardless of fault, and generally extends to pedestrians covered under the policy.
You should also open a third-party claim with the at-fault driver’s liability insurer. Be accurate about what happened, but don’t agree to a recorded statement without first talking to an attorney. Adjusters are trained to extract sound bites they can use later.
Policies include reporting deadlines. Some require notice within 24 hours, others give you a few days. Check your policy or call your agent. Missing a reporting window gives the insurer grounds to deny the whole claim, which is a brutal outcome for a timing mistake.
If You Were Partly at Fault
If you were jaywalking, on your phone, or crossing against a signal, expect the driver’s insurer to argue you share responsibility. How much that costs you depends on your state’s negligence rules. Most states use some form of comparative negligence, which reduces your compensation by your percentage of fault instead of wiping it out.
The math is straightforward. If your damages are $100,000 and a jury finds you 30% at fault for crossing mid-block, you recover $70,000. Over 30 states use a modified version that cuts off recovery entirely once your share crosses 50% or 51%. About a dozen states use a pure version, where you can recover something even at 99% fault. A handful of states still follow contributory negligence, in which being even 1% at fault bars recovery altogether.
Partial fault doesn’t necessarily sink your claim, but it does shrink it. This is also why the photographs, witness contacts, and journal matter: fault percentages often come down to competing stories, and the side with better evidence usually wins the argument.
Deadlines That Can End Your Case
Every state sets a statute of limitations for personal injury lawsuits, and missing it permanently kills your right to sue. These deadlines run from one to six years depending on the state, with two or three years most common. The clock usually starts on the date of the collision.
Government vehicles trigger much shorter timelines. If a city bus, a postal truck, a police car, or any government-owned vehicle hit you, you almost certainly need to file a formal administrative claim before you can sue. For federal vehicles, you must submit a written claim to the correct federal agency within two years, then file suit within six months of a denial.2Office of the Law Revision Counsel. United States Code Title 28 – 2401 Time for Commencing Action Against United States State and local notice requirements are often tighter. Many jurisdictions require written notice within 90 days to six months of the incident. Miss that window and no amount of evidence or severity of injury will save the case.
This is one of the main reasons to talk to an attorney early. Figuring out whether a government entity is involved, identifying the right deadline, and filing the correct paperwork in time are places where a mistake is irreversible.
When to Hire an Attorney
You don’t need a lawyer for a scraped knee. But if you were seriously injured, ran up significant medical bills, missed work, or face a disputed-fault fight, handling the claim yourself is a losing position. Insurance companies negotiate injury claims every day. You probably don’t.
An attorney handles the investigation, sends preservation letters, deals with adjusters, calculates the full value of the claim, and files suit if negotiations stall. Most personal injury attorneys work on contingency: no fee upfront, a percentage of what they recover for you. That percentage typically runs from 33% to 40%, with the lower end for cases that settle before litigation and the higher end for cases that go to trial. If they recover nothing, you owe nothing for their time.
Before you sign, ask how many pedestrian cases the lawyer has handled, what the fee structure looks like, and whether you’ll be on the hook for litigation costs (filing fees, expert witnesses, medical record requests) if the case doesn’t succeed. Get the fee agreement in writing.
What a Claim Can Cover
A pedestrian injury claim can include several categories of losses. Knowing what’s on the table keeps you from settling for a fraction of what the case is worth.
- Medical expenses, past and future, including emergency care, surgery, hospitalization, rehabilitation, physical therapy, prescriptions, and medical devices. Future costs matter enormously when ongoing treatment is likely.
- Lost income, including wages missed during recovery and any reduction in future earning capacity if the injury permanently limits what you can do.
- Pain and suffering, covering physical pain, emotional distress, anxiety, depression, and loss of enjoyment of life. This is harder to quantify and often ends up being the largest piece of a serious-injury settlement.
- Property damage, including replacement of items destroyed in the collision like a phone, laptop, glasses, or clothing.
In cases involving extreme recklessness, such as a drunk driver or street racing, punitive damages may also be available. Those aren’t tied to your actual losses; they punish the driver’s conduct. Not every state allows them, and the proof threshold is higher than for ordinary negligence.
One thing that surprises people: the settlement check isn’t entirely yours if someone else paid your medical bills along the way. Health insurers, Medicare, Medicaid, and employer-sponsored health plans can have a legal right to be reimbursed out of your recovery. This is called subrogation. Medicare’s claim is backed by federal law, and failing to reimburse it can bring interest charges and double-damages liability against responsible parties.3Office of the Law Revision Counsel. United States Code Title 42 – 1395y Exclusions From Coverage and Medicare as Secondary Payer Employer plans governed by ERISA often have especially aggressive reimbursement language. On a $150,000 settlement, it isn’t unusual to see $30,000 or more claimed by insurers and government programs before you and your attorney split the rest. Ignoring these liens doesn’t make them go away, and an unpaid Medicare lien in particular creates problems that follow you long after the case closes.